ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Most Excitingly Modern and Revolutionary”: A British Zoo Professional’s Tour of Chinese Zoos in 1965 and the Global Flow of Zoo Knowledge

• In Event: Animal Networks. Zoos in the Peripheries 3

English Abstract

This article examines the circulation of information and knowledge about zoos between socialist China and the Western world in the 1960s, through a case study of British zoo profession Caroline Jarvis’s tour of Chinese zoos. In September 1965, Jarvis, then editor of Zoological Society of London’s journal International Zoo Yearbook, visited zoos across China in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou “on a private holiday.” She later discussed her experiences and observations in popular magazines, public lectures, and correspondence with British sinologists, and incorporated information gained from Chinese zoo professionals into the Yearbook. By tracing Jarvis’s tour and its afterlife, I suggest that, contrary to the perception of zoos in socialist China as developing in relative isolation from Western practices, Chinese zoos were engaged in varied forms of transnational exchange and positioned themselves as part of an emerging global network of zoo expertise. At the same time, Western fascinations with Chinese zoos and their animals reflected a mixture of professional interest, Cold War anxieties, and lingering colonial imaginaries of the Far East’s natural resources. Jarvis’s travel, and others like it, demonstrate how zoos formed an unexpected node of information exchange and knowledge production in the centre-periphery dynamics of the Cold War.

Author

• Yutong Li, University of Cambridge