Ancient Chinese Poems Reveal the 1,400-Year Disappearance of a Smiling River Spirit

In a remarkable fusion of art and science, researchers have used centuries-old Chinese poetry to track the heartbreaking decline of one of the world’s most charismatic and endangered river mammals—the Yangtze finless porpoise.

Publishing in Current Biology, a team led by Zhigang Mei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed 724 poems dating back as far as the year 618 to reconstruct the historical range of the Yangtze finless porpoise, a freshwater species once revered in Chinese folklore for its intelligence and seeming smile. Their findings are sobering: the porpoise’s habitat has shrunk by at least 65% over the past 1,400 years, with the steepest declines occurring in the last century.

“We’re connecting 2,000 years of Chinese culture with biodiversity,” said Mei, who grew up along the Yangtze River. For generations, local communities believed the porpoises were magical—omens of weather, luck, and prosperity.

The Yangtze River, the longest in Asia, has been immortalized in thousands of poems throughout Chinese history. From the Tang Dynasty through the Qing Dynasty, poets regularly mentioned the playful porpoises surfacing before storms and leaping after fish. These poems became a surprising but powerful dataset, offering a window into the animal’s past range across the river and its tributaries.

The research team sorted through poetic styles, biographical records, and geographic clues to separate imagination from observation. The Qing Dynasty yielded the most references, with 477 poems, followed by the Ming and Yuan dynasties. Only five mentions were found in the Tang Dynasty, reflecting both rarity and the emergence of detailed poetic observation over time.

The most striking finding: while the porpoise’s range in the Yangtze’s mainstem has decreased by 33% since the Tang Dynasty, its presence in connected tributaries and lakes has collapsed by 91%. These losses align with major human-driven changes to the river, particularly the construction of dams and other infrastructure projects during the 20th century.

Once part of a vibrant ecosystem, the Yangtze finless porpoise is now one of the last of its kind. The baiji dolphin and Chinese paddlefish—two other endemic species—have gone functionally extinct.

But this study offers more than a eulogy. It’s a call to action—and a testament to how culture and conservation can intersect.

“Art, like poetry, can really spark an emotional connection,” said Mei. “It reminds us that nature isn’t separate from us. It’s part of our shared history.”

Going forward, the team hopes to extract even more ecological insight from classical literature—not just about where species lived, but how they behaved, and what the rivers themselves once looked like.

“Reading these poems is like having a conversation with the past,” said Mei. “They help us understand how far we’ve come—and how far we’ve fallen.”