Spotlights insects in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history from the exalted to the despised

Interactions between people and animals are attracting overdue attention in diverse fields of scholarship, yet insects still creep within the shadows of more charismatic birds, fish, and mammals. Insect Histories of East Asia centers on bugs and creepy crawlies and the taxonomies in which they were embedded in China, Japan, and Korea to present a history of human and animal cocreation of habitats in ways that were both deliberate and unwitting. Using sources spanning from the earliest written records into the twentieth century, the contributors draw on a wide range of disciplines to explore the dynamic interaction between the notional insects that infested authors' imaginations and the six-legged creatures buzzing, hopping, and crawling around them.

Acknowledgments

A Note on Terms and Conventions

Chronology of Dynasties, Reign Periods, and Countries

Introduction David A. Bello and Daniel Burton-Rose

Part One: Conceptual Categorization and the Philology of Chong

1. What Did It Take to Be a Chong? Profile of a Polysemous Character in Early China

Federico Valenti

2. The Masculine Bee: Gendering Insects in Chinese Imperial-Era Literature

Olivia Milburn

3. Manchu Insect Names: Grasshoppers, Locusts, and a Few Other Bugs in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Mårten Söderblom Saarela



Part Two: Insect Impacts on the Exercise of State Power

4. Locusts Made Simple: Holding Humans Responsible for Insect Behavior in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century China

David A. Bello

5. A Silkworm Massacre: Agricultural Development and Loss of Indigenous Diversity in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

Sang-ho Ro

6. "Lives without Mosquitoes and Flies": Eradication Campaigns in Postwar Japan

Kerry Smith



Part Three: The Institutionalization of Entomology in Twentieth-Century China

7. Circumscribing China with Insects: A Manual of the Dragonflies of China and the Indigenization of Academic Entomology in the Republican Period

Daniel Burton-Rose

8. The Dialectics of Species: Chen Shixiang, Insect Taxonomy, and the "Species Problem" in Socialist China

Lijing Jiang



Glossary of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Terms

Bibliography

Contributors

Index