The Animals of China in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination

Abstract

In eighteenth-century Britain, knowledge about animals from around the world was rapidly increasing. This paper focuses on what the British knew and imagined about the animals of China from reading the works of European travellers and natural historians. Whereas the animals of Africa and America served to foster a growing sense of European mastery of less civilized parts of the world through trade and possession, those of China were understood as embedded in a highly advanced civilization and therefore as sources of knowledge about that civilization. This paper examines the way in which British understandings of China were mediated through accounts of Chinese animals and of human–animal relations in China. Looking at works of popular natural history and at Oliver Goldsmith’s fictional letters of a "Chinese philosopher" in The Citizen of the World (1762), I argue that the animals of China bore several messages about their country. Focusing on the particular examples of the golden pheasant, the horse, the cormorant, and the cat, I suggest that British writing about Chinese animals served as a way of expressing mixed feelings about the value of advanced civilizations, whether Chinese or European.