Geography Reference
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that, although much of China's native flora is currently seriously endangered, “the Chinese
have a history of appreciation of the natural world; their major religions and many of their
artistic values are nature-oriented. They are already primed, culturally, for the conserva-
tion ethic.”
39
Roderick Nash has written that “Far from avoiding wild places, the ancient
Chinese sought them out. . . . Eastern cultures did not fear and abhor wilderness.”
40
Sinologist Joanna Handlin Smith has documented and interpreted the tradition, which
evidently flourished among scholars during the late Ming and into the Qing dynasties,
of liberating caged animals (otherwise destined for consumption) as an act of Buddhist
piety. She also describes how some traditions abjured killing even prior to Buddhism's
ascent in China, and that vegetarianism was often seen as a virtue.
41
Then there is the odd case of Pu Songling. His charming and off-beat stories would
seem to suggest a very different view of the natural world than the instrumental, arrogant,
or even occasionally hostile view that has been suggested thus far. Living in Shandong
Province during the early part of the Qing Dynasty, Pu (1640-1715) wrote short, moralistic
stories, many featuring Daoist legends (and a surprisingly risqué view of romantic and
sexual behavior) that invariably emphasized the strange, the unusual, and the occult. What
is noteworthy, however, is that at a time when tigers still commonly killed and devoured
peasants, and the natural world must still have been an obstacle to livelihood and com-
fort, Pu sometimes portrayed animals—including potentially dangerous carnivores—as
heroes, or, at the least, as deserving of sympathy. In his stories one finds clever myna
birds that help their owners outwit corrupt feudal lords, oxen that fly, moralistic owls,
and most frequently of all, magical foxes who, while sometimes harbingers of evil, are
more often transformed into objects of romantic and erotic attraction for Pu's poor,
lonely, and morally steadfast scholar-heroes. Most amazingly, in his story “Mao Dafu,”
a pack of wolves befriends a country doctor, pays for his services to heal a sick member
of the pack, and then, rather than abandon him to his fate after being falsely accused of
murder (to say nothing of eating him), assists the county magistrate in identifying and
apprehending the real murderer. Throughout, these wolves are depicted not as entirely
imaginary or mystical (they don't, for example, speak or hold things with their paws, but
rather make their intentions known much as we might imagine domestic dogs would do,
by pawing the ground or grabbing objects with their mouths), although they are admit-
tedly provided with the kind of intelligence and morality that only fictional wolves could
possess.
42
At the time of its writing, wolves in analogous fiction or fairy tales in Europe
were almost universally seen as the embodiment of evil. Does not, then, the work of Pu
Songling provide some suggestion of a positive or compassionate view toward wildlife,
at least as of the early Qing period?
These examples would appear to show ancient Han culture as valuing awareness of
nature and harmony with its essence. Yet, when put into context, such stories either melt
away as metaphors for affairs of the civilized, human world, or stand as exceptions proving
the rule that nature was seen instrumentally at best and as an enemy at worst. Pu Songling,
it turns out, was primarily a social critic, and his themes usually focused on corruption of
the gentry, or the conflicts associated with the emotional and physical bonds between the
sexes and the Confucian morality that restricted those bonds. Both because of the time
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