Are there really white elephants?

The elephant of India, as everyonce knows, wears a grey coat of very thick skin. But once in a great while, a baby elephant is born with off white skin of the palest grey. He is a so called white elephant. His rare coloring has made him a sacred animal in parts of India, Burma, Thailand and Ceylon. As a sacred animal, the white elephant is not expected to work for his keep and an elephant is a very expensive animal to support. For this reason, white elephant crept into our language as an expression of something expensively useless. We may call an old house a white elephant because its upkeep costs more than its worth.