ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Translating Natural History: Arthur de Carle Sowerby and the Sinicization of British Zoology in Republican China

• In Event: China Observed: Science and the British Encounter with China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

This paper examines how Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885–1954), a British naturalist active in early twentieth-century China, was reimagined through Chinese translation, journalism, and editorial mediation. By analyzing Chinese translations of Sowerby’s major works—Through Shen-Kan (1912), A Naturalist in Manchuria (1922-30), and Sport and Science on the Sino-Mongolian Frontier (1918)—alongside Chinese reportage such as Shenpao’s 1939 home interview, the paper argues that Sowerby’s image evolved from a Western explorer to a locally embedded naturalist who was versed with Chinese knowledge of zoological practice. Chinese biologist-translators such as Zhou Jianren and Wu Kuangfu reframed Sowerby’s zoological writings within the idioms of Chinese intellectual framework, biological modernization, and national development. Their adaptations softened the colonial undertones of Sowerby’s biological expeditions, recontextualizing his zoological observations through classical Chinese taxonomies drawn from Erya and contemporary debates over the “sinicization of science.”

Through this process, Sowerby’s work became a site of translating natural history that linked British zoological work to Chinese discourses on evolution and scientific nationalism. The paper situates this Sino-British engagement within the global circulation of natural history and examines how Sowerby’s translations mediated between imperial science and Chinese modernity. By tracing Sowerby’s reception and reinterpretation in 1920s–1940s China, this study reveals how global British science was domesticated, debated, and ultimately transformed through the cultural politics of Republican-era print culture.

Author

• Christine Yi Lai Luk, Tsinghua University