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The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Explorations of West China and Tibet . By Erik Mueggler . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2011. xiv, 361 pp. $31.95 (paper).
Book Reviews--Inner Asia
With its exceptionally rich flora, southwestern China was one of the major destinations of European and American plant hunters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Botanical gardens, nurseries, and wealthy enthusiasts sponsored expeditions to the region to collect specimens, seeds, and living plants of rhododendrons and other garden plants. In a foreign land, the botanical collectors never operated on their own; they relied heavily on the local people's guidance, cooperation, and tolerance. The locals had their own ideas and motivations in working with Western explorers. They made their decisions and actions based on their own cultural assumptions and traditions. The encounters took place, as they must, in a landscape--a topographical site layered with materiality, knowledge, history, and memory.
Although most of Mueggler's engrossing book is about botanists and botanical fieldtrips, it is not primarily a book on the history of science. It says little about botany or scientific fieldwork per se. Nor is what it has to say about cultural encounter very controversial, but rather it builds on ideas well accepted among scholars. These are not weaknesses of the book, however; on the contrary, scholars of many fields--anthropology, China studies, postcolonial studies, and the history of science--will take something away from this beautifully crafted book.
Mueggler is acutely aware of non-Western historical actors and has done a wonderful job in integrating them into...