In this Talking Animals feature, we interview Ronald Po about his work on Chinese maritime frontiers and the animals that dwell beneath the ocean’s surface – or, in this case, an animal best known for what juts out above the water – the shark.
Ronald C. Po is Associate Professor of Chinese and Maritime History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on late imperial China, with particular interests in marine governance, sea charts, commodities, and changing conceptualisations of the sea. He is the author of The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool University Press, 2024), The Silver Thread of the Deep: A Cultural History of Shark Fin in China and Beyond (Harvard University Press, 2026), and The Camphor War: Taiwan in the Age of Imperial Realignments (Columbia University Press, 2026).
Hi Ronald! Thank you for joining us on Talking Animals. To start, what first inspired you to include animals in your research?
It happened rather accidentally! I began as a historian of the sea, rather than as a historian of animals. But the more I worked on maritime China, the harder it became to write about the sea simply as a space through which people, ships, and commodities moved. The sea was also full of living things, and those creatures shaped human behaviour in ways that historians have not always taken seriously enough.
Sharks were particularly important in changing how I thought about this. I became fascinated with the idea of shark fin as a commodity and then soon found that if you followed the fin, you also had to follow the animal: where the shark was caught; how fishers, traders, and consumers perceived the shark and its body; and how certain body-parts came to have great value. This became my book, The Silver Thread of the Deep.
Your research has largely focused on maritime industries and animals. Could you summarise your impressions and findings from this body of work?
One thing I have become increasingly interested in is the relationship between marine life and the making of maritime economies. Fishing is, of course, an industry, but it is also an encounter between humans and animals. Once you begin from that point, familiar subjects such as trade, consumption, and technology look rather different.
In The Silver Thread of the Deep, I trace the history of shark fin through the seas and fishing villages to markets, kitchens, and dining tables, and even the high end of the global market. I wanted to find out not only why people consumed shark fin, but how this unappetizing animal product became so desirable. In other words, animals have allowed me to explore different fields of history that we usually keep apart, such as environmental history, economics, food, knowledge, and even imperial history. There’s a lot you can learn from a shark!
What’s something surprising you’ve come across while researching maritime animals?
I think maybe how changeable meanings can be around animals. We tend to think that certain animals, whether real or imagined, carry fixed meanings throughout time. Dragons represent power and emperors, cranes represent long life, etc. When we move past these obvious examples though, things can get complicated.
Again, sharks are a good example of this: they can be feared as dangerous creatures, described as curiosities, treated as sources of useful materials, and consumed as food. All of these meanings can overlap, and each aspect of a shark has been used for different purposes with different values. Shark skin may be worth something quite different to a merchant than their teeth, let alone their fins. What surprised me most was therefore not any single strange anecdote, although there are plenty of those, but how thoroughly human beings disassemble animals intellectually as well as physically. We don’t just see a shark; we see its composite characteristics and attributes.
Is there a resource or theory you’ve found particularly helpful in your research?
More than any individual theory, I feel that I’ve been shaped by a style of questioning. One area which I find particularly helpful is the issue of animal agency in histories of animals. To what extent can we include animals within historical narratives without anthropomorphising them? Erica Fudge’s writings on this issue have been inspiring and informative, along with Harriet Ritvo’s work on animals, classification, and humans. Environmental histories by Alfred Crosby and William Cronon have also been beneficial, although my own work tends to stay rather close to cultural and material history.
I’m also reluctant to begin with theory. Usually I will start with a fish market, recipe, poem, governmental papers, custom entry, or encyclopaedia and ask what larger problem the source is forcing us to confront.
How has research on the topic of animals in China changed during your career? What new questions are we asking now that we didn’t before?
There has been a considerable shift! Earlier scholarship often approached animals primarily through symbolism, philosophy, literature, or religious thought. These are all important questions. However, what I feel has been happening more recently is historians have wanted to know what animals did within economies. What role did they play in the environment? This then allows you to ask further questions: what happened when animals were captured and sold? What information was available to people about these animals? How did governments view them? What happened when certain animals became a commodity? How did humans effect the ocean, or land for that matter?
Another thing I think we are starting to realize is that there isn’t one “Chinese perspective” on animals. There are so many different groups of people who interacted with animals, from fishers and physicians to government officials and those that consumed these animals. We need to look at these categories in more detail. That is one reason I became interested in shark fin; it allowed me to move between coastal labour and elite consumption, but also between China and a much wider maritime world. As you can see, animals allow us to break out of the boundaries we try to create.
What questions are you looking to answer next in your research?
I’ve recently become quite intrigued by the history of watching animals, and more specifically by fish-watching in late imperial China. We often ask how people classified animals, or how they ate them, but I’m interested in something slightly different: how did people actually learn to watch them? What did it mean to sit and observe fish swimming and gathering? And what kinds of ideas about nature emerged from that act of looking? I see this as part of a wider history of observing nature. Watching fish could go hand in hand with watching birds or just watching the world around you. How did they come to these conclusions about nature? Are there parallels throughout Asia and beyond? So the larger question is not just what people knew about animals, but how they learned to look at them.
Finally, if you could be an animal, what animal would you be and why?
After spending years writing about sharks, I feel I should probably say a shark! But I suspect that would sound suspiciously convenient. How about a migratory seabird instead – I like the idea of an animal that doesn’t care about border that historians spend so much time studying. It can live on coastal lines, seas and continents. Who cares if it crossed into a different countries or boundaries! Also, rather selfishly, it would give me a bird’s eye view of the maritime world. Most historians look at how people moved around the sea horizontally from port to port and along various routes, but a seabird would see more of the big picture. (Although if this question is asked just as The Silver Thread of the Deep is published, I reserve the right to change my answer to a shark!).