I read that an embassy from the king of Khotan in 717 presented the emperor of China with "horses, a camel, and an animal of the na species" 1. The translator didn't explain what sort of animal the "na" was, but he included a footnote with the Chinese spelling of that word (豽) and a remark that "the Kangxi dictionary gives this animal the most preposterous definitions".

Another source says about the same embassy that it brought "two horses for the ball game (i.e. polo), a wild camel with feet fleet as the wind, and a leopard" 2. This is by the same translator as the previous one, and this time he doesn't mention the word "na" or complain about preposterous definitions. (To be honest, I don't even know if this second source used the same word 豽 as the first one - perhaps this second source used some other word and this is why the translator felt confident in translating it as "leopard"...)

I also found another mention of the embassy, in a novel, which describes it in terms very similar to the second one above, but instead of a leopard it mentions "a na or fox" 3.

So now I'm wondering, what sort of animal is the 豽 really? Is it actually a leopard? Or a fox, or something else? (And isn't a fox a somewhat unimpressive present if you're sending an embassy to the emperor of China?) What sort of preposterous things do the dictionaries say about the 豽? (I tried googling a bit but found it only in some Chinese dictionaries, which wasn't terribly useful as I don't understand any Chinese and Google Translate mostly made a mess of it.) Thanks in advance for any help.