Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Although we know that honey was being consumed in China by the seventh millennium BCE, and that honey hunting and beekeeping were common throughout China during the imperial period, bees are not as prominent in Chinese history and culture as they were in some other parts of the world. 1 Bees do not begin to emerge clearly from the broader category of feng 蜂, which includes wasps, until the second century CE, and the first literary meditation upon them is a rhapsody composed in the early fourth century CE.While numerous texts mention bees, few elaborate on them, either descriptively or imaginatively.The pictorial record of bees is poor, and there are hardly any images in which bees or their hives are used symbolically.No 'royal beekeeper' is mentioned in the Western Han (206 BCE-25 CE) Zhouli 周禮 (Rites of Zhou) or other texts relating to governance, and there seems to have been little government interest in beekeeping; it was not until the Yuan dynasty that beekeeping was added to agricultural manuals, and its place in such manuals was not assured even after that. 2 Despite their marginal place in cultural representations of animals in China, a lore about them did emerge during the pre-Qin period, which became more elaborate over time.This chapter traces the broad contours of this process, which has, as yet, not been systematically described in existing scholarship.3 It will first examine some early descriptions of feng and the negative characteristics normally associated with them.It then traces the emergence of honeybees (mifeng 蜜蜂) in texts from the Six Dynasties period, before focusing on the 1 McGovern et al. (2004).Numerous local gazetteers list honey as a local product, but rarely describe it.Li Shixiong's 李世熊 Ninghua xianzhi 寧化縣志 (Ninghua County Gazetteer) (1684) is the most detailed account seen by this author.See Ninghua xianzhi, 2.134b-136a. 2 See Nongsang jiyao yi zhu, 377-8.For a further discussion of beekeeping in agricultural manuals, see Pattinson (2012).3 Eva Crane noted some examples of representations of bees in Chinese culture, but it was not the focus of her work and she did not have direct access to Chinese sources.
Author: David Pattinson
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2904401233