Fish Roaming in Paintings: Fish Diversity Depicted in Chinese Paintings from the Song to Qing Dynasties

Surviving ancient paintings themed on fish constitute a type of documentary source that has not yet been fully exploited in ichthyological research. In this study, 101 Chinese paintings dating back to the Song–Qing dynasties were examined. Fish depicted in these paintings were taxonomically identified, and an Index of Relative Commonness (IRC) was developed to quantify the commonness of each genus-level statistical unit across dynastic painting corpora. Across all artworks, 39 statistical units (including 38 genera and goldfish) belonging to 23 families and 9 orders were identified, with 268 cumulative occurrence counts recorded. At the ordinal, familial, and generic taxonomic ranks, Cypriniformes, Cyprinidae, and Siniperca represented the most frequently occurring statistical units, respectively. Based on quantitative IRC analysis, the detected statistical units were classified into four occurrence groups, including 2 common, 14 frequent, 15 occasional, and 8 rare units within paintings. At the dynastic level, 10 Song-dynasty paintings produced 49 valid fish occurrence counts covering 22 statistical units; 15 Yuan-dynasty paintings yielded 52 counts across 23 statistical units; 19 Ming-dynasty paintings generated 77 counts representing 27 statistical units; and 57 Qing-dynasty paintings returned 90 counts for 21 statistical units. Historical shifts in the stylistic traditions of Chinese fish paintings and the influences of these stylistic changes on the taxonomic composition and numerical distribution of depicted fish taxa were further investigated. The results of this study complement textual historical records and offer a new complementary resource for modern research on fish biogeography.