The zoomorphic imagination of Chinese artists was inhabited by some animals as carefully observed and rendered as in any scientific study, by other animals bred from sheer fantasy or concocted from various real beasts, representing various divinities or divine diversity, and by still others appropriated to serve as rhetorical substitutes for certain people or social groups. These are eleven in-depth topical and case studies of the thought and culture which permeated animal representations and the representations that in turn permeated their cultures, stretching historically from the Chinese br ... More

The zoomorphic imagination of Chinese artists was inhabited by some animals as carefully observed and rendered as in any scientific study, by other animals bred from sheer fantasy or concocted from various real beasts, representing various divinities or divine diversity, and by still others appropriated to serve as rhetorical substitutes for certain people or social groups. These are eleven in-depth topical and case studies of the thought and culture which permeated animal representations and the representations that in turn permeated their cultures, stretching historically from the Chinese bronze age to China's encounters with the counter-reformational Catholic Church, and down to the present day. Throughout these chapters is described a world whose creatures one must know in the Chinese way if one is to know the Chinese world.