In this Talking Animals feature, we interview Olivia Milburn about her recent work on Chinese insect literature, including the fascinating misgendering of queen bees and how painful mosquito stings have inspired her research.
Olivia Milburn is currently Professor at the School of Chinese, Hong Kong University and was formerly employed at the Department of Chinese, Seoul National University. She received her M.A. from Cambridge and Ph.D. from SOAS. Her research focuses mainly on the history and culture of the ancient kingdoms of Wu and Yue, and the position of minorities and marginalized groups in early and medieval China. Her work on animals has encompassed dog ownership, geckos, bird feathers in art and costume, and, more recently, insect literature.1
Hi Olivia! Thank you for joining us on Talking Animals. To start, what first inspired you to include animals in your research?
I first started studying the role of animals in Chinese culture in 2011, due to having purely by chance encountered a story about Confucius having a pet dog.2 This is not an aspect of the life of the Sage that has really received any attention at all, but I felt it was a very humanizing detail, and it throws quite a different light on Confucius to think of him as a pet owner—in fact he’s one of the very first people in Chinese history to be recorded as having a companion animal. It is also interesting that the Liji 禮記 (Record of Ritual) does specifically stress that this was a pet, and not a guard dog or hunting dog or anything like that.
Having written about dogs in early China, I wasn’t planning on working further on animals, but then I moved to Korea to work at Seoul National University. The campus is located in the middle of the Gwanak Mountain national park, which is infested with a particularly huge, silent, black mosquito. They don’t usually bite people, but if they do, you’re certainly going to know about it—it feels not unlike being stabbed and they are strong enough to bite through jeans. Living in close proximity with these mosquitos, quite different from anything I had encountered before (including a run-in with a particularly voracious bunch of tiger mosquitos when trying to climb Mount Kuaiji in Zhejiang), made me wonder about what had been written about these insects in Chinese literature, and that was when I started really concentrating on researching insects within the broader category of chong 蟲.3
You recently produced a fascinating article on featherwork.4 It must have been challenging to work on a material that we have so few surviving examples of from early China.
Looking at featherwork is an interesting topic, because it is a form of applied art in which people make use of feathers for their colors and iridescence. Unfortunately, feathers are highly biodegradable, so researching the early history of these artworks is purely text-based—there are no surviving examples of early featherwork so we have to rely on contemporary descriptions to tell us what they looked like, and also, what concerns people brought to them. In addition to strictures about living too luxuriously and spending too much money, you also start seeing environmental issues being referenced from the medieval period onwards, and people certainly worried about the possibility that an over-exploitation of a particular species would lead to extinction.
Speaking of insects, you’ve recently been working on bees – could you summarise your findings so far?
Insects are now the major focus of my research, and bees are particularly fascinating. Chinese observers throughout the imperial era really struggled with how to explain a eusocial insect society and ended up deciding that all bees are male. That includes what we would now call the queen bee; and they were perfectly well aware that she laid eggs, which hatched out into other bees. They regarded bee society as a perfect hierarchical patriarchy, in which a male “king” bee had sex with male drone bees and produced yet more male bees, who would then support their parent in everything.5
What’s something surprising you’ve come across while researching insects?
What has really become obvious over the last few years of work in this field is that Chinese literature about insects is a treasure-trove of material for anyone who is interested in issues of gender and sexuality. For about two thousand years, members of the literati elite poured all their anxieties about these topics into poetry and prose about particular insect species which they believed regularly changed gender identity, engaged in cross-species sex, reproduced exclusively asexually or via male-male sex etc. It is perfectly true that there is not a lot of obvious pre-modern writing about LGBTQ+ people in Chinese, but that’s mostly because they didn’t write about people. Crises around gender and sexuality were expressed in the form of writing about insects.
Is there a resource you’ve found particularly helpful in your research?
I love medieval leishu 類書. They are a wonderful resource, they preserve all kinds of information that otherwise hasn’t survived, and they have helpfully organized their material into easily searchable categories. If your research interests happen to coincide with one of the categories in a leishu, the compilers have done an awful lot of the work for you already.
And what animal-related questions are you aiming to answer in your research next?
I have various animal-related research projects underway, including producing a joint translation of an important late Ming entomological study with a long-term collaborator, Daniel Burton-Rose. In addition to that, I am currently working on a study of literary representations of albinism and leucism in medieval Chinese literature, focusing on wolves, rabbits, rats, and doves. These are white omens (baixiang 白祥), and so there is an interesting dynamic whereby creatures that are very vulnerable to predators because of their coloration get protected by people because they are believed to be lucky.
Finally, if you could be an animal, what animal would you be and why?
I have always had a particular affection for corvids, so I am going to say crow or raven. They are such beautiful birds, and so clever! The ability to fly is obviously wonderful, but when you combine that with tool use, complex social personalities, a special relationship with wolves/dogs, and the ability to bend people to your will so that they provide you with tasty snacks… that’s a very superior creature!
- Including her most recent animal publication, “The Imagery of House Geckos and Tokay Geckos in Imperial Era Chinese Literature,” Sino-Platonic Papers 346 (2024), 1-50. ↩︎
- “Confucius and His Dog: Perspectives on Animal Ownership in Early Chinese Ritual and Philosophical Texts,” Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 29.4 (2011): 289-315. ↩︎
- “The Chinese Mosquito: A Literary Theme,” Sino-Platonic Papers 270 (2017): 1-50. ↩︎
- “Featherwork in Early and Medieval China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 140.3 (2020): 546-564. ↩︎
- “The Masculine Bee: Gendering Insects in Chinese Imperial-Era Literature,” in Insect Histories of East Asia edited by David A. Bello and Daniel Burton-Rose, 21-40 (University of Washington Press, 2023). ↩︎
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