Cambridge Scholar Finds New Angles on China's Zoos in San Diego Archives

Yutong Li, a third-year doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, spent four weeks at UC San Diego Library this summer to investigate the social history of zoological gardens in China during the 1950s and 1970s. Her visit was funded by the WongAvery Visiting Scholar Exchange Program, a joint initiative between Cambridge University Library and UC San Diego Library that facilitates international research into East Asian collections.

Li’s primary research focus is the Beijing Zoo and how animal exhibition functioned as a cultural practice in socialist China. She traveled to San Diego because UC San Diego’s East Asia Collection holds specific materials on modern and contemporary China that complement the premodern and dynastic holdings at Cambridge. The collection includes more than 200,000 print volumes, 1.2 million digital titles, 19,000 visual images, and 3,000 films.

A key discovery for Li came from the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars Friendship Delegations archive. This collection contains photographs, diaries, and publications from foreign visitors to China in the 1970s. Li noted that references to zoos and wildlife in these documents provided rare insight into how outside observers perceived Chinese animal management during that era. These materials are central to her analysis of cross-border perceptions of Chinese nature.

Li also uncovered unexpected sources in the library’s Red Guard publications. She found several articles discussing urban park management, including one that directly criticized the practices of the Guangzhou Zoo. This material revealed how the construction and operation of public parks became a subject of radical political discourse during the Cultural Revolution. Li identified these findings as a new direction for her work, particularly for potential future oral history research.

The digital resources at UC San Diego provided a practical advantage for the short-term visit. Li used subscriptions to the China Local Gazetteers Database and Digital Libraries’ China Pictorial to search and collect sources efficiently. She stated that these tools allowed her to work more effectively than manually flipping through physical pages, a necessity given the limited duration of her stay.

The exchange program also supports reciprocal visits. Earlier this year, UC San Diego scholar Ian Dubrowsky spent time at Cambridge University Library and Trinity Hall. Dubrowsky utilized Cambridge’s Chinese collections to study the global networks of information that influenced Chinese industry during the Mao era. His experience was documented in a report titled “From Cambridge to San Diego: Crossing Cold War Boundaries in the Chinese Collections.”

Li credited the Avery-Tsui Foundation for supporting the collaboration between the institutions and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She emphasized that the program allowed her to access resources that were otherwise unavailable to her as an early-career researcher. Li plans to share her findings with colleagues at Cambridge through departmental events and informal discussions.

Beyond the library, Li visited the San Diego Zoo to examine its archives for materials relevant to her research. She also explored the San Diego campus, where she noted the influence of modernist and brutalist architecture on her daily routine. She specifically mentioned the design of Geisel Library and the Applied Physics and Mathematics Building as notable features of her environment.