Animals through Chinese History

Earliest Times to 1911

Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, Dagmar Schäfer

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108428156
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108677554
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This volume opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. As environmental historians turn their attention to expanded chronologies of natural change, something new can be said about human history through animals and about the globally diverse cultural and historical dynamics that have led to perceptions of animals as wild or cultures as civilized. This innovative collection of essays spanning Chinese history reveals how relations between past and present, lived and literary reality, have been central to how information about animals and the natural world has been processed and evaluated in China. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, ranging from ritual texts to poetry to veterinary science, this volume explores developments in the human-animal relationship through Chinese history and the ways in which the Chinese have thought about the world with and through animals. This title is also available as Open Access.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology of Dynasties
• Knowing Animals in China’s History: An Introduction
• 1 Shang Sacrificial Animals: Material Documents and Images
• 2 Animal to Edible: The Ritualization of Animals in Early China
• 3 Noble Creatures: Filial and Righteous Animals in Early Medieval Confucian Thought
• 4 Walking by Itself: The Singular History of the Chinese Cat
• 5 Bees in China: A Brief Cultural History
• 6 Where Did the Animals Go?: Presence and Absence of Livestock in Chinese Agricultural Treatises
• 7 Animals as Text: Producing and Consuming ‘Text-Animals’
• 8 Great Plans: Song Dynastic (960–1279) Institutions for Human and Veterinary Healthcare
• 9 Animals in Nineteenth-Century Eschatological Discourse
• 10 Reconsidering the Boundaries: Multicultural and Multilingual Perspectives on the Care and Management of the Emperors’ Horses in the Qing
• 11 Animals as Wonders: Writing Commentaries on Monthly Ordinances in Qing China
• 12 Reforming the Humble Pig: Pigs, Pork and Contemporary China
• Bibliography
• Index