Across the treaty ports of Amoy, Foochow, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the back rooms smelled of camphor, arsenical soap, and damp rope. In these quiet, meticulous spaces—after the foghorns stilled and the customs flags came down—clerks, lighthouse keepers, missionaries, and fishermen stitched seabirds, pinned dragonflies, and labeled coils of fish gut. Drawing on lighthouse logs, hydrographic surveys, cargo manifests, and the ledgers of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, Li, Zheng reconstructs the 'taxidermy afternoons' that knit together a maritime world. Here, the consular naturalist Robert Swinhoe corresponded from Pagoda Anchorage, J. D. D. La Touche sorted waders beside the Min River, and a Cantonese preparator named Chen A-Kui balanced a needle between his teeth while translating Hokkien place names into Latin. Glass eyes, brass calipers, cotton batting, bell jars—the objects of this craft became instruments of rule and memory.
From the Ninepin Group to Waglan, Dongquan to Pratas, island stations doubled as observatories and collecting posts. Keepers' families trapped terns and shearwaters under moonlit nets; a Hokkien widow on Gulangyu mounted flying fish to pay for schoolbooks; Malay fishermen near St John's Island traded jars of pipefish for quinine. Parcels marked with red-waxed seals sailed with lighthouse oil and signal rockets to the Raffles Museum in Singapore, the British Museum (Natural History) at South Kensington and Tring, and missionary cabinets in Macau and Xiamen. Along these littorals, classification blurred with surveillance: quarantine lazarettos measured cholera in eels and rats, pilots tallied seabirds as proxies for storms, and coral cores sank into boundary arguments with rival colonial offices in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.
A history of technique as much as empire, Taxidermy Afternoons shows how specimen work naturalized sovereignty at sea. The same hands that stitched skins also charted reefs, placed iron-bell buoys, and translated reefs and shoals into navigational data. Li, Zheng follows disputes over guano islands and light dues through correspondence between Sir Robert Hart's customs headquarters in Beijing and magistrates in Zhangzhou and Haicheng, where standardized labels and printed blanks lent bureaucratic force to beachcombing. The living world entered files; pelagics became paper; and the everyday craft of preservation underwrote legal fictions that fixed moving waters into maps.
War and revolution scattered the cabinets. Influenza swept through Quarantine Island in Hong Kong in 1918; the 1937 bombings of Xiamen shattered glass domes on university shelves; Japanese occupation repurposed lighthouse dwellings into listening posts. Yet, fragments endured. Li, Zheng traces a spoon-billed sandpiper skin from the Min estuary to Tring and, a century later, to a primary school in Fujian; he listens to pilots on Dongyin recall night-signals and to shipwrights in Kinmen explain the best wood for a specimen drawer. Closing in the present, he follows community museums and citizen scientists along ferry piers in Shekou and Penghu, where binoculars, phone cameras, and eBird lists echo earlier ledgers. Taxidermy Afternoons is a sweeping, intimate history of how coastal people, cabinets, and states met—one stitched wing at a time—and why their entanglements still shape conservation, provenance debates, and maritime belonging today.
