Wings of Desire
Print Edition
FOR Tang Qingyu, the Royal Asiatic Society building is not just another heritage structure on the Bund. Rather, it is the place where his father and grandfather before him carried on a family legacy in taxidermy and biological research.
Now 74, Tang is the fifth generation of an illustrious family that includes taxidermists, naturalists, researchers, professors and technicians. In addition to that array of talent, Tang has added naturalist drawing to the family legacy.
About 80 percent of the 240,000 animal specimens displayed in the newly opened Shanghai Natural History Museum come from the Tangs.
In China, two schools of taxidermists emerged in late 19th century. Both started as family businesses. Their craft carries on today with the Tangs and with the Liu family of Beijing.
The northern branch of the Royal Asiatic Society was founded in 1857 with a natural history museum and a library. It became the base of the Tang family after they moved to Shanghai from Fujian Province.
“Our family had bedrooms in the building,” Tang said. “I was born there, so you might say my association with the business started at a very early age.”
When he was a little boy, his grandfather Tang Renguan and his father Tang Zhaokui worked on specimens at the society every day.
The 1980s were a heyday in the business, with the family preparing, stuffing and mounting eight small specimens a day. The team of three or four took only a week to finish a larger wild beast.
Tang studied at Leisi Primary School, which is now South Sichuan Road Primary School, where he developed an interest in sketching.
He often helped classmates in middle school when they had difficult drawings to do. The teachers recognized his talent.
“My grandfather heard about this and told me to draw the family’s specimens as a way of passing them on to future generations,” Tang said.
He studied drawing with Gu Zhonghua, a master from the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute, who used to visit his family and sketch animal and bird specimens to be used in embroidery work.
“He asked me if I wanted to learn drawing because every time he drew, I sat by his side watching,” Tang said, “Of course, I said yes.”
With the advent of the “cultural revolution (1966-1976),” Tang kept his drawing to himself. When it ended in 1976, he took it up again and started drawing for encyclopedias.
Tang’s name is credited in 75 published books. His intimate knowledge of animal anatomy, learned in taxidermy, makes his drawings lifelike. He is a master of gongbi hua, or traditional Chinese realistic painting.
For example, every fish he draws is detailed down to the number of scales of a particular species.
“About 70 percent of my knowledge came from books, and the rest came from my work in taxidermy,” he said.
His work appears in the “Encyclopedia of China,” the first comprehensive encyclopedia of its kind in China, published from 1993 to 2009.
Loyalty runs deep
In 2005, the encyclopedia “Plants of Shanghai” was published, featuring his drawings. His work also appeared in the “Colored Animal Encyclopedia,” which is probably why his drawings are so familiar to people who grew up with these books.
Tang said his family history is one of loyalty — to one another, to society and to the nation. None of the Tangs have ever emigrated abroad, not even during the upheavals of the cultural revolution.
The more than 100-year family legacy started with Tang Chunying, a fisherman in Fuzhou. His life changed when he met a French-born, English-educated tax officer named John David Digues de La Touche, who was attracted to the egret feathers the patriarch was selling as a sideline.
La Touche was an avid biologist and master in Western taxidermy. He asked Tang to show him around. A friendship was formed that guided the elder Tang into taxidermy. In 1899, with the help of Tang, La Touche and another bird lover named C. B. Rickett discovered many new bird species in Fujian Province. Upon returning to Europe, La Touche published the book “Handbook of the Birds of Eastern China” in 1931. On the title page, he included a family photo of the Tang family, taken in 1893, to express his gratitude for all their help.
Tang Qiwang, son of Tang Chunying, worked with La Touche for more than 20 years, learning not only his techniques but also developing a love and understanding for biology.
Loads of specimens
He is credited with steering the family into working with research institutions and museums of natural history. At Xiamen University, his son Tang Renguan helped developed a complete collection of China’s fish specimens and was among the first to introduce the Western concept of eco-presentations, displaying animal specimens in reproductions of their natural habitats.
A branch of the family was involved when a specimen museum opened at Wuhan University in 1928. Of China’s more than 1,300 bird species, 700 are exhibited there.
The current curator and his two predecessors are all Tangs.
When China issued the Wildlife Conservation Law of 1985, the fifth generation of Tangs stopped gathering specimens in the wild and turned its attention to research.
Tang Qingyu explained that there are three schools of taxidermy in the world: the traditional European carcass method, the traditional Japanese ligation method and the traditional Chinese stuffing method.
The Tang family used straw to stuff large animals and cotton to stuff small ones. Straw is an ideal stuffing because it doesn’t rot easily, Tang said.
“We don’t skin the animals and then wrap the skin over pre-made models,” he said.
The Tangs use arsenic as a preservative because it lasts longer than other chemicals. “The whole idea is to preserve specimens for the future when a species may disappear altogether,” he said.
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