Animal Classification in Ancient China

Abstract

Establishing the ways in which the ancient Chinese understood the internal relationships between animal species and the biological workings of the animal realm at large is a thorny undertaking as scholars find themselves confronted with textual sources that remain remarkably silent on the issue.1 To be sure, the ancient Chinese interacted in many ways with their surrounding wild and domesticated fauna. Records of animals, reports of animal activity and descriptions of the use of animals in socio-economic, religious, and ritual practice have been preserved in China’s oldest written records. Oracle bone inscriptions dating to the late Shang period (c. 1200-1045 BC) contain numerous animal data, and references to animals abound throughout the written sources of the subsequent Zhou (1045-221 BC) and early imperial periods (221 BC-9 AD). China’s oldest collection of poetry, the Shijing 詩 經, collating poems composed between the tenth and seventh centuries BC, likewise provides a rich thesaurus of animal lore in pre-imperial China.2 Among the body of technical texts that developed in the milieus of natural experts such as astrologers, physicians, diviners, the makers of almanacs and practitioners of related specialties, writings dealing with animals