The Fisher Folk of Late Imperial and Modern China: An Historical Anthropology of Boat-and-Shed Living

摘要

Samuel Couling opens the "Fishes and Fisheries" entry of his Encyclopaedia Sinica (Shanghai, 1917) with the words: "In China the Fish is abundant, the species are numerous, everybody, more or less, fishes, and everybody eats fish. So one would expect to find in Chinese books of Natural History copious details on Ichthyology." But he concludes bathetically: "the Lexicons, translations, and commentaries published by Europeans have been able to extract from the Chinese sources no more than the latter contain, that is to say, some vague generalities, and some errors." In the century since, it is tempting to assume that little has changed: true we now have better descriptions and classifications of the fish, but we know very little more about the people who hooked, netted, trapped and cormorant-fished them, whether working from boats or from the shore, whether on lakes or rivers or on the near or deep seas.