The Transcultural Body of the ‘Chinese’ Mermaid

Tang dynasty poetry refers to krakens that transform into women, Liao dynasty ceramics include lamps in the shape of fishtailed figures with female torsi, and the image of a mermaid appears on a Jesuit map made for Emperor Kangxi. As different as these three examples appear at first view, all three figurations are united by their emergence from transcultural contexts in Chinese history. Unlike the countless mermaids that populate European maps and other imagery related to colonial exploration and exploitation, in the visual and material culture of late Ming and early Qing dynasty China the motif of the merwoman is much less frequent.

Focusing on the transcultural characteristics of the few instances of mermaid appearances in seventeenth-century Chinese art and material culture, this paper analyzes iconographic links to Buddhist representations of underwater creatures and discusses relations between human sacrifices at sea as well as period sources like Zhao Xuemin’s Bencao gangmu shiyi that mentions the use of merwomen’s bones as materia medica. Paying attention to the entanglements of the exoticization and eroticization of foreign female bodies in conjunction with the figure of the mermaid, this paper examines the emergence of the transcultural bodies of mermaids in Chinese visual and material culture as instance of reflection on the ambivalence of Sino-foreign encounters and the depths of the sea as a site of danger as well as generation, replication, and recreation.