Samuel Couling opens the “Fishes and Fisheries” entry of his Encyclopaedia Sinica (Shanghai, 1917) with the words: “In China the Fish is abundant, the species are numerous, everybody, more or less, fishes, and everybody eats fish. So one would expect to find in Chinese books of Natural History copious details on Ichthyology.” But he concludes bathetically: “the Lexicons, translations, and commentaries published by Europeans have been able to extract from the Chinese sources no more than the latter contain, that is to say, some vague generalities, and some errors.” In the century since, it is tempting to assume that little has changed: true we now have better descriptions and classifications of the fish, but we know very little more about the people who hooked, netted, trapped and cormorant-fished them, whether working from boats or from the shore, whether on lakes or rivers or on the near or deep seas.

The reason for our enduring ignorance is simply enough found in Chinese cultural values. Good people, who farmed land, the vast majority of the population and the backbone of the Chinese economy, were sedentary, tied to their fields and discouraged from moving, making them comparatively easy to control and tax. People who moved with the tides or the seasonal fish shoals and who were not necessarily tied to any one location or fixed administrative unit were not culturally “normal,” they had strange customs and work habits, and like strangers everywhere they tended to be viewed with mistrust. Many land-dwellers considered those who lived from the waters to be non-Chinese: indeed it was not until the late 18th century that the “mean” (jian min) status of the boat people was lifted, and even then their descendants were not eligible to sit the civil service examinations until four generations later.

Despised or ignored by land-dwellers, feared as real or potential pirates, their women rightly or wrongly infamous as prostitutes, and themselves almost universally illiterate, the boat people did not have “a good press” and lacked the means to develop one. A handful of anthropologists have studied them, but scholars such as Eugene Anderson, Kani Hiroaki, John McCoy, Barbara Ward and George Worcester, while knowledgeable, have not been especially prolific in their writings in this field. And now, very late in the day, it has been realized that for some time the world of the boat dweller has been disappearing. This book is an attempt at what might be termed “rescue historical anthropology,” both an acknowledgement that much has been lost and a brave effort to encourage others to focus on and record what remains.

The editors have gathered together 12 papers of varying length but, tellingly, most of these are quite short. The quality is somewhat uneven, as might be expected given the difficulties of working in such a neglected area and the disadvantages of what appears to have been in some cases very short fieldwork exposure. The attempted coverage is wide, ranging from historical fishing rights on Poyang lake in Jiangxi province; through an analysis of the history of settlement and administration of the Zhoushan archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang; accounts of religious practices on Naizhou island (Guangdong), Tai lake (Jiangsu) and Weishan lake (Shandong); the “emancipation” of the boat people of Fuzhou city; and to aspects of group social mobility in a number of locations.

Recurrent themes of the papers are lament for the paucity of documentary records (whether descriptive of or generated by the fisher folk); the hierarchy of deep water, shallow water and on-shore fishermen; the chronic dilemma of the state over how the fisher folk should be classified and treated; the seemingly inexorable progress of movement from boats to shore and then from shacks to permanent houses; and a perceived change from small-scale simple family to large-scale lineage organization associated with the move from water to dry land, this change being most visible in new temple and ancestor worship rituals. None of the authors seems to question why large-scale ancestor worshipping groups were not found among the water people, the physical mobility and small unit size apparently offering sufficient ground for the assumption that extension of organization beyond the boat was not feasible. Yet in coastal Guangdong at least, a majority of permanent houses were small (one room) structures hardly bigger than a medium-sized fishing boat and not as large as many a deep-sea junk, and while houses could not move, there was nothing to stop boats from moving in groups much like mobile villages. Is it possible that there could be additional reasons for the absence of lineages among the floating population?

These papers are too disparate to give a comprehensive overview of the lives and history of the fisher folk: they are fragments of flesh looking for a strong skeleton to adhere to. The contributors are not of course to blame for the missing bones, there is still much work to be done, and what has been produced here will not have been wasted. There is particularly valuable content in the editors' Introduction and in the papers by Liang Hongsheng on fishing rights on Poyang lake, by He Xi evaluating relationships between land-based and water-based peoples and their religious practices, by Ota Izuru also on changing rituals, and by Diao Tongju and She Kanglue on the development of lineages associated with the move to land dwelling. The final section of the book looks at contemporary developments, with meaty insightful contributions from Huang Xiangchun on the boat people of Fuzhou; from Zeng Huijuan on a Guangdong village long settled by former boat dwellers; and from the joint editors in an Appendix on “Mechanization, market and moving ashore.”