It’s amazing just what kind of a zigzag journey the Grass Mud Horse, otherwise known in Chinese as the Caonima (草泥马), has been through. Born in early 2009 after online resentment of censors shutting down websites which supposedly had “low-brow content” at all (these sites, in fact, were just critical of those in power; is that “low-brow”?), the Grass Mud Horse was immediately harmonized (or censored) along with YouTube after a song praising the animal, which in actual fact turned out to be a virtual animal and was merely represented by the alpaca, went online at YouTube. To this day, YouTube remains blocked in China — but the animal has made a comeback.

Named after a Chinese expletive targeting — of all persons, someone’s mother — the alpaca-turned-animal-God became a cyberpet that represented contempt on the side of the average Net surfer — simply because the authorities seemed to be in much of a mood to shut down sites at random. Yet amazingly enough, zoos in China, notably that in Beijing, have the animal “in stock” — but labelled merely as an alpaca (羊驼), not the Caonima.

The Grass Mud Horse (in real life an alpaca) made a comeback earlier this year in Shanghai, when it appeared at an expo and was immediately greeted with people eager to snap pictures with the “mythical beast”, as the alpaca was also known in cyberspace. The beast has now come to Tianjin — just a 30 minute right by high speed rail from the Chinese capital, Beijing, and attracted 60,000 onlookers in just one morning in the Tianjin Water Park (水上公园).

Folks who’ve visited the alpaca in person tell of the animal being very cool, very peaceful and always watching you — regardless of you throwing it food or just teasing the animal. And while that’s a bit uncharacteristic of some of the more “active” folks in Chinese cyberspace, who would not hesitate going on an anti-#GFW hashtag rampage as soon as their favourite site got “harmonized” again, it is characteristic of much of those folks who are more interested in stealing cyber vegetables. They live in a censored world online, yes, but they’re more interested in getting a better cyber car than trying to kick that Great Firewall.

Meanwhile, zoo authorities told the libre-leaning NetEase, who broke out the story (see, we told you it was more open than its rather “restrictive” big brother, Sina), said that they got the Caonima here simply because they never had anything like it in the zoo. They also wanted more people at the Water Park, and they got precisely that — and more, with queues over 100 metres in front of ticket offices during the three-day May Day break. In fact, with the alpaca being this popular, zoo management actually is thinking of letting the alpacas stay for good.

Just don’t stick a river crab next to the thing — they go by the Chinese name he xie (河蟹), a pun on the characters for “harmony” (和谐; pronounced just about the same), which has been Beijing’s excuse for blotting out offensive content “just to ensure social harmony”. @isaac (one of the earliest bloggers in China) has been seen fitting three watches on the river crab — so done to make fun of the “Three Represents” (which in Chinese sound close to “wearing three watches”), a 2002 ideology which to the average man on the street has no meaning whatsoever. It goes to show that in a country still dominated by political control, polit jokes are slowly catching on.