The Kangxi Court’s “tribute lion” and Lodovico Buglio’s On Lions

Abstract

There was no shortage of works depicting lions from political or literary perspectives in ancient China, but there had not been a dedicated treatise on the animal before the early Qing period. Lodovico Buglio’s On Lions, which appeared with the activities around the presentation of a tribute lion in 1678, was the first Chinese language text to discuss lions from the perspective of animal knowledge. It is also a concise encyclopaedia of European “lion culture.” Buglio sought to spread Western animal culture, especially Christian animal knowledge, through On Lions. From the perspective of spreading Christianity, he tried to break the connection between the lion and Buddhism found in Buddhist literature. And by questioning the reliability of accounts of historical tribute lions that came by land, he tried to create a new tradition of a systematic Christian lion culture in China. By comparing the contents of On Lions and Aristotle’s History of Animals (Historia animalium), this article points out that the “Yali” mentioned in Buglio’s On Lions was not Aldrovandi as Fang Hao supposed, but more likely refers to Aristotle.