Animals through Chinese History. Earliest Times to 1911 consists of twelve chapters and offers a comprehensive picture of the knowledge and knowledge practices around animals in Chinese history. As the editors state in the introduction, this volume aims to combine both material culture, especially archaeological findings, and texts to use animals to think about natural change over the longue durée, as well as to focus on the spiritual and physical roles of animals in society, the state and thought. For me, it is exemplary in taking innovative approaches and offering sophisticated methodologies on many fronts, by exploring and analyzing very rich primary sources, with the exception of visual materials, and it goes beyond conventional agricultural and environmental history. These innovations secure its unique spot in any reading list on Chinese history.

This volume focuses on real animals, or non-human animals, and especially on those animals that play the most important roles in human political, economic, and social life, such as pigs, cats, bees, cows, and so forth. Given its emphasis on the knowledge and knowledge practices around real animals in traditional China, it can be regarded as a preliminary volume to supplement Joseph Needham's monumental enterprise A History of Chinese Science and Technology, in which a volume on animals from the perspective of the history of science and technology has never been published. However, this volume pays less attention to the imagined animals in the spiritual and psychological experience of humans in traditional China.

The twelve chapters in this volume are chronologically arranged, but none is limited to a specific dynasty. Chapter One, by Adam Schwartz, analyzes the importance of animals to the sacrificial rites for ancestors and natural powers in Shang China and argues that cattle, sheep, and pigs played a complex role in the early development and transmission of Chinese ritual culture, scribal practice and social interaction by examining material culture, oracle bones, and associated texts from the Huayuan Zhuang. Chapter Two, by Roel Sterckx, reveals that a sophisticated system was developed for livestock management and professional specialists appeared for preparing animals for ritual purposes in ancient China. These specialists were involved in breeding, selecting, decorating, killing, cutting, drowning, burning, and offering animals following specific procedures. Chapter Three, by Keith Knapp, illustrates that both animals and humans share the same filial piety as the heavenly endowment which blurs the human-animal distinction by examining virtuous animals as moral exemplars in the Confucian stories of filial piety, especially the Xiaozi Zhuan, from the first to sixth centuries, while connecting animal filiality with knowledge of the medieval natural world. Knapp's other significant contribution is his findings of two differences between animals’ and humans’ filial piety, including the maternity and reciprocity of animal filiality. I would add that Michael Nylan's recent article “Humans as Animals and things in Pre-Buddhist China” (Religions 2019, 10, 360) perfectly enhances Knapp's discussion.

Chapters Four and Five focus on two particular animals: the cat and the bee. Chapter Four, by Timothy H. Barrett and Mark Strange, provides a concise yet thorough history of cats through Chinese history from ancient times to the twentieth century and addresses many crucial issues centered on the practical and symbolic roles and functions of cats in the domestic, religious, cultural, and daily lives of Chinese people. This chapter should be read together with Barrett's two earlier articles on cats in Chinese Buddhism. Chapter Five, by David Pattinson, traces the transformation of Chinese knowledge about honeybees in texts over the centuries and argues that in early texts the taxonomies were vague and the Chinese name for the bee, “feng”, was associated with violence, cruelty, and bad luck. But in the early medieval period, Guo Pu transformed “feng” into a positive, and later in the Song-Yuan periods, “feng” was granted Confucian values of duty, order, and ritual in literary texts.

Chapters Six and Seven concentrate on texts. Chapter Six, by Francesca Bray, analyzes the presence and absence of farm animals by drawing upon four Chinese agricultural treatises from the sixth to the eighteenth century. The composition of these texts is produced by the entanglement of politics, morality, and elite mores. For this reason, horses and sheep are recorded more prominently than cattle and pigs. Chapter Seven, by Martina Siebert, ventures into the relation between the scholar and the animal by focusing on “pulu” in the Song Dynasty, a popular scholarly genre in the form of treatise and list dealing with particular animals and material objects. Siebert notes the division between “remote” animals, or the animals constructed from other texts and hearsay, and “close” animals, or those constructed from actual observations.

Chapters Nine and Eleven deal with the relations between the state and animals by focusing on the care and management of animals. Chapter Nine, by Dagmar Schäfer and Han Yi, explores how the literati thought about systems, function, infrastructure, organisation, and processes of farming, managing, and knowing large livestock during the Song Dynasty, and it concludes that central state power shaped the farming of cattle and horses and developed the veterinary sector. Trade, ritual, and moral behaviours played their role in the process of caring for and managing animals. Chapter Eleven, by Sare Aricanli, discusses the care and management of imperial horses from the linguistic and institutional perspectives by focusing on Mongolian, Manchu, and Han Chinese vocabulary, and it reveals the fluid boundaries between institutions, human and animal medicine, and practices in the centre and the steppe in the Qing Dynasty.

Chapter Ten, by Vincent Goosaert, explores how late Qing elites wrote about caring for and killing animals in morality books. He contextualises the early modern views of protecting life in which the boundaries between animals and humans blurred and the protection of life has its social, political, and economic foundations. Chapter Eight by Zheng Xinxian on Qianlong's knowledge of animals through classical learning; it suggests that animals played a crucial role in the political life of eighteen-century China. The last chapter, by Mindi Schneider, examines the economic importance of the pork industry by looking into its global-local and past-present dynamics in modern and contemporary Chinese cultural and political contexts.

Overall, this volume is a very welcome addition to the current scholarship on the animals or human-animal relations in Chinese history, as well as to animal studies in general.