Crafting Luxury from the Sea: Shark Fin and the Making of Maritime Knowledge in Late Imperial China

How does a fearsome predator of the deep become refined? Why do people eat shark fin? When did shark fin transition from being an onerous and relatively obscure product of the sea to one of the most prized delicacies of late imperial China? Instead of taking luxury for granted, this talk historicizes how value was produced via cuisine, medicine, commerce, literature, visual culture, and classification/connoisseurship practices. Using recipe books, medical treatises, merchants’ records, travel accounts, paintings, and literary sources from the Ming and Qing, I argue that shark fin was literally cultured: produced, not simply eaten. Shark fin’s ascendance to luxury status depended on maritime knowledges produced by fishermen, merchants, cooks, physicians, artists, and elite patrons up and down the South China coast and beyond. Farther afield, this talk asks what types of knowledge about the sea were produced, circulated, and leveraged into cultural authority in late imperial China.

Ronald Po is associate professor of Chinese and maritime history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of the award-winning The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018), translated into traditional Chinese as Lanse bianjiang: Dongya haiyu zhongdi Qingchao fanglüe 藍色邊疆：東亞海域中的清朝方略 by National Taiwan University Press, and Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool University Press, 2024). He has also published two books in Taiwan with China Times Publishing Co., namely Hai bu yangbo : Qingdai Zhongguo yi Yazhou haiyang 海不揚波：清代中國與亞洲海洋 [The placid ocean: Qing China and the Asian Sea] (shortlisted by the International Convention of Asia Scholars for the ICAS Book Prize), and Shou wan yinhe shui: Qingji renwu, lishi yu jiyi 手挽銀河水：清季人物、歷史與記憶 [Turning the tide: Historical actors and social memory in late Qing China], the latter appearing in simplified Chinese with the Social Sciences Academic Press.