Arthur Sowerby and the Shanghai Museum: A new paper sheds light on his achievements

 In my article of 11 May 2019, I described the activities in China of the explorer Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885-1954). I noted:

For around 25 years he lived in Shanghai. He produced and published a monthly periodical, the China Journal. He served as honorary director of the Shanghai Museum, one of the activities of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was president of the China Society of Science of Art which was incorporated into the Royal Asiatic Society. He later served as president of the latter. He had his publishing business and was a director of other companies.

I am now able to put more flesh on the bones of his zoological activities in Shanghai as the result of a recent publication in Archives of Natural History written by Li-Chuan Tai of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. In his role, first as honorary curator then, from 1932, as honorary director of the Shanghai Museum Sowerby persuaded the Municipal Council of the International Settlement to permit the demolition and reconstruction of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society’s premises. The resulting expanded and re-designed museum was opened in 1933. New diorama-style exhibits were introduced showing stuffed animals in artificial compressed landscapes, following the latest fashion in museum display techniques.

Sowerby obviously did some of the work on the dioramas himself as this photograph from Tai (2021) shows

 

The most prominent diorama was that showing a Giant Panda and a Red Panda in a naturalistic setting. Giant Pandas were big news in the 1930s both when alive or dead since so few people had seen one. The animal in the Shanghai diorama was shot in 1932 by the Chinese-American explorer, Jack Theodore Young (1910-2000)*; he donated the panda to the Shanghai Museum.

 

The panda exhibit was installed in 1933 and became a major attraction. Another new exhibit, opened in 1935, was a diorama on Peking Man. Sowerby added labels in Chinese alongside those in English in 1934; school visits together with lectures and demonstrations for the public made the Shanghai Museum an important element of life in Shanghai. The number of visitors increased during the 1930s, reaching 65,000 in 1940.

Reading Sowerby’s accounts of the development of the museum in the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society show how busy he was in developing the museum in the 1930s. But then of course came war both from the Japanese occupation and the struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists. After the latter’s takeover of the Shanghai Museum in 1952, by which time Sowerby had left Shanghai, the premises were closed and specimens moved to form the basis of the Shanghai Museum of Natural History which opened in 1956. In turn that museum closed in 2014 to be replaced by a new Shanghai Natural History Museum which opened in 2015.

During the lifetime of the Shanghai Museum, a family—the Tangs—had become established as taxidermists and their services had been used to prepare mounted specimens for local hunters and other museums, thereby contributing to the income of the museum. Tai writes that in the transfer of specimens to the new museum in 2014-15 many of those made by members of the Tang family were included. It would seem then that many of Sowerby’s additions to the museum, if not the displays themselves, live on in, as Sam Alberti described it, The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie.

*The lives of Jack Theodore Young and his brother, Quentin, both in the Giant Panda story and later were remarkable and too complicated to detail here. However, three snippets will suffice: (i) Jack was ADC to General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell; (ii) present at a meeting between Chiang Kai-Shek and Chou En-Lai; (iii) an American intelligence agent in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The brothers also donated other specimens, including a Takin from Sichuan, to the Shanghai Museum.

Tai L-C. 2021. The Shanghai Museum and the introduction of taxidermy and habitat dioramas into China, 1874–1952. Archives of Natural History 48, 111-130 doi.org/10.3366/anh.2021.0691