Histories of Animals in East Asia: The Living Conditions of Non-Human Beings in Domestic, Wild and Imaginary Contexts

Abbreviation: ZooAsia, noted as Z@si@

Following on from the work dedicated to dogs in ancient China, conducted at the CRCAO since 2014, this programme aims to take stock of the condition of animals in East Asia, from ancient times to the present day. It focuses on issues and themes that have been expanded to include all domestic and wild animal species throughout East Asia, the importance of which has been highlighted by our work on dogs. To a lesser extent, imaginary and mythical animals are also taken into account, insofar as they can bear witness to zoological realities, even if these are distorted, exaggerated, or transposed into an unreal context. The programme aims to write one or even several parallel histories of the animals themselves, species by species, without neglecting to focus first and foremost on their interactions with humans, particularly in the case of domestic species. The geographical scope of this vast study is China and its neighbouring countries: Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. We are adding other nearby cultural areas, such as Mongolia, Tibet, Northeast Asia, and Central Asia.

Zoohistory, viewed in this way, draws on a varied and considerable body of material collected, preserved, or produced by humans over several millennia. In line with recent developments in the study of animals, or Animal Studies, we consider that the scientific study of animals now takes place at the intersection of various disciplines, whether they come from the so-called ‘natural’ sciences or the so-called ‘humanities and social sciences’, including even the fields of literary and artistic studies. Such an approach to ‘animal science’ extended to all areas of human knowledge is all the more relevant in the specific context of East Asian cultural areas, given that the modern Western concept of ‘science’, and in particular the concepts of ‘natural sciences’ and ‘life sciences’, were only introduced and adopted at the turn of the 20th century. While not following the same historical path as in the Western world, natural studies (along with technical and encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world and animals) nevertheless developed in East Asia as part of a long tradition that began in China several centuries before the Common Era. The sum of all these human descriptions and representations of animals constitutes what we refer to here as ‘zoographies’. The aim of this programme is to transcend these man-made zoographies by analysing, contextualising and comparing them with one another, in order to get as close as possible to the living conditions of animals in their historical and concrete reality.

Firstly, our research involves studying the various relationships and interactions between humans and animals. Like previous researchers, we have chosen to highlight the fundamental role of animals in the cultural and historical development of human societies and civilisations, focusing specifically on East Asia. Furthermore, it involves accurately documenting the condition of animals themselves, whether under human control, under human influence or unaffected by humans. To this end, we adopt an approach that has become customary since the pioneering work of Robert Delort in the 1980s, and more recently with Éric Baratay and other historians since the mid-2010s: considering the ‘animal perspective’ from a non-anthropocentric viewpoint. Animals are therefore studied from both a historical and a transregional perspective — not to mention a transcultural one — in relation to China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia and other neighbouring countries in Central and Northeast Asia.

Like any historian who studies non-human living beings using materials produced or preserved by humans, we face a paradox in doing so. We attempt to describe animals using historical sources and accounts which are inherently rooted in a strong anthropocentric context where the human perspective often takes precedence over that of the animals themselves. This is why it is important and challenging to attempt to reconstruct a vision that is as close as possible to the animals themselves and their living conditions. Therefore, we must try to go beyond the representations and descriptions of animals created by humans, regardless of the nature and origin of these sources, in order to understand the animals themselves.

This programme is structured around several axis:

Axis 1: Zoographies of ancient China, a documentary inventory (F. Devienne and J. Boittout).

The aim of this axis is to compile a documentary inventory of all zoographic content produced or collected throughout Chinese history that is directly or indirectly related to animals.

• Conferences on ‘Zoographies’ will be held at Université Paris Cité (2025-2026, cycle 2: ‘Animals as Companions to Humans’; 2024-2025, cycle 1: ‘The Animal Condition and Bestiary: Domestic, Wild and Fabulous’)
• Participation in the international symposium ‘Cats: Past and Present’, Rome, November 19-21 2025.

Axis 2 : History of Animals in the Chinese World, 19th-20th Centuries (J. Boittout and F. Devienne)

With its primary focus on the relationship between humans and animals, considered through their materiality (emotional manifestations, public space, scientific and popular developments, categories of “wild” and “domestic/civilized”), the animal history proposed here is conceived from a perspective that is not strictly anthropocentric. It aims to reveal how humans’ understanding and treatment of animals—although still neglected by the major historical narratives—have influenced all the cultural, social, and intellectual transformations that China has undergone since the 19th century.

• Publication of a special issue of the journal Perspectives chinoises, devoted to the history of relations between humans and animals in China from 1949 to the present day.
• Publication of a special issue of the journal Etudes Chinoises on the history of animals in China from antiquity to the present day.

Axis 3 : Horse in Japan History (Clio Simonetta)

Through the study of human-horse relations, this research area aims to gain a clearer and more concrete understanding of the cultural, social, and economic mechanisms that have characterized Japanese society over the centuries. Our multidisciplinary approach draws on a wide variety of historical, scientific, and archaeological sources. It thus ties in with Japanese historiography, which has renewed its interest in horses and their role, as demonstrated in the works of Sasaki Ken’ichi, Nojima Minoru, Isahaya Naoto, and Kuji Fujio.

Axis 4 : The dog in East Asia (Li Guoqiang and Frédéric Devienne)

The domestic canine species is, in many ways, a valuable benchmark for the study of other animals and for the study of the animal condition in general. There are many reasons for this. As the first domesticated animal species, dogs continue to occupy a special place and role in human society, in Asia as elsewhere. For the current five-year period, the continuation of research on dogs has been expanded to include the question of small dogs under the Tang dynasty (K. Granger), dogs in Mongolia (C. Marchina), dogs in Vietnam (E. Poisson), and the ethnography of dogs in China (several Chinese specialists).

• Publication scheduled for 2026, with contributions from Marc Kalinowski, Yuan Jing, Olivier Venture, Françoise Bottéro, and Gilles Boileau, among others.
• CYNICO iconographic database.
• Participation in the international symposium ‘Dogs: Past and Present’, Rome, November 14-17, 2018, and in the publication of the proceedings in 2023.
• Organization of study days ‘Man and Dog in Ancient China’, November 28-29, 2016.

Axis 5 : Animal sacrifice in ancient China: anthropozoological studies (Li Guoqiang)

This research area aims to explore the issue of animal sacrifice, whose central role in the social and religious life of ancient China has already been highlighted by the various studies we have conducted on the subject over the past twenty years. From a novel anthropozoological perspective, we plan to extend our reflection to new questions concerning the categorization of animal species, the opposition between ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’, the hierarchy and status of sacrificed animals, and the consideration of other species that are the object of sacrifice or rarer rituals, such as the offering of intestines. We also plan to study the implementation and evolution of sacrifices over time, in particular through a comparison of archaeological and textual data.