This article is part of an ongoing series about the naturalists who laid the foundation for modern Chinese natural sciences, particularly ornithology. Where the earlier subjects were Westerners who documented China’s wildlife for foreign science, this piece marks the turning of the tide — the moment the work passed into Chinese hands.
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For the better part of a century, the story of China’s birds had been written by outsiders — a consul in Amoy, a French priest in the western mountains, a customs officer in Fuzhou, missionaries on the Beijing plain. They sent their specimens to London, Paris, and Cambridge, and it was there, in the museums of the West, that China’s fauna was named, described, and catalogued. But the Pioneers were not the end of the story. They were the beginning of one. From the institutions they helped seed, and from the growing traffic of Chinese students to universities abroad, there emerged a generation of Chinese scientists who would reclaim the study of their own country’s nature. Foremost among the founders was a quiet, endlessly versatile scholar from rural Zhejiang.
So who was Shaw?
Tsen-Hwang Shaw (寿振黄, Shou Zhenhuang; also transcribed Zhenhuang Shou) was born on 4 February 1899 in the Zhejiang countryside. Growing up amid the hardships of rural life, he first set out to change them directly: in 1917 he went to the National Nanjing Higher Normal School — later Southeast University — to study agriculture. But he soon reasoned that biology was the true foundation of agriculture, and switched fields, taking his BSc in biology in 1925. It was a characteristic move for a man whose curiosity would never stay within a single discipline.
Like the most ambitious of his contemporaries, Shaw went abroad to complete his training. He enrolled first at the University of California, Berkeley, and then, in 1926, at Stanford, where he studied fish taxonomy under David Starr Jordan, the most eminent American ichthyologist of the age. He carried out research at the Hopkins Marine Station and travelled to the great museums of Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Washington to master the techniques of taxidermy and museum display — the practical craft on which all systematic zoology then depended. When he returned to China in 1928, he brought with him something new: a Chinese scientist trained to the highest international standard, equipped to build the discipline at home rather than merely feed specimens to it from afar.
The First Chinese Ornithologist on the World Stage
Shaw’s ornithological debut was quietly historic. In 1927, while still in the United States, he published a paper titled “A small collection of birds from Fukien” in the American journal Science — making him the first Chinese scientist ever to publish an ornithological research paper in that journal. The choice of Fujian was fitting: it was the same rich south-eastern province that La Touche had made his own, now being studied by one of China’s own sons. Over the following years he cast his net across the country, publishing on the birds of Chefoo (Yantai), Szechwan (Sichuan), and Chekiang (Zhejiang), and in 1930 he too appeared in the pages of The Auk, the leading American ornithological journal — the very publication in which George Wilder would review Shaw’s later work.
On his return to China, Shaw taught at Tsinghua University for eight years and worked at the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology in Beijing — the pioneering Sino-foreign research institution, founded in 1928, that did more than any other to professionalise Chinese biology. He appears in the photograph taken at the Institute’s establishment, among the founding figures of a new scientific era.
A Landmark, and a Bridge to the Pioneers
Shaw’s ornithological masterwork came in 1936: The Birds of Hopei Province, in two volumes, published by the Fan Memorial Institute. It was the first ornithological book written by a Chinese zoologist to achieve international influence, and the first monograph on a local Chinese fauna to be organised on modern taxonomic principles — regarded ever since as a paradigm of regional zoological study and, in a real sense, the beginning of vertebrate taxonomy in China.
Here the threads of this whole series draw together. Shaw’s Birds of Hopei Province covered precisely the ground — the province surrounding Beijing — that the American missionaries George D. Wilder and Hugh W. Hubbard were documenting at the very same time; their own Birds of Northeastern China would follow in 1938. The two projects were not rivals but neighbours, and their authors knew and esteemed one another. Wilder reviewed Shaw’s book for The Auk, bought and passed on copies to colleagues in America, and treasured a painting that Shaw gave him — a scene of the “three blessings of old age” — as a seventieth-birthday gift. In that small exchange of a review and a painting between an aging American missionary and a rising Chinese professor, the handover of a science from one generation to the next can be glimpsed in miniature.
A Polymath Without Equal
Ornithology was only ever one of Shaw’s fields. He was the first Chinese scientist to work seriously on ichthyology, co-authoring a 1927 study of the fishes of eastern China with the American B. W. Evermann and going on to a long series of papers on the fishes of eastern and northern China. He was among the earliest to study the country’s amphibians and reptiles, surveying the amphibians of Beijing as early as 1929. Across his career he published more than a hundred papers and books spanning taxonomy, morphology, palaeontology, and ecology, pioneering the use of biostatistics along the way.
His most remarkable turn came late. After the founding of the People’s Republic, Shaw recognised that Chinese mammalogy scarcely existed as a discipline — and, at the age of sixty-five, he set out to build it. He established the first mammalogical research division and the first animal-ecology laboratory in China, at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and led the first regional mammal survey, producing A Report on the Mammals of Northeastern China and the landmark Economic Fauna of China: Mammals. He married theory to practice, studying rodent control in the Korean-pine forests of the north-east, and trained a generation of mammalogists and animal ecologists who would lead the field after him.
A Conservationist Ahead of His Time
Shaw’s legacy reaches beyond the specimen drawer and the monograph. Having visited nature reserves in Germany in 1956, he returned convinced that China must protect its wild places, and — together with the great botanist Wu Zhengyi (Cheng-Yih Wu) — he proposed the establishment of a network of nature reserves in Yunnan. Their plan for twenty-four reserves was approved by the provincial government in 1957, among the earliest formal conservation measures in modern China. In an age that too often saw wildlife only as a resource, Shaw was among the first Chinese scientists to argue that it must also be safeguarded — a conviction that echoes powerfully today.
Tsen-Hwang Shaw died in 1964, remembered by his peers as “the founder of vertebrate zoology in China” — an erudite scholar of insect, fish, bird, and mammal alike. If Swinhoe and La Touche and the missionary-naturalists opened the study of China’s fauna, it was Shaw and his generation who took possession of it, and made it a Chinese science studying a Chinese land. The next time you page through a modern account of the birds of Hebei, or walk in one of China’s now-thousands of nature reserves, remember the scholar from a Zhejiang village who helped make both things possible — and who, in a review, a book, and a birthday painting, joined hands across a generation with the pioneers who had come before.
References:
Wei, F. & Wang, D. (2020). “Tsen-Hwang Shaw: Founder of Vertebrate Zoology in China.” Protein & Cell 12(1): 1–3.
Shaw, T. H. (1927). “A small collection of birds from Fukien.” Science.
Shaw, T. H. (1930). “Note on some birds of Chefoo, China.” The Auk 47(4): 542–545.
Shaw, T. H. (1936). The Birds of Hopei Province (2 vols). Beijing: Fan Memorial Institute of Biology.
Evermann, B. W. & Shaw, T. H. (1927). “Fishes from Eastern China, with description of new species.” Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences.