Captivating old photos of 1890s China by famed travel writer Isabella Bird given new life

A republished version of ‘Chinese Pictures: China Through the Eyes of Isabella Bird’ contains 61 images from across China in the 1890s

The photos from acclaimed British travel writer Bird range from classic architecture to dying men to a tower where poor people left dead babies

Annemarie Evans Published: 22 Feb, 2020

“Chinese Pictures: China Through the Eyes of Isabella Bird” is a memoir of an English woman who travelled through the country in the 1890s and took photos of the people and places she came across. Photo: Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books
In 1894, a middle-aged British woman, independently wealthy from her work as a travel writer, took a course to learn how to use a camera. She planned to use one while travelling around Asia, in what would be her final trip to the region.

The trip was an opportunity for Isabella Bird to hear and see the rapids of China’s untamed Yangtze River, observe the country’s dainty women with bound feet and relish the architecture of arched bridges, temples and the Forbidden City.

The ailments that had dogged Bird throughout her life, though, would soon become too much for her, and the bearers she hired to carry her large, tripod-mounted camera, albumen plates – used for photography at the time – and chemicals ended up having had to carry her, too.In her extensive and arduous journey, there were no dark rooms to develop her photos. The waters of the Yangtze were used to rinse the photographs she took during her extensive three-year journey around East Asia. They were published, on her return to England, in 1900 in Chinese Pictures: China Through the Eyes of Isabella Bird. She died in bed in 1904.

Isabella Bird took many photos during her three-year journey around East Asia.
Bird was a solo traveller at a time when it was thought unusual for a Caucasian woman to travel without a companion. She had been married to a doctor named John Bishop, and she did not remarry after he died in 1886.

Her observations of America, Hawaii, Korea, Japan, China and then-Malaya (a set of states on the Malay Peninsula and Singapore) made her a literary success in England and opened people’s eyes and minds to these faraway countries.

Some 90 years later, Bird’s works were found by a publisher named Graham Earnshaw among a bunch of classic China-related books in a bookshop called Caves in Taipei, Taiwan.

“Forty years ago, I used to buy books from Caves, among them Isabella’s. The first one I read was her Japan story,” Earnshaw says. “She did a very long, interesting trip around Japan and went up near Hokkaido – and it just blew me away. The sense of being with her, the experience of travelling with her, is what makes her writing so brilliant, so extraordinary, so alive.”

Earnshaw has since republished a number of Bird’s works. The layout and organisation of the newer Chinese Pictures, which contains 61 images by Bird, has been kept as close to the original edition as possible, with an additional foreword by Earnshaw.

Bird took a photograph of the Forbidden City from the south side from what would be now Tiananmen Square. It shows buildings that no longer exist. Photo: Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books
“All photos and words in the original are included – not one word [has been] left out,” he says. “We did it because I think anything by Isabella on China is worth keeping in the sun, and these photos are basically unknown and have value in terms of understanding China and Isabella.”
Bird writes about China in The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither, and The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. On both occasions, she passes through Hong Kong – once during the city’s Great Fire of 1878, where she arrived, dropped her luggage off at the bishop’s house, and went back out to follow the developments of the event.
She also wrote about a court and execution ground in Guangdong province in mainland China’s south, the costumes of Manchurian people in the north, her travels up the Yangtze rapids, and Sichuan and Tibet.

The newer Chinese Pictures contains a foreword by Graham Earnshaw. Photo: Earnshaw Books

“There were a lot of memoirs at that time that looked at things from a military perspective or a cultural perspective, but she was doing it from a humanistic perspective – that is, the people,” Earnshaw says.

“She was paying attention to the people to an extent that I think it was certainly rare for those days, and allowed us to get a sense of not only the places, but the people. She had, of course, various attitudes that come out. We all have our prejudices, but she transcended them to a remarkable extent.”

The China we see through Bird’s eyes in Chinese Pictures is on the cusp of change. It precedes the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, an anti-foreigner uprising, by a few years. Although she was attacked in Chengdu for being a foreigner, she was protected by the men she had hired for her travels, and she remained undeterred on her adventures.

While Isabella Bird often stayed in the homes of missionaries, she also stayed in inns in towns along the route. Photo: Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books

Bird’s photos provide something of a social commentary in the sense that they encapsulate the lives of ordinary Chinese and Manchurians at that time. Although she often stayed in the homes of missionaries, Bird would sometimes stay in town inns, where she was considered an object of curiosity. She photographed people staring at her in one, as well as families on the move in Manchuria, a dying coolie under a tree, and a child eating with chopsticks.

In Fuzhou, she took photos of a “baby tower”, where the bodies of newborn babies were left. These children would have been from parents who were not able to afford another child, were female, or were babies that had simply died from ill health, Earnshaw says.

In Chinese Pictures, the description reads: “When a baby dies and the parents are too poor to give it a decent burial, they drop its poor little body into one of the openings in this tower. A Guild of Benevolence charges itself with the task of clearing out the tower every two to three days, burying the bodies with all religious rites and ceremony.”

A “baby tower”, photographed by Isabella Bird, in Fuzhou, Fujian province. Photo: Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books

Chinese Pictures doesn’t just have photos of people, though – it has landscape and architectural images, too.

“One of the most interesting photographs is the one that we featured on the cover,” says Earnshaw. “It’s a half-moon bridge at Wanzhou – then called Wanxien, and a key river port on the Yangtze … just on the bend where the Yangtze River heads north to Chongqing and then turns east to go into the gorges and then into the Pacific …

“At that corner is this town, and [Bird] spent quite a lot of time there. The bridge itself was mentioned by a number of other travellers and it was just the most beautiful piece of architecture. Of course, it doesn’t exist any more.”

The bridge of Mien Chuh in Sichuan province. Photo: Courtesy of Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books

Another photograph shows a child in traditional Chinese clothes eating with chopsticks. Bird’s role as she travelled, says Earnshaw, was that of an observer and she wouldn’t have talked much to the locals – a sentiment that was not uncommon. Foreigners in China were isolated both in terms of local society excluding them and foreigners themselves being unwilling to step into that world.

“If that were you or me today, we might have been looking to spend time getting to know the people and learn about life [there],” he says. “But she moved from one missionary household to another missionary household. She took a picture of a kid eating, but she was operating as a bystander, as an observer.”

Bird was also interested in the rudimentary modes of transport used in the region. There’s a photograph of a Manchurian family on the move, with the baby in a basket and the mother atop a mule. She photographed wheelbarrows, which were used to transport goods and people, too.

Bird spent much of her time in the north of China and travelled into Manchuria. Photo: Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books

Perhaps one of her more disturbing images, titled the “Dying Coolie”, captured one of her bearers lying with his legs crossed under a tree. The story behind the image was that he had become ill, and his fellow bearers were ready to move on and leave him behind.

Although Bird was surprised by this seemingly callous pragmatism – he was dying, thus he was of no more use – she put a wet handkerchief on his brow to soothe him, took a photograph, and then herself also abandoned him.

“Is there a difference in the end? I don’t think so,” Earnshaw says. “But her Christian Victorian conscience was assuaged by bothering to put a handkerchief on his brow. Good for her.”

Perhaps one of Bird’s more disturbing images captured one of her bearers lying with his legs crossed under a tree. Photo: Isabella Bird/Chinese Pictures/Earnshaw Books
Bird also spent time in Beijing and took a photo of the Forbidden City from what would become Tiananmen Square. Her photo shows a more extensive set of royal buildings than exists today.

“You can see various gates and walls that no longer exist but give a sense of the wider Forbidden City – the home of the emperors at a time again before everything fell apart. It’s one of the most instructive photographs that I’ve seen of the Forbidden City,” Earnshaw says. “She recorded history.”

Chinese Pictures: China Through the Eyes of Isabella Bird, with a foreword by Graham Earnshaw, is published by Earnshaw Books.

Chinese immigrants went to Australia looking for gold and found communities. Why does so little of their legacy remain?

Chinese history

Driven off Queensland’s goldfields, arrivals from China pioneered trade and agriculture in the north of the country, until discriminatory legislation and changing times forced them out

David Leffman  22 Feb, 2020

Gold fever hit Australia in 1851. Rushes swept the southern states of Victoria and New South Wales and fanned out across the country; whole towns emptied as people raced to the goldfields, hoping to “strike lucky” and make their fortunes. As news reached the outside world, Australia was overrun by migrant prospectors from Britain, Europe and, especially, China.

At the time, China was in chaos, ravaged by famine and civil war, and many Chinese came to the Antipodes from harsh rural backgrounds. With little to lose, they were willing to work hard for profits they could either send home to relatives or save for their own return. Mostly male, immigrants were divided by a range of dialects and clan loyalties, united by being strangers struggling to survive in a foreign and often unwelcoming land.

In far north Queensland, where Australia’s “finger” points towards New Guinea, so many Chinese came that, at one time, they outnumbered the European population by five to one. Many remained long after the gold had gone, pioneering local trade and agriculture and bringing substantial improvements to living conditions. And yet little trace of this Chinese heritage remains today.

In 1872, gold was discovered in far north Queensland’s remote Palmer River, a harsh country of open wood­land, savannah and granite outcrops where tempera­tures top 40 degrees Celsius in summer. It was also home to Aboriginal peoples, who resented outsiders pouring into their territory, stripping the land of its resources. Violent exchanges between the two groups ensued, with fatalities on both sides.

An illustration from 1870 shows Chinese workers on the

 Queensland goldfields. Photo: Getty Images


Still the prospectors came in their thousands. Mining camps sprang up at Palmerville and Maytown, and the gate­­way coastal port of Cooktown was founded 140km to the northeast. The Palmer became Australia’s richest alluvial goldfield: the government warden recorded one prospector finding nuggets weighing 179oz (5kg; worth US$262,000 today) in just three hours, while another team panned 59lbs (26.8kg) of gold in three weeks (US$1.26 million).


The first Chinese arrived on the Palmer goldfield in 1874 and were soon pouring in from the Pearl River region, on China’s southern coast, with steamships running directly from Hong Kong to Cooktown. The Australasian Sketcher magazine described newly arrived Chinese “thronging the roads to the Palmer diggings, where long strings of them can be seen stretched out in Indian file, each man laden with burdens swinging from the ends of his bamboo pole [...] Their loads consist of the most miscellaneous articles, tinware, chests of tea, bags of flour, tents and equipage, mining tools, clothes and all the other items of necessary equipment for mining life.”

Some died along the road from heatstroke, injury and Aboriginal attack. Controversial police inspector Frederic Urquhart reported that the Aboriginals were cannibals, and that they preferred Chinese to Europeans because they tasted better.

On the fields, the Chinese usually targeted workings abandoned as unprofitable by European miners, patiently extracting every last speck of gold. This ability to make money from “exhausted” claims and their sheer numbers – by 1877 there were 17,000 Chinese prospectors on the Palmer – fired racial friction, with white mobs raiding Chinese camps to cut off their long plaits of hair.

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Oldest Chinatown in Australia faces suburban rival

Many Australians, like government warden William Hill, felt the Chinese were robbing the country of its right­ful wealth: “Only for the influx of Chinamen the Palmer would have given profitable employment to thousands of Europeans for many years [...] The amount of gold obtained by them was enormous, and thousands of ounces of gold were taken back to China privately, as one of the Boss Chinamen told me.”

In 1877, the Queensland government enacted the Chinese Immigrants Regulation Act, which limited the numbers of Chinese arriving on any one ship, and taxed them £10 per head – equivalent to US$870 today. When that had little effect, the tax was raised to £30, and the Chinese were banned from working on newly discovered goldfields.

A Chinese gold prospector in the 1860s. 

Photo: State Library of Queensland

Declining returns combined with hostile conditions and taxation eventually drove the Chinese off the Palmer. Some found jobs as cooks or timber workers, others set up in business at the newly established regional settlements of Cairns, Atherton and Innisfail. At the time, the government was leasing agricultural land to white developers, but in order to purchase the land freehold, “improvements” – clearing and planting – had to be made.

Many Europeans leased acreages at the low rate of £1 per acre a year to Chinese tenant farmers (who, unless naturalised, were not allowed to own land themselves). The soils proved fertile and, as many Chinese had previous farming experience, within a decade the area had become a major exporter of crops, shipping produce as far away as Melbourne.
Far north Queensland’s major city, 

Cairns, was founded in 1876 as a port for the newly discovered Hodgkinson goldfield, 140km inland. The first two Chinese attempting to land were literally thrown back into the water by European miners, who wanted to keep the Hodgkinson white. But Chinese migrants to Cairns were not there to risk their necks prospecting; instead they established market gardens and general stores to supply the growing township with goods, fresh tropical fruit and vegetables.

One of these early pioneers was Andrew Leon (1841-1920). Already 10 years in Australia and fluent in English, Leon became a major figure in Cairns’ development. “Around 1878 he selected 1,250 acres for the Hap Wah plantation, planting sugar and cotton, and in 1882 the plantation’s Pioneer mill produced the area’s first sugar exports,” says Julia Volkmar, of the Hap Wah and Andrew Leon Historical Project.

Kwong Sue Duk with three of his wives and fourteen of

 his children in Cairns, in 1904. Photo: State Library of Queensland

After the sugar industry collapsed, Leon moved into property investment, including several businesses on Sachs Street (now Grafton), between Spence and Shields streets. This Chinatown strip eventually hosted restaurants, stores, hostels, banks, cottage industries, gaming halls, and several Japanese-run brothels. One of the district’s two temples, Lit Sung Goong, played a central role in the Chinese commu­nity and survived until 1966.

According to Sandi Robb, of the Cairns and District Chinese Association, by 1900 there were 1,600 Chinese in the Cairns area (compared with 4,000 Europeans), all but 28 of whom were male. Not surprisingly, a number married European women while others found brides in China and brought them out. Kwong Sue Duk – a naturalised Australian who settled in Cairns for a few years and ran a store and Chinese pharmacy – was famed for having four wives and 24 children (he has more than 800 descendants, including Australian celebrity chef Kylie Kwong).

The Chinese contribution to Cairns’ economy was apparent and, unlike on the goldfields, they were generally treated with respect. In 1888, the Anti-Chinese League was refused permission to hold a rally there, while a visiting cleric enthused about Chinese farmers supporting the Cairns region: “I don’t know how the people would get on without them.” The Chinese community raised money for local causes, and its Lunar New Year festivities, with fireworks, parades and lion dances, were the talk of the town. Complaints against Chinese tended to revolve around opium, prostitution and gambling, and their frequent use of the courts to try to ruin business rivals.

Up on the tablelands behind Cairns, the township of Atherton coalesced during the 1880s around a timber workers’ camp. There were already about 100 Chinese living there, many of them former gold miners, who now turned their hands to farming and successfully introduced maize. This put them in competition with Atherton’s European settlers, who wanted to use the same land to graze dairy cattle. The Chinese further ruffled feathers by storing surplus grain in good years and then selling it at high prices in times of shortage.

A statue of a Chinese gold prospector outside the Atherton

 Chinatown Hou Wang temple, in Queensland. Photo: David Leffman

Atherton’s Chinatown eventually became home to more than 1,000 people, its broad main street comprising 20 or so buildings – there were restaurants, stores, gaming halls, market gardens and the timber Hou Wang temple. This was a fairly modest three-room affair, decked in corrugated iron and dedicated to Yang Liangjie, bodyguard to the last emperor of the Song dynasty (960-1279); fittings included a bronze bell cast specially in China, and four auspicious paintings under the eaves. Atherton’s markets were brisk enough to draw business away from Cairns. The North Coast Advertiser reported, “The produce trade in Atherton is all in the hands of the Chinamen. They also have the best kept horses there, and are great horse dealers.”

Not that everything went their way. When prayers to Yang Liangjie failed to end a drought in the 1890s, irate farmers dragged his image out of the temple and kicked it into the river. (Three days later, Atherton was hit by a cyclone.) Another incident saw international affairs played out locally. After the abdication of China’s last emperor, in 1912, pro-imperial and pro-republic factions from across north Queensland descended on Atherton; the imperials – mostly wealthy merchants, gambling-den owners and shopkeepers – had kept their traditional plaited queues while the Republican labourers and farm workers had cut their hair short in support of the new regime. The two sides hurled “stones, bottles and other handy missiles” at each other, resulting in a dozen injuries and four arrests.

About 90km south of Cairns, near the mouth of the twisting Johnstone River, Innisfail (then called Geraldton) sprang up in the late 1870s as a supply town for local sugar cane plantations. One of its earliest Chinese residents was Tom See Poy (Taam Sze Pui; 1856-1926), whose autobiogra­phy sketches how he came to settle here. After the family farm in China was destroyed by flooding, he heard “a rumour that gold had been discovered [on the Palmer], the source of which was inexhaustible and free to all”, and caught a steamer from Hong Kong to Cooktown.

“He spent five years on the goldfields, barely covering expenses and suffering illness, injury and Aboriginal attack,” says his descendant, Bill Sue Yek. “Leaving to work on a sugar plantation at Innisfail, in 1882, he used his savings to found what became See Poy & Sons department store. With suppliers all over Australia, See Poy’s could sell you anything from an umbrella to a car.” The business survived until 1981.

The interior of Atherton’s Hou Wang temple. Photo: David Leffman

Innisfail is also known for its bananas, which grow prolifically in the region’s rich soils. According to local businessman and former mayor Herb Layt, Chinese firms such as Hop Kee and Man Cheong Long once dominated the banana trade, digging long canals between the fields and river so crops could be easily shipped out. A sub­stantial Chinatown spread west from Innisfail’s riverfront, featuring the usual run of retail businesses, services and nightclubs, and even a furniture factory.

A visiting journa­list described how the Chinese were everywhere. “He is the cook, the merchant, and the gardener, and indeed, it is the export of bananas by the Chinese that has kept Geraldton going during seasons when sugar cultivation has not been as promising as usual. Sugar is largely grown by the Chinamen at Geraldton, too.” As at Cairns, the community put on lively parades for Lunar New Year, and even for a visit by the Queensland premier in 1903.

By 1900 then, the Chinese were firmly established in far north Queensland, and their communities were thriving. So why did they decline?

In short, says Bill Sue Yek at Innisfail, it was due to a mixture of discriminatory legislation and changing times. North Queensland was losing its rough, pioneering edge and the towns had begun to attract white working-class settlers, who competed with the Chinese as labourers. Fears of unemploy­ment led to Australia’s 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, the infamous “White Australia policy”, which greatly restricted non-British immigration.

Chinese workers transport bananas along a waterway,

 in Innisfail. Photo: State Library of Queensland

At the same time, disease, poor transport infrastructure and overseas competition were undermining the banana industry. As profits fell, the Chinese were hit further by the Leases to Aliens Act and Banana Industry Preservation Act, again designed to exclude non-Europeans. In 1913, restric­tions were also placed on the employment of Chinese in sugar production; and from 1917, to reward servicemen returning from the first world war, the Australian govern­ment handed out land packages as “soldier settlements”, including acreages leased by Chinese at Atherton.

Deprived of their livelihoods, the Chinese began leaving the far north. Some of the older generation retired back to China, but many Australian-born Chinese dispersed to wherever there was work, leaving the Chinatowns to fade away. Over the following decades local agriculture passed into the hands of a new wave of migrants fleeing poverty in their home countries, the Italians and Maltese, who were themselves superseded in the 1990s by Hmong refugees from Thailand and Laos.

Today, signs of Chinese presence are comparatively thin on the ground. Cairns’ once-thriving China­town is commemorated by a bus-shelter-style memorial on Grafton Street, and a plaque to Hap Wah inside Stocklands shopping centre, on the site of its former plantation. An active community of descendants of early Chinese families remains, however, along with an annual Lunar New Year street festival, and a planned cultural centre that will showcase a significant collection of artefacts from Lit Sung Goong temple.

Atherton’s Chinatown was abandoned by 1950 and the buildings scavenged, although the Hou Wang Temple remained more or less functional until 1975. The site was bought by the Fong On family and donated to the National Trust, which has restored the temple and set up a museum.

A Chinatown memorial in Cairns. Photo: David Leffman

Down at Innisfail, a memorial plaque inside Coles super­market marks the now-demolished See Poy & Sons store and, on Owen Street, another Lit Sing Gung temple is a focus for the dwindling Chinese community. Painted vivid yellow and red, an angular concrete 1940s building replaced the original 19th century construction, destroyed by a cy­clone. Lit Sing Gung once provided charitable accom­moda­tion for the poor and elderly, especially the first generation of Chinese settlers who decided not to return to China. Inside are reminders of busier times: gilded deity sculptures and altars, another bell, and a dedication board dated 1897 proclaiming, “A Heroic Breeze Bringing Righteousness”.

Temple committee treasurer Neville Lee, who traces his family back through the Australian goldfields to a 13th century Chinese magistrate, is vague about what happened to Innisfail’s community, describing its current numbers as “very few”.

Now retired, Layt has long promoted the development of Innisfail’s former Chinatown as a historic precinct. Yet the regional Cassowary Coast council’s 53-page “Innisfail Masterplan”, drawn up in 2018, does not mention the Chinese or Lit Sing Gung. This might be about to change. The council has plans to discuss the wider promotion of Chinese heritage with other regional tourism bodies, and hopes to work with the temple committee to develop a themed “Chinatown” district.

“We recognise that the Lit Sing Gung temple plays an important role in the fabric of the town,” says councillor Byron Jones. “The masterplan specifically focuses on pub­­lic space improvements designed to bring more tour­ists through the centre of town and down to the river­bank, hope­fully increasing patronage and awareness of the temple.”

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Lunar New Year: Lions aren’t native to China, so where did the traditional lion dance come from?

Get ready for the clanging of cymbals and beating of drums that announce the colourful trance of the lion dance – but how much do you know about this centuries-old CNY tradition

Artists perform a lion dance at Shanhaiguan Pass, in Qinhuangdao city,

 Hebei province, in northern China. Photo: Xinhua
It’s Lunar New Year, and the clanging of cymbals and the persistent beat of drums are aural cues to the lion dance. Colourful and loud, the lions are an ancient Chinese ritual to scare away evil spirits, and bless a business or home. The Chinese lion does not look much like a lion, though, and if these predators aren’t native to China, where does the dance come from?

Revellers in the Congos and Devils carnival festival in Panama, a celebration 

dating back to colonial times, with congos representing African slaves and

 devils the Spanish conquerors. Photo: AFP

Humans have long dressed up like animals to dance, a practice that dates back to the Qin dynasty, around 220BC, when there were texts describing exorcisms with dancers wearing bear skin masks. So what made the lion so special and how has it stood the test of time?

A lion dance with lion lads sees students perform alongside their mentors. 

Photo: Good Hope School

The earliest use of the word “lion” was in Han dynasty texts presented to court by emissaries from Central Asia. It wasn’t described as a dance until much later during the Tang dynasty. The dance was a lavish affair, and involved five different coloured lions, 12 “lion lads” or dancers in charge of teasing the beasts, accompanied by 140 singers.


In his poem, Western Liang Arts, Bai Juyi describes a line dance more like what we know today that was “performed by two hu (胡, he means non-Han people from Central Asia) dancers who wore a lion costume made of a wooden head, a silk tail and furry body, with eyes gilded with gold and teeth plated with silver as well as ears that moved”.

Northern and southern lions

A northern lion dance, where the green bow represents a

 female and a red bow represents a male lion. Photo: Handout

By the Song dynasty, all the lions in the dances resembled what we know as northern lions today. These lions have a gold painted wooden head, a shaggy red mane and yellow fur throughout their body. The male has a red bow on its head while a female usually sports a green one or has a green mane. The distinction between the sexes is made because the dance usually portrays a family of lions. The performance is more agile to depict playfulness, and acrobatics and stunts are common.

A lion dance at Times Square in Causeway Bay, 

Hong Kong. Photo: Nora Tam

The structure of southern lions is more complicated than their northern counterparts. The head is made with papier-mâché over a bamboo frame, covered in gauze then painted and decorated with beautifully coloured materials that mimic fur. Southern lions are believed to originate in Guangzhou. They are said to have appeared in the Qianlong Emperor’s dreams during his Southern tour, and he ordered an animal to be made in the likeness of his description and used in festivals from then on. However, it’s most likely to have been adapted from the Northern lion, which dates back to the Ming dynasty.

Civil and martial lions

Awakening Lion performance by Guangzhou Song and 

Dance Troupe. Photo: Handout

Lion dance performances are commonly separated into civil and martial types. Where there is more gesturing and blinking to mimic the animal’s movements in the civil dance, the martial style is more energetic and involves lots of acrobatics.

The enduring image of the southern lion

A child touches a lion’s head as dancers perform a traditional

lion dance in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: EPA-EFE

Which brings us to the southern lion dance we commonly see today. More often than not, the civil dance is performed because of restricted space, but martial dances are also performed at larger gatherings and festivals.

Why is the eyelash-batting, silky and colourful beast the first image that comes to mind when we mention the lion dance? This is thanks to the Chinese diaspora from southern provinces such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong’s mass migration around the world in the past half-century, bringing their traditions and desire for auspiciousness with them.

From New York to Sydney, and Vancouver to Kuala Lumpur, many Chinese people trace their heritage back to the Southern cities and from there, every Lunar New Year these magnificent creatures are used to bless the new year.


Lisa Cam
Commissioning Editor at SCMP and Editor of Sands Style magazine, Lisa Cam enjoys reporting and editing all things about food, travel and anything in between. She also draws on years of banking experience to write business and financial articles. At the end of the day, she likes nothing more than kicking back to a good dose of true crime stories and cooking tried and true recipes from sticky old cookbooks.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE BIO WEAPON VIRUS CONSPIRACY THEORY IS A NOVEL OF COURSE

A virus called Wuhan-400 causes outbreak … in a Dean Koontz thriller from 1981. How is it that some books appear to prophesy events?

The Eyes of Darkness features a Chinese military lab in Wuhan that creates a virus as a bioweapon; civilians soon become sick after accidentally contracting it

In fact, the one lab in China able to handle the deadliest viruses is in Wuhan and helped sequence the novel coronavirus the world is currently battling

Kate Whitehead


In bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz’s 1981 thriller The Eyes of Darkness, a virus to be used as a biological weapon is developed in Wuhan, China, but humans end up contracting it. Photo: Shutterstock

The Eyes of Darkness, a 1981 thriller by bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz, tells of a Chinese military lab that creates a virus as part of its biological weapons programme. The lab is located in Wuhan, which lends the virus its name, Wuhan-400. A chilling literary coincidence or a case of writer as unwitting prophet?

In The Eyes of Darkness, a grieving mother, Christina Evans, sets out to discover whether her son Danny died on a camping trip or if – as suspicious messages suggest – he is still alive. She eventually tracks him down to a military facility where he is being held after being accidentally contaminated with man-made microorganisms created at the research centre in Wuhan.

If that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up, read this passage from the book: “It was around that time that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen moved to the United States while carrying a floppy disk of data from China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon of the past decade. They call it Wuhan-400 because it was developed in their RDNA laboratory just outside the city of Wuhan.”

In another strange coincidence, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses China’s only level four biosafety laboratory, the highest-level classification of labs that study the deadliest viruses, is just 32km from the epicentre of the current coronavirus outbreak. The opening of the maximum-security lab was covered in a 2017 story in the journal Nature, which warned of safety risks in a culture where hierarchy trumps an open culture.

Chinese research lab denies links to first coronavirus patient
17 Feb 2020


Fringe conspiracy theories that the coronavirus involved in the current outbreak appears to be man-made and likely escaped from the Wuhan virology lab have been circulated, but have been widely debunked. In fact the lab was one of the first to sequence the coronavirus.

In Koontz’s thriller, the virus is considered the “perfect weapon” because it only affects humans and, since it cannot survive outside the human body for longer than a minute, it does not demand expensive decontamination once a population is wiped out, allowing the victors to roll in and claim a conquered territory.

It’s no exaggeration to call Koontz a prolific writer. His first book, Star Quest, was published in 1968 and he has been churning out suspense fiction at a phenomenal rate since with more than 80 novels and 74 works of short fiction under his belt. The 74-year-old, a devout Catholic, lives in California with his wife. But what are the odds of him so closely predicting the future?

Albert Wan, who runs the Bleak House Books store in San Po Kong, says Wuhan has historically been the site of numerous scientific research facilities, including ones dealing with microbiology and virology. “Smart, savvy writers like Koontz would have known all this and used this bit of factual information to craft a story that is both convincing and unsettling. Hence the Wuhan-400,” says Wan.

British writer Paul French, who specialises in books about China, says many of the elements around viruses in China relate back to the second world war, which may have been a factor in Koontz’s thinking.

The Eyes of Darkness, by Koontz.

“The Japanese definitely did do chemical weapons research in China, which we mostly associate with Unit 731 in Harbin and northern China. But they also stored chemical weapons in Wuhan – which Japan admitted,” says French.

Publisher Pete Spurrier, who runs Hong Kong publishing house Blacksmith Books, muses that for a fiction writer mapping out a thriller about a virus outbreak set in China, Wuhan is a good choice.

“It’s on the Yangtze River that goes east-west; it’s on the high-speed rail [line] that goes north-south; it’s right at the crossroads of transport networks in the centre of the country. Where better to start a fictional epidemic, or indeed a real one?” says Spurrier. (Spurrier works part-time as a subeditor for the Post.)

Albert Wan runs the Bleak House Books store in San Po Kong, Hong Kong.

Hong Kong crime author Chan Ho-kei believes that this kind of “fiction-prophecy” is not uncommon.

“If you look really hard, I bet you can spot prophecies for almost all events. It makes me think about the ‘infinite monkey’ theorem,” he says, referring to the theory that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text.

“The probability is low, but not impossible.”

British writer Paul French.

Chan points to the 1898 novella Futility, which told the story of a huge ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg. Many uncanny similarities were noted between the fictional ship – called Titan – and the real-life passenger ship RMS Titanic, which sank 14 years later. Following the sinking of the Titanic, the book was reissued with some changes, particularly in the ship’s gross tonnage.

“Fiction writers always try to imagine what the reality would be, so it’s very likely to write something like a prediction. Of course, it’s bizarre when the details collide, but I think it’s just a matter of mathematics,” says Chan.

Many of Koontz’s books have been adapted for television or the big screen, but The Eyes of Darkness never achieved such glory. This bizarre coincidence will thrust it into the spotlight and may see sales of this otherwise forgotten thriller jump.

Hong Kong crime author Chan Ho-kei.

Amazon is currently offering it on Kindle for just US$1. Perhaps, like Futility, it will also be reissued with some updates to make it really echo the current outbreak.

China wasn’t original villain in book ‘predicting’ coronavirus outbreak – it was Russia

Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness originally contained details of a man-made virus called Gorki-400 from the Russian city of Gorki

The change to Wuhan came when the book was released in hardback under Koontz’s own name in 1989 – at the end of the Cold War

Kate Whitehead

Much has been made of Dean Koontz’s 1981 book The Eyes of Darkness which appeared to have predicted the recent coronavirus outbreak – but the original villain was Russia, not China. Photo: Shutterstock

The 1981 book by US thriller writer Dean Koontz that appeared to predict the coronavirus outbreak in China initially had the virus originating in Russia.

The book appears to have been rewritten after the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the country was no longer seen as a communist bogeyman.

Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness made headlines in the past week after readers noted the story concerned a man-made virus called Wuhan-400 developed in a biological weapons lab in Wuhan – ground zero of the current coronavirus outbreak – and described as the “perfect weapon”.

“They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made organisms created at that research centre,” Koontz writes in the book.

However, Wuhan wasn’t even originally mentioned in The Eyes of Darkness. The first edition of the book, written under Koontz’s pseudonym Leigh Nichols, concerns a virus called Gorki-400 that was created by the Russians and emerged from “the city of Gorki”.

Excerpt from 1981 edition of The Eyes of Darkness.
The change to Wuhan came when the book was released in hardback under Koontz’s own name in 1989. The year of the book’s re-release is significant – 1989 marked the
end of the Cold War. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country was no longer communist.

“Starting in 1986, relations between the US and the Soviet Union began improving,” says Jenny Smith, co-founder of indie bookshop Bleak House Books in Hong Kong and a student of Russian history. “Mikhail Gorbachev came in in 1985 and was very interested in making the Soviet Union a more open society and improving relations. By 1988, it is our friend and not our enemy.”

Cover of the 1981 edition of The Eyes of Darkness.


An American author pointing the fictional finger of blame at Russia would not have gone down well in that climate, so The Eyes of Darkness needed a new villain. There were only so many places with bio-weapons facilities – think France, Britain and Japan – and most, as far as the US was concerned, were the good guys.

“China is the only place that comes to my mind that would have had an active programme and it’s likely there was a deep suspicion [in the US] of China covering a lot of things in this period,” says Smith, who wrote her PhD on Soviet technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

This was in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 student demonstrations and the bloody Tiananmen crackdown that followed. It was a period when there were rumours swirling about leaks and cover-ups at biological weapons facilities, says Smith, and the US would have been aware of the repression of these rumours.

Excerpt from a post-1989 edition of The Eyes of Darkness.

The switch from Gorki-400 to Wuhan-400 in the book was a literal cut-and-paste and appears to reflect the shift in mentality after the Cold War.

“Everyone was thinking in terms of two great powers – America and the Soviet Union, the good guys and the bad guys. It’s easy to see how you might substitute one bad guy for another, Gorki for Wuhan,” says Smith.

It is not known whether Koontz himself requested this change or his publisher made it. Emails to Koontz, his literary agent and publisher have gone unanswered.

Author Dean Koontz in 2019. Photo: Douglas Sonders

Leigh Nichols wasn’t the only pen name Dean Koontz wrote under in his early career. He also used David Axton, Deanna Dwyer and K.R. Dwyer.

“It’s not unusual to use a pen name when you are starting off in your career. To play it safe, you don’t want to be as exposed,” says Albert Wan, Smith’s husband and the co-founder of Bleak House Books. “When his books started to take off in popularity, he may well have decided to use real identity.”

As for the Gorki referenced in the book, it could be one of a number of Russian towns with that name. The largest, just south of Moscow, is home to 3,500 people today. Compare that with Wuhan, with its population today of more than 11 million – even in 1989, Wuhan’s population topped 3.3 million.

The revised edition of The Eyes of Darkness brought the book closer to possibility, but it’s still some way off what’s happening with 

Covid-19. Significantly, contracting the fictional Wuhan-400 is a certain death sentence, while only 2 per cent of Covid-19 cases are fatal.

Jenny Smith is a co-founder of indie bookshop Bleak House Books.


“It might run as science fiction, but it’s not impossible as it has happened in the past and people would be aware of it,” Smith says. “Think of the cover-up over anthrax – a lot of these stories are stranger than real life.”


Meanwhile, readers are also pointing to a passage in a book by the late Sylvia Browne, an American author who claimed to be psychic, that predicted an international outbreak of a virus this year.


“Around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments,” Browne wrote in the book End of Days. “Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack 10 years later, and then disappear completely.”


Kate Whitehead is a freelance journalist who worked on staff at the SCMP before editing Discovery magazine. She is the author of two Hong Kong crime books - After Suzie and Hong Kong Murders - and fully intends that the next book she writes will be less grisly.

China’s frog breeders silenced over opposition to wildlife trade ban

Outlawing the industry would be unscientific and irrational, breeders say before umbrella association apologises for comments

Legislators set to fast-track prohibition on multibillion-dollar wild animal sector

 22 Feb, 2020
Frogs are a multibillion-dollar business in China. Photo: Biosphoto

A Chinese wildlife industry and conservation group has apologised for public opposition voiced by frog breeders to plans to outlaw the multibillion-dollar wild animal trade in the aftermath of the coronavirus epidemic.
China’s top legislators will meet next week to fast-track a ban on the trade and consumption of wild animals, following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call to review laws on wildlife protection.

The coronavirus epidemic is thought to have emerged from a seafood and meat market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where wild animals were also sold.

Last weekend, defiant frog breeders on a subcommittee of the China Wildlife Conservation Association, an umbrella trade group, made their case against the ban in an online article arguing that it was part of a valuable tradition.

The group said it was “an arbitrary, unscientific and irrational move to put a blanket ban on all wildlife animal consumption just because of one viral outbreak”.

“Human demand for wildlife products has never ceased, and in a sense, it is an indispensable need,” the article said.

The group also drew contrasts with other animal-related disease outbreaks such as avian flu, mad cow disease and African swine fever.

“We don’t ban poultry breeding because of avian flu, do we?”
But the umbrella association – which says it promotes sustainable development of the trade – quickly issued a public apology on Tuesday for the frog breeders’ comments and disbanded the subcommittee that released the article.

The wildlife trade is estimated to be a 520 billion yuan (US$74 billion) business in China, employing more than 14 million people and breeding a wide variety of exotic species from quail, to ostriches, snakes, crocodiles and civets.

More than half of those in the trade – about 7.6 million people – work in the fur and leather industry valued at about 390 billion yuan. The rest – more than 6.2 million people – help breed and process animals for food.
China’s retail and tourism taking hits as online services find opportunity amid coronavirus epidemic

A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering estimated that frog breeding alone employed about 1 million people in a 50 billion yuan business in 2016.

In some of China’s most impoverished regions such as Guangxi, wildlife breeding is a key poverty alleviation strategy.

But there is also public support for a ban on the trade as more lives are claimed by the epidemic.

In an online survey organised by several conservation groups and conducted between January 28 and February 14, over 97 per cent of 100,000 respondents supported a total ban on the industry, the China Business News reported on Friday.

China steps up locust prevention as swarms ravage crops in neighbouring India and Pakistan

Beijing has allocated 1.4 billion yuan (US$200 million) for the prevention and control of pests, including locusts and fall armyworms 

UN experts say China unlikely to suffer major infestation because Himalaya mountains act as ‘natural barrier’ for locusts in India and Pakistan

Elaine Chan 22 Feb, 2020


Locusts, which decimate almost all green vegetation including crops and trees, have infested parts of India and Pakistan, bordering China. Photo: Bloomberg

China has heightened prevention and control measures to protect its cropland from desert locusts that have ravaged India and Pakistan, despite assurances that the likelihood of a large-scale attack was marginal.

Locusts, which decimate almost all green vegetation including crops and trees, have swarmed swathes of agricultural land on the India-Pakistan border, an area identified as a global hotspot for the pests by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The outbreak has raised concerns in neighbouring China, where an economic downturn is already being made worse by the  that has killed more than 2,200 people and ground business to a near halt.

However, officials at the FAO have played down the threat, saying a huge plague of locusts was unlikely.


Desert locusts are one of the oldest and most destructive

 pests on the planet. Photo: Bloomberg


“There is no threat to China by the desert locust because of a) the wind direction and b) they cannot cross the Himalaya Mountains because they are too tall and the air is too cold – so this is a natural barrier,” said FAO’s senior locust forecasting officer Keith Cressman by email.

China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs agreed the threat was small, but officials are not leaving anything involving national food security to chance.

China’s agriculture sector had a devastating year in 2019, hit by the crop-gobbling fall armyworms, which spread over a million hectares of farmland, as well as African swine fever that has killed about half of the country's 440 million pigs through culling of disease.

Beijing has allocated 1.4 billion yuan (US$200 million) for the prevention and control of pests, including 30 million yuan (US$4.2 million) for locust prevention and control in 15 provinces, according to a Reuters report on Friday.

What’s most important is that the locusts could still make their way inland to Yunnan and Guangxi provinces via Indochina, just like the fall armyworm did, affecting our agriculture

Ma Wenfeng

The agriculture ministry said last week it was closely monitoring the locusts’ movements and stepping up prevention efforts, especially in southwest Yunnan province and Tibet, regions close to India and Pakistan, Chinese state media reported.

Agriculture analysts like Ma Wenfeng, of Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant, said that while the Himalays acted as a barrier between the mainland and South Asia, any potential threat should not be taken lightly.

“What’s most important is that the locusts could still make their way inland to Yunnan and Guangxi provinces via Indochina, just like the fall armyworm did, affecting our agriculture,” Ma said.

The Chinese government’s prioritisation and preventive measures limited the fall armyworm’s spread and damage to domestic agricultural output, he added.


Pesticide-spraying drones rise to challenge of China’s ‘intelligent agriculture’ ambition

Desert locusts are one of the oldest and most destructive pests on the planet, flying at speeds of 16 to 19km an hour depending on the wind and travelling between 5 to 130km or more in a day, according to the FAO.

A swarm spanning a square kilometre typically contains at least 40 million and sometimes as many as 80 million locusts, with a swarm of about 40 million capable of eating the same amount of food as roughly 35,000 people in a day, the FAO said.

The current infestation of desert locusts appeared around the Red Sea, where two cyclones near the Arabian Peninsula brought heavy rainfall that helped insects breed freely. From there the pests spread through the  Horn of Africa and down the continents east coast. The FAO said the infestation in Kenya was the worst in 70 years.

Samburu men attempt to fend-off a swarm of desert locusts 

flying over a grazing land in Kenya. Photo: Reuters

Swarms in Pakistan have ravaged crops including wheat and cotton, forcing the country to declare a national emergency on January 31. The pests have crossed over to India and killed crops in the northwest states that border Pakistan.

The FAO has launched a US$76 million appeal to control the situation, but have so far only secured US$20 million, and it is now racing against time as officials warned the swarms are growing at an astonishing pace.

The current challenges were quickly upscaling “survey and control operations to treat all the infestations” and locating the swarms across “large remote areas some of which are insecure”, said Cressman.

This week the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, Yao Jing, was quoted by local Pakistan media as saying China would consider supplying pesticide and spraying equipment to the country to help it combat the locust attack.

TAO OF PHYSICS
Physics Proves Sometimes True Harmony Requires Diversity 

Fireflies in South-East Asia flash in unison. This sort
of synchronization has been thought to rely on similarity,
but diversity may actually make it easier to achieve.
Motter/Northwestern

Contrary to expectations and Star Wars propaganda, an army of clones might not be a particularly effective fighting force. To create something that works together most effectively, whether for war or peace, it is better to build it from elements that differ from each other than have them all be exactly the same. The proof is a physical one, but it could have applications from renewable energy to biology.

We naturally assume the more similar items are, the more likely they are to act in the same way. However, science is all about overthrowing assumptions. Four years ago, Dr Takashi Nishikawa and Professor Adilson Motter published a paper arguing that not only are differences between components of a system no barrier to producing matching behavior, they are sometimes essential.

This sounds like the sort of abstract mathematics that barely connects with reality, but in Nature Physics, Nishikawa, Motter, and Dr Ferenc Molnar have demonstrated what they call “scenarios in which interacting entities are required to be non-identical in order to exhibit identical behavior” in the real world.

We know from examples such as heart cells and pedestrians falling into step that, in the right circumstances, things with naturally different rhythms can synchronize. Even physicists expected similarities in the components would assist this process (for example, if the walkers naturally walked at the same pace).

Molnar built a set of electrically powered oscillators that could be coupled together and applied friction as a dampening force. In some experiments, all three oscillators were matched. In others, the friction applied to each varied. As Motter noted in a statement, identical objects will behave identically when separate, but this can go out the window once they start to interact, with feedback between them inducing changes. Hard as it is to visualize, the three found the output frequencies matched best when the oscillators experienced different, but not too different, dampening.

“This is remarkable mathematically, let alone physically. So, many colleagues thought that experimentally demonstrating this effect was impossible,” Nishikawa said.

As unrelated to the practical world as this may seem, the authors argue: “The results presented here will naturally extend to real systems with tunable node parameters, such as networks of logic gates, neuronal systems, coupled lasers, and networks of mechanical, electrical and chemical oscillators.”

The authors are already trying to use their work to improve stability in electricity grids dependent on wind and solar power. However, the implications extend far further. Fish and birds act in unison to evade predators, and male Asian fireflies are most attractive to mates when their flashing keeps time with each other. This finding raises the possibility that animals' synchronization may work best when diversity exists within those that need to align, a potentially important lesson if we seek to replicate or harness these systems.

https://archive.org/details/TheTaoOfPhysicsFritjofCapra_201802/mode/2up

OZZIE SCIENCE 

Soon You May Be Able To Fight Climate Change By Drinking Beer

Researchers may have found a form of climate action even those most apathetic about the planet's future can get behind. Airthena is a demonstration unit that sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its likely applications is making beer, and it could be the entry-point the technology needs to go on to much bigger things.

Airthena harnesses the power of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), lattices whose holes can be tuned to capture a specific gas even at low concentrations. A decade ago, scientists were excited about the potential to collect carbon dioxide released in electricity production so that it could be stored underground rather than adding to global warming. Today, with fossil fuels struggling to compete on price with the plunging costs of wind and solar, this is looking less economic, but Dr Aaron Thornton of Australia's CSIRO thinks the same technology could cool the world in other ways.

Besides making drinks fizz, carbon dioxide is used for industrial cleaning, and the first Airthena will keep hydroponic tomatoes fed. Some of this CO2 is produced by yeast in the process of beer production, while some is currently collected from power plant or ammonia factory waste streams. However, in Australia some is deliberately mined or from on-site methane burning, making its release into the atmosphere after the drinks' consumption bad for the planet.

Moreover, Thornton told IFLScience, even when carbon that would have been released anyway is captured, “there's a lot of energy used in transportation”, a particularly big problem in spread-out countries like Australia where large-scale capture only occurs at a few sites. These issues hit small CO2 users like microbreweries much more than big ones. Capturing two tonnes a year without needing a lot of space, Airthena could fit this market well.

"As it requires just air and electricity to work, Airthena offers a cost-effective, efficient, and environmentally-friendly option to recycle CO2 for use on-site, on-demand," Thornton said in a statement.

Although this is better for the environment than consuming drinks made with carbon dioxide from other sources, Thornton readily acknowledges that customers breathe the gas out, rather than sequestering it. Beer made this way doesn't directly help the environment compared to drinking tap water.

The indirect effects are something else, however. Initially, expensive new technologies need a niche to get started. Once they find one – like solar panels on satellites or mobile phones for early 90s stockbrokers – better production and economies of scale bring costs down until wider uses become viable.

If transport savings and marketing gold convince some brewers to install an Airthena, it could be the entry point the technology needs. Other CO2 users, such as pubs that use the gas to force beer from keg to tap, are often even more remote. One day, a more advanced Airthena could make large-scale removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide for underground storage viable.

Soon you'll be able to make it happen by buying the right brand of tomatoes, but beer will probably generate more enthusiasm.

Japanese Scientists Create A Child Robot That Can "Feel" Pain

Japanese roboticists have developed a suitably creepy child robot that can feel pain. This might seem like a cruel gift to give to a robot, but the researchers say it could help robots understand and empathize with their human companions. 

Scientists from Osaka University have developed a synthetic skin that contains sensors to subtly detect changes in pressure, whether it's a light touch or a hard punch. This artificial “pain nervous system” was then hooked up to a life-like android robot child that was able to react to the sensations using a variety of facial expressions.

Minoru Asada presented the research team’s work on February 15, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.

Named Affetto, the robot child was first revealed by Osaka University in 2011. At the time, it was just a realistic head capable of pulling a variety of expressions, such as smiling and frowning. This was made possible through a soft skin-like material covering the robot that moved using 116 different facial points. This latest project has given the boy robot a body, complete with artificial skin covered-skeleton covered in the new tactile sensor.

The aim is to make more realistic “social” robots that are able to have deeper interaction with humans. This might sound like a long-term pipedream, but it’s not as far out as it might seem. Japan has already rolled out robots in nursing homes, offices, and schools as a way to deal with its aging population and shrinking workforce. Some states in the US have also been experimenting with using real-life Robocops to patrol the streets – often with mixed results.

The theory goes that these robots will able to communicate with humans more authentically and effectively if they give the impression they are capable of feeling like us. However, speaking to Science News, Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, was quick to point out that this is “not the same thing” as a robot actually computing and experiencing some kind of internal experience.

So, if young Affetto is gazing at you with puppy dog eyes and a sad frown, try not to feel too bad. 

[H/T Science News]

AUSTRALIA

“Unprecedented” Number Of Rare Antarctic Blue Whales Sighted In South Georgia Waters



BLUE WHALES WERE HUNTED TO NEAR-EXTINCTION WHEN COMMERCIAL WHALING WAS AT ITS PEAK. KIRK HEWLETT/SHUTTERSTOCK

The island of South Georgia, packed with seals, albatrosses, and penguins jostling for space, is a unique wildlife haven in the South Atlantic, around 3,250 kilometers (2,000 miles) east of the southernmost tip of South America. But it has a dark past. This sub-Antarctic island was once a hub of whaling, seeing hundreds of thousands of the ocean giants being plucked from the waters during the 20th century. Thanks to the 1986 ban on commercial whaling, South Georgia’s whaling stations, like the famous Grytviken, lie abandoned. And the whales are bouncing back.

Commercial whaling killed an estimated 2.9 million whales around the world during the 20th century. The animals were processed for meat, blubber, and oil, which was used in everything from lighting to perfume to margarine. Many species, like the iconic blue whale, were decimated to near-extinction. But an international moratorium on commercial whaling signed in 1986 put a stop to the practice, allowing whales to recover their numbers. However, Japan, Norway, and Iceland still commercially hunt whales.

Now, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has shared some good news regarding the whales around South Georgia. Researchers have been surveying the animals, finding humpbacks to be common in these waters and blue whales to be surprisingly numerous. The team spotted a total of 790 humpback whales during their three-week survey. Combining this information with population counts over the past year or so, they estimate that around 20,000 humpbacks seasonally feed in the waters surrounding South Georgia. They believe the area to be a crucial feeding ground for the whales in the Southwest Atlantic, and note that the animals have almost fully recovered from whaling in this region.

What's left of Grytviken, the largest whaling station on South Georgia. 

Thomas Barrat/Shutterstock

In addition to this positive news, the team sighted 55 blue whales, the largest animals to grace our planet. Antarctic blue whales are rare, being critically endangered, and the researchers were surprised to see them in such numbers. In 2018, only one blue whale was sighted during the survey.

“After three years of surveys, we are thrilled to see so many whales visiting South Georgia to feed again,” said whale project leader Dr Jennifer Jackson, a whale ecologist with the BAS, in a statement. “This is a place where both whaling and sealing were carried out extensively. It is clear that protection from whaling has worked, with humpback whales now seen at densities similar to those a century earlier, when whaling first began at South Georgia.”

Southern right whales were also spotted, but not in as great a density as they were in 2018, suggesting they chose to feed in other areas this year. The right whales’ name goes back to whaling days, when they were thought of as the “right whale” to target – their bodies float and they’re often found swimming not too far from shore. During their survey, the BAS researchers successfully managed to tag two southern right whales, which will allow them to track their movements and learn more about this rare species. You can keep an eye on the pair’s whereabouts here.

As we continue to over-exploit Earth’s resources, whales’ recovery from the impacts of commercial whaling serves as an important reminder of what international collaboration can achieve when it comes to protecting our world’s unique wildlife.