The seven articles in this edited volume address the complex meanings that visual representations of plants and animals gained in early modern China and Japan. They aim to understand animals and plants in the new contexts of empirical and epistemological concerns, political and social agendas, and cultural interests. In particular, they examine the ways in which scholars, professional painters, and publishers engendered the sociohistorical meanings of the images.

Fan Lin is an art historian at the Institute of Area Studies at Leiden University. Her research interests focus on mapmaking and urban culture in middle period China, especially during the Song period.

Doreen Mueller is assistant professor of Japanese art and material culture at Leiden University. Her research explores the intersections of visual culture, social and environmental history with a focus on representations of famine and natural disasters.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Singing Frogs: Approaches to Registering Animals in The Nihon Sankai Meisan zue – Doreen Mueller
Chapter 2: Tea Harvesting at Uji: Repackaging Uji as a Productive Place – Shiori Hiraki
Chapter 3: Disciplined Objects?: Wood panels from the Kew Collections – Maki Fukuoka
Chapter 4: The Return of the Elephants: A Social History of Elephant Watching in Early Modern China – Fan Lin
Chapter 5: A Pair of Camels in Edo Japan: Representation and Discourse – Hiroyuki Suzuki
Chapter 6: Pictures of Sea Fish (Haiyu tu) and Knowledge of Nature in Eighteenth-Century China – Ching-Ling Wang
Chapter 7: Treatise (pu) versus Illustration (tu) – Absence and Presence of Illustrations in Pulu Writings on Chinese Nature Studies – Martina Siebert