Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to the librarians at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh and Kew for their indefatigable assistance. Fellowships from the British Academy and the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School helped fund research for this article. I thank Marc Auslander, Dominic Boyer, Roy Ellen, Elizabeth Ferry, Wendy Larson, Viranjini Munasinghe, P. Steven Sangren, Terrence Turner, and two anonymous CSSH readers for their critical comments on earlier drafts.

Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting in any subsequent edition.

In his own mission to versify the planet, or at least an exemplary portion of it, Captain Francis Kingdon-Ward (1885–1958) returned repeatedly, even obsessively, to certain places on the alpine plateaus of Northwest Yunnan and Southeast Tibet, where the vegetation, refracted through the Aleph of what I shall argue was a deliberate, laborious, and disciplined optical practice, became liquid, a sea:¹

How must we understand the human encounters with the earth through which imperial science explored, collected, and archived the world? Historians of natural history have focused on the instrumental symbiosis between science and empire: the history of botany in particular is written as the history of British imperial expansion. Botany emerged as a distinct discipline in the world-transforming voyages of James Cook and Joseph Banks, Cook's natural historian on the Endeavor who made the Royal Botanic Gardens into an imperial (rather than merely a royal) institution.³

As Hugh Raffles reminds us, such encounters were “tangles of science, space, and affect,” contingent intersections of localized modes of knowing, apprehending, and representing; immanent taxonomies of beings, races, regions, and cosmologies.⁶

In the present article, I examine the labors of one botanical explorer of the imperial periphery as labors of perception. Frank Kingdon-Ward and the half-dozen other British (and one American) botanists who explored the borderlands between Burma, China, and Tibet immediately before the Great War and in the interwar period were traversers and reformulators of early twentieth-century time-space.¹⁰

Kingdon-Ward and his colleagues traversed this uncertain terrain, making the most of those technologies with which, as scientific observers, they were trained to align their senses. They struggled to reformulate their own relations to the world of things, striving, on the one hand, to bring things home as frozen, distant, luminous images, and, on the other, to plumb the promises of optical technology to bridge distance, to put one in intimate contact with the world of things. This was an intensively textual enterprise. Geographical botany aimed to force the landscape to yield names of known and new flora and of vegetative formula. Each such name carried with it an imperative for further text—the precise, formal, verbose language that outlined a species' distinguishing characteristics: its habit, bark, shoots, buds, leaves, inflorescence, calyx, corolla, stamens, ovary, style, stigma, capsule, and seeds. Published Latinate descriptions, often running to five or six closely printed pages, established the authority of each new species name: each was preceded by many drafts in English, in field notes, letters, herbarium notes, and lab notes. And this textual order demanded coordination—in notes, tables, maps, and scientific articles—with the other languages that poured out of this landscape: a confusion of names of towns, mountains, routes, rivers, crossings, passes, plants, and peoples, in a multitude of tongues and scripts. But this was only the beginning. Most botanical explorers of West China and Tibet were prolific authors of books and articles on travel and gardening. Frank Kingdon-Ward published twenty-five books and more than six-hundred-and-fifty articles—but a fraction of his textual output, which included letters, diaries, field notes, sketches of maps, and embryonic drafts of books never to be published. The practices of walking and seeing through which this landscape was apprehended, and its flora gathered, named, archived, and mapped, were principles of production for text. Writing (in all its forms, including revising and reading) was a means for working through the perceptual dilemmas to which these practices responded. It was a means for disciplining perception to the demands of optical technology, of filling in the enormous voids in representation that these technologies left open, and of preserving the prestige of the photograph, especially, as a model for perception.

Such textual practices were embedded in the colonial encounter in concrete social relations. To render the landscape and its inhabitants into text was to regulate the senses; to regulate the senses was to channel perception through specific forms of social relation and to produce affective states appropriate to those relations; to produce affect in this way was to invest oneself in the production of, give oneself up to the grip of, or seek contingent escapes from national and imperial cosmologies. Here, I attempt to show how certain dialectically interrelated practices of perception emerged in this encounter from struggles to fashion particular modes of social relation. I do this with a partial route survey (rather than a comprehensive map) of the social geography of one botanical explorer.¹⁵

I sort out of Kingdon-Ward's extended encounter with the landscapes and inhabitants of Southwest China and Southeast Tibet two practices, which I call writing and revising. In writing, Kingdon-Ward struggled to create a mode of presence to the landscape that would, at the same time, help him disentangle himself morally and affectively from those among whom he traveled. In revising, he worked to refashion the landscape as a source of ecstatic affect, in order to create a regime of feeling that he could share with his popular audiences in Britain. Nearly all the botanists who intensively explored West China and Tibet in the early twentieth century used such practices of writing, revising, and reading the landscape to fashion Edens of the world of things, which they strove repeatedly to reach, the appeal of which brought them back repeatedly to those mountains. Their textual practices and the thousands of floral species that they sent to Britain as texts, images, samples, or cultivated plants worked to weave these Edens into Britons' imaginations of their own landscape and its relation to the far Imperial periphery. Ward's Eden—his eventual solution to the problems of perception and relation with which he was presented—was that frothing sea of flowers up on the Doshong La.

Walking (Empire and Oblivion)

I.

The fad of natural history had long shaped the aesthetic and scientific ambitions of those involved in British efforts to open up the Chinese Empire to economic exploitation.¹⁷

A new circulatory system for trade and natural history sprang into being: the network of British consulates and Chinese Maritime Customs stations. By 1880, the British Consular Service had opened consulates in more than twenty Chinese cities and employed more than two hundred officers; the Maritime Customs Service employed more than six hundred foreigners of whom nearly four hundred were British.²¹

Plants from China thus joined the enormous flow of new floral species from the expanding Imperial possessions that was challenging scientists at the great botanical centers at Kew, the British Museum, Edinburgh, and Glasgow to create new taxonomical categories and work through new problems of geographical distribution in relation to the new theories of descent. But Chinese plants were also big business. Endless in variety, infinite in novelty, evocative of every exotic territory of the empire and the globe beyond, such plants were exemplary forms of the commodity kitsch that transformed Victorian and Edwardian domestic spaces. The introduction of new flowers to seduce the tastes of gardeners and the scientific project of envisioning the ecology of the earth's flora were intimately interconnected, and they were both shaped by personal relations between a few heads of commercial enterprises, key scientists in imperial botanical institutions, and wealthy enthusiasts who signed on to syndicates.

In 1905, a wealthy cotton-broker and gardening enthusiast, A. K. Bulley, founded the seed and nursery firm Bees Ltd.²³

Ward's son Frank had been born into a comfortable rural home near the Thames, attended public school at St. Paul's in London, and entered Christ's College, Cambridge on a science scholarship. His father's death had left the family in awkward straits, and, without finishing at Cambridge, Frank had accepted an appointment as a Junior master at the Shanghai Public School in the European residential sector of that city.²⁶

II.

In 1911, in the company of his personal servant “Kin” and a transport caravan, Frank Ward walked and rode from Bhamo, in Burma, to the British customs station at Tengyue, Yunnan, then to Dali, north to the Yangtze river, and over the Yangtze-Mekong divide to the French mission at Cigu on the upper Mekong. There, he employed as a collector a Tibetan resident of the mission, whom he called “Ganton.” Ward, Kin, Ganton, and a rotating cast of muleteers and porters, spent the summer months collecting around Adunzi (Deqin) in the far north of Yunnan near the border with Tibet. It was the last year of the Qing; news of the revolution reached them on 11 October. Ward and Kin arrived in Burma again on the first day of 1912, without encountering any of the popular upheavals that were sweeping the more populous parts of Yunnan. Ward revised his diaries from this journey into The Land of the Blue Poppy, a popular success in Britain.

This book presented a vision of the cartographic body of the empire as a constitutive condition for perception. Sailing to Burma out of Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze, Ward found the empire laid out before him upon the sea: “I saw again the far-flung outposts of our eastern empire, strung like gems at either end of that magic tiara of the Indies, which guard the approaches to the South China Sea.” He viewed Hong Kong and Singapore from ports, but he discerned their shape and “charm” in the map, where they were the jewels on either end of the tiara.²⁸

A theodolite was a precision telescope mounted on a series of adjustable, scaled axes, used to measure horizontal and, sometimes, vertical angles. In the eyepiece were placed three lines formed of spiders' web, one horizontal and two crossing it, so as to include a small angle between them. Before using a theodolite, one made a painstaking series of adjustments to the telescope's line of sight (collimation), its angle of horizontal deviation (azimuth), and its angle of vertical deviation. Surveyors were advised to make a final check for accurate adjustment by setting up the instrument so that a conspicuous elevated point could be seen both directly through the telescope and reflected from a basin of water, oil, or quicksilver; the horizontal thread of the telescope should bisect the object both directly and by reflection, thus proving its horizontal axis perfectly accurate. To observe with a theodolite, a surveyor precisely bisected two or more objects with the horizontal and vertical threads of the telescope, and read from the scales the resulting angles or magnetic positions.³¹

“On the care a Surveyor takes of his Theodolite depends much of the accuracy of his work,” instructed the Survey Department's Manual of Surveying for India (1851). “If he neglect and be careless about the former, he will one day have to lament over the accumulated errors of the latter. . . . Never allow a Native Sub-Surveyor or lower subordinate of any sort to apply oil to any part of the instrument. . . . the strictest surveillance is necessary . . . to guard against the great negligence in this respect generally prevalent amongst Native Sur veyors.”³²

Like viewing an object along the horizontal thread of the theodolite, crossing the border of the empire provided evenly measured scales for perception. The passage from The Land of the Blue Poppy quoted above continues:

The border bisected time and focused sight in both directions. To the west, space and time stretched out towards Bhamo and Delhi, delimited precisely by the erect, taught, and regular markers of telegraph poles and mile posts. To the east, the “long months” were given over to a telescopic optic: they were drawn together and flattened into a “vista.” It could not be more clear that the frontier was a border between two very different sets of requirements for perception: on the side of the British Empire, the requirement, conditioned by the presence of the “paternal” imperial state, that perception move in accordance with foundational, disciplined, rhythms of time and space; on the side of the new, chaotic Chinese Republic, a requirement, conditioned by the perceived absence of that state, that perception find its way to views supported by other foundations altogether.

Ward had cartographic aspirations. In 1913, after narrowly missing him in Lijiang, his competitor George Forrest wrote, “[Ward] spent all his time here playing around with the theodolite, plane-table, compass, and other instruments . . . mapping country which was systematically surveyed by some of the best men on the Indian Staff before he was conceived.”³⁴

On his 1911 journey, Ward carried a map of Yunnan created in 1909 by Major H. R. Davies of the Light Infantry. Davies' surveys were sponsored by the Government of India and a British firm interested in building a railroad from the Burmese border to the Yangtze river; he had traveled with an escort of fifty men of the 19th Yorkshire Regiment.³⁶

“As for me,” he wrote, “I have an eye for plants, and take [no] more than a passing interest in men and things; and to my mind the high plateaux . . . now blazing with scarlet Rhododendrons and pink camellias, afforded such charming landscapes that I was almost oblivious of everything else.”³⁸

Stanley Cavell reminds us that to write is to establish a mode of presence to the world.³⁹

The labor of traveling, like the physical labor of writing, was an endlessly repetitive drudgery, in which “nothing very remarkable” occurs, and about which very little may be said. Ward's solution was to set the world itself in motion, to give that motion the specific characteristics of a walking or riding body, and then to let that motion transfer itself to the traveling body. Here, the flowers, the rapids, the rocks themselves all move; the entire world is a thickly layered alternation of sun and shade, vegetation and limestone, sound and silence, like the alternating footfalls layered one over the other, of the mule caravan. The world moving around the travelers—the beating branches, sweeping cascades of flowers, and falling scree—allows a reader to imagine with clarity the alternating footsteps of the travelers moving in and out of the gorges, up and down the zigzag paths. This transfer of movement from world to travelers, and the concurrent absorption of the travelers into the moving world, is given a material analog by the branches that beat the travelers as they ride, depositing on their clothing, one assumes, some of their substance: leaves, petals, the scent of roses.

In The Land of the Blue Poppy Ward searches for a mode of presence appropriate to a world from which the border's thick parentheses have bracketed out the certainties of imperial time and space. This book is full of events, observations, and speculations, to a far greater extent than most of his later writing. But each meeting with an official, attempt to capture a girl's beauty on film, or story of a child's death is sandwiched between passages that continue this project of writing an absorptive wandering. This structured alternation moves the narrative along on its extended loop from the border near Tengyue and back again. The time of empire, measured in the routes and stages of Major Davies map and the mileposts and telegraph poles on the border's Western side, is deliberately dispensed with, in an effort to measure the world in the rhythms of the walking body. But then, all the long days of wandering are “brought into focus” along the thread of the border, subjected to the double effect of telescopic vision: at once made absent and brought close. In later journeys, this tension between giving the world the human body as its measure, and obtaining the world with technologically enhanced vision would sharpen, digging its way deeper into Ward's efforts to establish a mode of presence to this landscape and to give it over to vision, reproduction, and possession, by an increasingly avid British public.

Writing (Steel-nib Pens and Silence)

I.

Ward first walked across the imperial border as a youth, and he grew to maturity figuring and refiguring his sense of self in relation to the diligently contrived strangeness and familiarity of the border's two sides. By 1924, thirteen years later, he had worked out ways to strip down this sense of presence to its fundamentals. This was not easy work. It required a rigorous system of exclusions that filtered out of the encounter between body and world the social conditions of perception: the labor of all those who accompanied and cared for him; the history of military incursions and political negotiations that established the border and made it possible for a British explorer to walk across it; the local institutions of the state that opened up the way before him; the social relations in which he was actually embedded on his expeditions, and all the exchanges, dialogues, claims, and recognitions these relations entailed.

Ward—now using his nom de plume, Kingdon-Ward—made another journey to Yunnan for Bees Ltd. in 1913. After he returned from China to Burma in 1914, he joined the Indian army and was posted, as a military censor, first to Victoria Point in Lower Burma, then to Mesopotamia: peaceful, often idle, assignments. He spent the war comparing the architecture around Basrah to that of the Mekong and Salween valleys in Yunnan (“an uncanny resemblance”) and dreaming of an expedition across Tibet following the route of the Pandit A. K. (Raul Bahadur Kishen Singh Milamwal), who had walked secretly from India to Lhasa and down the Yarlung Tsangpo for the India Survey in the 1880s.⁴²

Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor walked and rode ponies from Darjeeling through Sikkim, over the Himalaya, across a corner of the Tibetan Plateau to Tsetang, up the Tsangpo gorge to the high mountain passes of the Doshang La, Nam La, and Tang La. Transport of their stores and equipment was arranged by their chief of staff, employed in Darjeeling and fluent in Tibetan, whom they called Tom, never learning his real name. These included six Venesta cases, each weighing sixty pounds, of jam, butter, milk, Mexican chocolate, tea, cocoa, coffee, Quaker oats, soup, tinned fish, army rations, and bacon, as well as steel boxes containing camera, glass slide negatives, field glasses, telescope, prismatic compass, aneroid, thermometer, theodolite, and plane table, and a growing mountain of plant presses.

Tom was assisted by two more Tibetan-speaking men from Darjeeling, Dick the cook, and Sunny Jim, as well as a crowd of Tibetan porters, muleteers, and yak drivers, men and women, mostly nameless, a few of whom Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor re-christened: Curly, the Walrus, Shock-headed Peter, the Lay Reader, the Golliwog, Lydia, the Bakeress, Mary Bennet.⁴⁵

The two men each composed a diary of their expedition. Kingdon-Ward's covers two bound notebooks in a small, even hand; it is the earliest of his dairies to survive a warehouse fire during the bombing of London, in which all others from the three-and-a-half decades between his first trip in China in 1907 and a second trip to Tibet in 1934 were destroyed. He wrote for a half hour to an hour at the end of every day of traveling or wandering, lying in his camp bed or sitting out-of-doors.⁴⁷

At the end of each day, Kingdon-Ward wrote the walk in memory, submitting it to the slow, even discipline of his steel-nib pen. Walking as perceptual experience and writing as multiple, layered acts of memory in relation to a dense but distant intersection of social relations each lent the other its form. In his dairy writing, Kingdon-Ward sought to assert rigorous control over this process. He sought to reconstitute the walk as merely perceptual, and as subject to definite rules for perception. He sought to hammer it out into two elements: the world as a single, extended, continuous, and visible surface, representing nothing and concealing nothing; the observer as a solitary seeing body, unencumbered by sociality, admitting to no debts and no claims—a structure that echoed that of a steel nib scratching its way across a sheet of notebook paper.

II.

On 23 March, the expedition crossed the Nantham La, established as the border between the British protectorate of Sikkim and Tibet in negotiations between British and Chinese officials in 1890.⁵⁰

Here, as everywhere in his diaries, Kingdon-Ward's writing moves across the world's surface with the technique he had worked out on earlier expeditions: one step of gleaming, shimmering, moving vegetation, one of something else (a built structure, an event, a speculation), and repeat. This passage is unusual for the number of observations of persons and built structures that crop up in quick succession as the expedition moves through Yatung. The Indian military guard, the wall, the Chinese barracks, and the new mint stand like bedrock outcroppings in the plant-covered surface of the world, and the complexities of history, empire, power, and race sedimented into their stones threaten to tear this surface apart.

Yatung was a nodal site in the British effort to make Tibet into a stable buffer-state that would insulate the northern boundaries of India and the protectorate states of Sikkim and Bhutan from Russian and Chinese power.⁵³

Kingdon-Ward was well aware of the complexities of the British relationship with Tibet and China in evidence at Yatung. He had spent the previous few days in Sikkim in conversation with the new Political Officer there, his close friend since his time in the Indian Army, Major F. M. Bailey, who was preparing for his own important mission to Lhasa later that year. Yet he took great care in his writing to occlude every suggestion of the dense, troubled nature of this landscape, working these outcroppings into the surface by taking the next step—moving immediately on from the destroyed village to the Rosa Mayesii bushes on the slopes. In this fashion, he let the historical nature of the world make itself seen without allowing it to disturb the tightly mortared mosaic of the landscape. History remained on the surface; there was no depth and no sedimentation: unlike the other Western botanists who traversed this and nearby territory, he never noticed graves.

III.

With writing, Kingdon-Ward struggled to hold the walking observer free from social involvement with the inhabitants of this purely visible world. Eggs are a good example. At nearly every village, the expedition was greeted by a headman, who made Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor a present of dozens of eggs. Dick cooked eggs and chapatties with cocoa for breakfast, eggs and tsampa with buttered tea for supper. Kingdon-Ward noted these gifts briefly and moved rapidly on, as if by compulsion, to the next vegetal observation: “News of our coming had been received and they were ready for us; headman presented me with 4 dozen eggs. I noticed a third sp. of willow here.”⁵⁵

He had to “play the game” (as he put it) of exchange for his expedition to move. Yet he constructed the rules of this game as particular to this far side of the imperial border. His own social personhood, he wished to believe, was constituted by different rules, so these exchanges could slide off him without getting a grip or making a mark. At every major town, the local governing official, or Dzongpon, would provide lodging, arrange for transport across his territory, and call upon Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor to welcome them. Here is a description of such an event, typical for its cursory length, if not for its bad-tempered tone: “Phari is a filthy hole.⁵⁹

The scarves were given in the expectation that they or an equivalent would be returned as new scarves and gestures of friendship. Playing the game by his own rules, Kingdon-Ward did return them, ridding himself of both the scarves and the friendship they represented. This return was countered with the gift of the sword, which he parried, blunting it in his account.

Francis Kingdon-Ward, c.1911. Courtesy of the Royal Geographic Society.

Crates of seeds, packed and ready to ship, at the China Inland Mission station in Dali, Yunnan, 1914. Courtesy of Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

Theodolite, from Manual of Surveying for India.

“Native surveyor at work.” Photo by Major C.H.D. Ryder, 1904, during the British invasion of Tibet. Courtesy of the Royal Geographic Society.

Porter with a steel Vanesta case. Courtesy of the Royal Geographic Society.

“Shugden Gompa.” From Kingdon-Ward, A Plant Hunter in Tibet.

Exchanges of words were even more crucial for moving the expedition along. Once it passed the end of the well-traveled road from Yatung at Gyantse, the expedition relied entirely upon passing travelers, monks, and villagers for information about the route ahead. Between the lines of Kingdon-Ward's diaries, Tom and Sunny Jim are busily at work querying these passersby. Yet when Kingdon-Ward mentions these crucial exchanges, it is to denounce them as unreliable, contradictory, or useless: “Just below Tsetang remains of an iron chain bridge, broken. Ferry working here instead. . . . Enquiries about the road elicited contradictory stories. At first they said no road by the river to Trap, then conceded that there was, but not beyond. Then said there had been a river path only last year, but an earthquake had destroyed it and killed 100 men at Trap; we are going there anyhow to see.”⁶²

He always went to see, but the route had nevertheless to be prefigured in exchanges of words before it could take material form through walking and writing. On previous expeditions the maps of the India Survey often limited the need for such exchanges, but the maps of this region were incomplete and outdated. The voices of passersby exerted a claim upon him, for he had to listen in order to move, but it was a claim he repeatedly and strenuously denied.

It was a well-worn orientalist trope, of course, that the language of Britain's colonial subjects was both unreliable and excessive. Kingdon-Ward liked this trope, for it solved the problem of how to evade the claims of the voices of this landscape's inhabitants. In other texts, he deployed it in tight relation to racist caricature to present a vision of “Asia” as a world where babble, excessive, meaningless, and ineffective, flows over the landscape like water. Thus, at a market in Lijiang: “Across the lake was an open meadow surrounded by booths and here a motley crowd had assembled. There were sallow-cheeked Chinese traders, fair-skinned Moso in pleated skirts, tall Tibetans from Chung-tien [Zhongdian], lanthorn-jawed Lisu with hooked noses, and round faced Minchia come out of the west, arguing, expostulating, pleading, bargaining, as Asiatics do.”⁶³

It was a spectacle: picturesque, interesting, even restful, as he made clear a few pages later, when he let the river Mekong itself add its voice to this Asiatic cacophony “ . . . it is a fascinating pastime to sit and watch all these ever-changing tricks of the gamboling, shouting, Mekong waters, their voice rising in the summer, and dying away to a whisper in the winter as the red mud sinks out of sight, and the water reflects the blue of heaven.”⁶⁴

It is not just exchanges with the landscape's inhabitants that are rigorously controlled. Even dialog with his companion, Cawdor, is excluded: the 1924 diaries contain only a single snippet of such dialog, in Sikkim, a few days before the expedition reached the frontier. (“A specimen of our conversation. ‘What does Lepidote mean?’ ‘Covered with scales!’ ‘Oh! Like a fish!’”⁶⁵

These are traces of a disciplined series of exclusions of history, exchange, dialog, and voice, through which the world was constituted as an extended, un-layered, visible surface, over which this solitary and monadic observer made his way. They are unusual traces: the bulk of Kingdon-Ward's diaries follow his footsteps across this surface, practicing absorptive wandering on the far side of the imperial horizon as I have already described. It was not that perception came first and then writing: not that writing merely represented selected elements of the perceived world according to the rules of a style or genre. As Kingdon-Ward wrote each day's walk, he was teaching himself how to see the world—cultivating, as he would put it, his “eye for plants”—and as he walked, he was already writing, already finding, in each new step and each new plant, the words that would move his writing along. The instrument of this process was the steel-nib pen, the analog, in memory, of the walking body, the friction-laden contact between nib and paper concentrating perception down to a single register: the eyes carried across a resisting topography of plains and gorges. The pen was an instrument of perception, and as the field of perception to which it gave access was purely visual, it was an optical instrument.

Revising (Photography and the Sea)

I.

To distill pure perception out of its social field in one direction was to open up this solitary experience to a dense social terrain in another. While Kingdon-Ward kept his diaries to himself, he wrote them always with an eye to turning them into prose for others—letters home to his mother, sister, wife, and daughters; plant lists and botanical descriptions for his syndicate subscribers and scientific patrons; and, most prolifically, articles and books for a growing public readership. As much as possible, revision erased the body from the process of perception. The few references to bodily fatigue, illness, disability, and want that remain in his diaries disappear from the articles and books. Sounds and voices—the noxious crows and barking dogs, the birds that wake him up too early—disappear as well. At the same time, everything shines more brilliantly: in his books Kingdon-Ward turns the technique Elaine Scarry calls “radiant ignition” up to fullest luminescence, giving over the landscape more completely to the visual sense.⁶⁸

In the final week of June 1924, Kingdon-Ward and Cawdor, with their men, porters, and stores, had made their way from Gyantse, up the Tsangpo, over the Tang La, down the Rong Chu to its confluence with the Tsangpo, up the latter river again, and to Doshang La, a pass that led south toward Pemako. The expedition camped at the foot of some cliffs below the pass, and Tom and his men built a log bridge across the stream by the camp, cutting a path through the Rhododendron brush to give the two Brits access to a boggy valley that led up to the pass.⁶⁹

Revision expanded this tentative, peripatetic text, with all of its climbing and wading, and all its uncertainties about the names of places and flowers, into a full-voiced optical drama. In The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, written from this diary, four and one-half pages take the pair from avalanche to ridge, the high point being the sight of that blood-red creeping sanguineum.

A spot of color sighted at the end of a pointing finger, sighted again, twice, through a telescope; the rest of the passage describes a struggle to bridge the void between body and thing that optical technology brings into being—and then erases, for in the end, no dangerous crossing is needed, and the flower, speaking its own name, lies right at their feet.

Photography was exceptionally important to Kingdon-Ward. Each of his books and many of his articles contain a few photographs, and when still naive about the penurious world of publishing he dreamed of including a hundred photographs in a single book.⁷²

Only a few exposed plates could be carried at a time, in plate holders that protected them from light. For this reason, and because the equipment was so heavy and tricky to set up, nearly all photographs were taken on excursions from a base camp rather than in passage. Photography was fundamentally sedentary, performed in those periods when the party settled in for a stay, arranging their things about them, as in July 1934, when they arrived at Shugden Gompa: “I had my boxes brought in and arranged along the fore walls. My table and chair were set up by the window, with the camp bed alongside. Field-glasses, compass, thermos flask and camera were hung from pegs. Lastly my flower presses and stacks of drying paper were piled in the center of the room against a square wooden pillar, supporting the ceiling. The bare room now looked habitable, or at least inhabited.”⁷³

In each of the places he inhabited—tents, houses, temples, monasteries—Kingdon-Ward set up a dark room. There, glass plate negatives were dipped in a developing bath, dipped again in a fixing bath, immersed for an hour or two in water, clipped to strings hung across a room to be air dried, then filed away in envelopes bearing negative numbers, captions, and exposure data. Finishing—making prints and lantern slides—waited until the return to England, where the negatives were turned over to a professional photographer. The walls, tables, chairs, windows, and courtyards that made photography possible also accommodated two other activities: arranging and labeling seeds and specimens and revising diaries to write letters and begin books and articles. Glass plates labeled and stacked in their rectangular boxes; stacks of absorbent paper, interleaved with specimens and notes; and notebooks folded together with their corresponding sheaves of paper for drafting revisions: these were the material forms for the consolidation and reinterpretation of experience which the domestic life of inhabited rooms made possible.

Kingdon-Ward wrote drafts of many of his books and articles in such rooms. Sometimes, as with a book on plant hunting and another on rock gardening, he interleaved drafts with the pages of his daily dairies or wrote them on the backs of drafts of letters. More often, he worked from his bound diaries, copying and revising them on separate sheaves of paper, and sending them home directly from the field for publication. To compose his twenty-five popular books, he followed his diaries through their order of days, erasing details, unifying fragmented experiences, and adding long ecstatic passages. Absent from the diaries but central to each of the books were moments of sudden revelation where, after a long, difficult ordeal in which visual perception was limited or obscured, the veil was ripped away, and a view of a flower or a peak, frozen, stark, and luminous, was presented. In some cases these revelatory moments appeared at the end of a quest for a photograph. The vision was never the photograph itself, which was inevitably lost or disappointing. Instead, the ordeal in which sight was disciplined toward the end of taking a photograph made possible a form of vision that borrowed all its characteristics from a photograph—or rather from a lantern-slide, projected onto a large screen in a darkened room.

I'll give one example. After his 1924 expedition to Tibet, Kingdon-Ward made three expeditions to North Burma, Assam, and the Southern Shan States in Burma and Upper Laos. In 1933, he returned to Tibet, crossing the Himalaya in Assam and following a portion of the route mapped in 1882 by the Pandit A. K., from Rima to Shugden Gompa in Southern Kham.⁷⁴

But on the morrow, though the weather was fine, Kingdon-Ward seemed to forget about photography altogether, going on instead about the country lying beyond the pass. Brooks-Carrington's films of the expedition seem to be lost. Nevertheless, Kingdon-Ward found a way to accomplish the work of photography through revision. In retrospect—that is, in the settled rooms in which revision occurred—the five-day vigil prepared the senses to receive and project the world as a camera and lantern would. Vision was shut off, the body washed almost away. Darkened and empty, the senses screened out the world, all but the small window around Chömbö's tip, cropped off by a cloud, faint at first, then sharp as the focus was adjusted.

II.

Stanley Cavell writes of both romanticism and photography as responding to a condition that has been at the center of European thought since Kant, the bargain Kant struck with skepticism: that to assure ourselves that we can know the existence of the world we must give up any claim to know things in themselves—that which lies beyond appearances but does not itself appear.⁷⁶

Kingdon-Ward self-consciously made the lantern slide show the central condition of the botanical explorer's experience, the condition that made it possible to reproduce experience and bring it home. His manifesto about the role of botanical exploration in empire was a little book, probably co-written with his wife Florinda, called The Romance of Plant Hunting(1924), which drew on diaries from his 1922 expedition to North Burma, Yunnan, and Sichuan:

He reproduced this scene mechanically in his many books, never giving up, in reproduction, the strenuous alternation of desolation and ecstasy that accompanied the click of the shutter. The model of photography gave him a method to resolve the problem of translating subjective experience across the ocean to an audience in England. The solution was to present his audience with a world towards which he joined them on an equal footing, made vividly present in the absence of an intervening subject. His most avid and perspicacious reader in England was probably his sister Winifred. With a sure eye, Winifred collected the “photographic” moments of his prose in a manuscript biography of her brother—her effort to participate as fully as possible in his world. She knew exactly what she was about. Near the beginning of her manuscript she found in her own experience a formula with which to interpret and reiterate her brother's. In 1912, after his first expedition to China, Winifred attended her brother's first public lecture, with lantern slides: “For me this lecture was made especially memorable by a photograph of the 14,000 ft. Francis Garnier Peak at the head of Chung-tsung Pass. When it was thrown on the screen, there was a sudden intake of breath from the audience as the impact of the transcendent beauty of those everlasting snows struck. The picture seemed to project light from within with exemplary radiance, and Frank let it speak for itself without any commentary.”⁸²

Walking and writing were perceptual disciplines, aiming at a full alignment of the senses with the productive conditions of lens, glass negative, and slide. This discipline reached for the frozen image, bathed in light, calling for no commentary, engendering only its opposite: a sharp intake of breath. The lantern-slide shows in Kingdon-Ward's books worked toward a direct, optical relationship between Southwest China and England. Screening the world, they manifested a fixed distance between the perceiving body and the world and then overcame that distance by making it appear as a natural condition. To revise the perceptual labor of walking and writing into a prose slide show was to experiment with a fantasy in which imperial space found coherence and unity in this condition—an extended mimesis through which England and the colonized world reflected each other in images, no subject intervening.

The Romance of Plant Hunting is framed by a dream in which a photographic glimpse of a flower reproduces itself throughout England, transforming and healing the land. “Picture [the plant collector] in a remote valley. . . . He stands at the entrance to his tent peering through field glasses at the peak he proposes to climb in the morrow.” He goes to bed and dreams he is climbing the peak. “Jostling mountains, cape beyond cape—and his hurrying thoughts are pulled up with a jerk. What was the brilliance which his questing eye just glimpsed. By heaven, what a find! It is a flower after all, and the whole world stands still while he worships.” In his dream he is transported to the Chelsea flower show. He “rubbed his eyes. There it was! A great bank of it rose before him, and round him astonished crowds stood gazing at it. . . . Its delicate breath was in the breath of Sussex and Kent, its veined delightful leaves were shrouding rock gardens. . . . presently tired men would come home from overseas and having missed the loveliness of England would wander out of doors. . . . And, not knowing whence this flower had come, they would only say as they stood content before its beauty, “it's jolly good to be home.”

I scarcely need point out how these visions are screened like lantern slides. Their abruptness of appearance, leaving the viewer rubbing his eyes, their radiance, as though they are the source of their own light, and the affective shock they create match point-for-point the conditions Winifred observed as Francis Garnier Peak appeared on the screen in a darkened London room. A slide is “present to me while I am not present to it,” as Cavell puts it; that is to say, there is no bridge of voice, trade, labor, or history that reaches from the viewers into the world the slide gives them; there is only an “impenetrable gulf” made substantial and naturalized. The slide opens its radiant window by cropping out most of the world, and in this way implying an infinite extension of that window and the relation of subject to world it engenders.

III.

It was this extension that Kingdon-Ward was after when he returned repeatedly to the vision of the world as a sea of flowers formulated in 1924 up on the Doshang La. In his later writing, the huge plateau region between the Yangtze and the Tsangpo became the “Lapponicum sea” (Lapponicum is the name of a section of Rhododendron species). This was the “vortex” of a global “Rhododendron whirlpool,” the origin of the genus, where species diversity was the greatest and the range of each species the most limited. This “undulating moorland, with wide, shallow, boggy, iceworn valleys and rounded billowy hills” was a place where a certain kind of perceptual experience became possible, a mode of ecstatic involvement in a world of visual plentitude, of which the diversity of Rhododendron species was the sign.

In this sea of flowers, the hermetic principles of vision that Kingdon-Ward was struggling to practice reached their most perfect form, and the tension between the world as walked and the world as seen found momentary resolution. The ‘Lapponicum sea' opened a window on the world, automatically rejecting what was beyond and thus infinitely extending itself past the cropped edge—like a photograph of a moorland that crops out a town or camp. Yet it simultaneously presented the possibility of entering bodily into the lantern slide. Kingdon-Ward's books showed him plunging and wading into this sea, plowing through it knee-deep for hours, wandering ecstatically in it for days. It was the kind of walking he loved best to write about, in which the body and the world rubbed off on each other, pollen powdering his clothes, his passage leaving a shining path through the waves. The viewer's subjectivity was reintroduced into this vision, but it was a strictly limited form of subjectivity bent entirely toward reproducing ecstatic affect. None of this walking involved any of the tensions and compromises of getting from place to place—no caravans, companions, routes, nor supplies. Yet none of the labor of excluding voice, exchange, sociality, and history was evident either; the lantern slide of the sea had already automatically eliminated all of this. The sea was a fantasy of an uninhabited, modernist artwork, into which one entered by becoming absorbed into a pure and limitless visual plentitude.

It was not by accident that when the “tired men coming home from overseas” caught sight of Kingdon-Ward's dream flower it was in a rock garden. Rock gardens were the perfect showcases for the hardy alpines that he and other collectors in this region were sending home and the material reflection in England of the ‘Lapponicum sea.' He eventually produced a manual for rock gardeners of limited means. The rock garden, he insisted, was the ultimate accomplishment both of “man's aesthetic sense,” and of the British Empire. In rock gardens, England showed the world “how gardening might bring peace and contentment to a ravaged generation.”⁸⁴

IV.

I have called this vision of the ‘Lapponicum sea' “modernist.” This may seem an odd label for such a vigilantly romantic and pastoral project. Yet, as a perceptual practice, it had much in common with certain modernist projects in the visual arts. Rosalind Krauss argues that many modernist painters attempted to distill pure, formal principles of vision, isolated from all other bodily and social conditions of perception. In this sense, John Ruskin himself was a kind of prototypical modernist. Krauss follows the child John Ruskin (through the adult Ruskin's autobiography) as he learns a certain mode of perception, grounded, like Kingdon-Ward's, in a consoling grid of exclusions. She watches him travel through Europe “luxuriating in a rapt stare” through the train windows. He is monolingual, and all the voices he hears are babble; he takes, as he wrote, “inconceivable delight in not understanding a word anybody says!” Ruskin, writes Krauss, “spent his life transforming the whole of nature into a machine for producing images, establishing in this way an autonomous field of the visual, characterized by those two qualities upon which the optical sense opens uniquely: the infinitely multiple on the one hand and the simultaneously unified on the other.” She watches him lost in contemplation of the sea. He cannot take his eyes off of it: “And it functions for him in the same way as it does for Monet in Impressionism, Sunrise, or Conrad in Lord Jim. The sea is a special kind of medium for modernism because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social, its sense of self-enclosure, and, above all, its opening into a visual plentitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation.”⁸⁵

Kingdon-Ward's most remarkable book was a sober little manual called Modern Exploration(1945). It begins by describing the region of the ‘Lapponicum sea' as “a veritable treasure house of plants . . . the meeting place of several floras which have developed apart, the Sino-Himalayan, Indo-Malaysian, Eastern Asiatic, Northern or Palearctic, and Mediterranean.” In other words, it is a natural rock garden, the glittering contents of the world combined into a single container. Abruptly, this garden is immersed in an aquatic cosmology. The world, Kingdon-Ward explains, is three hollow spheres, the crust (or lithosphere), the ocean (or hydrosphere), and the atmosphere. “It is really rather surprising that there should be any lithosphere showing through the hydrosphere, or in other words that there should be any land surface at all. The sea is quite large enough and deep enough to drown all the continents two miles deep without leaving a trace. If that happened, the sea would be everywhere, the lithosphere nowhere, in contact with the atmosphere, and our three shells would be complete, in perfect contact, and concentric: air, sea, and rock.”

The spheres of the earth. From Kingdon-Ward, Modern Exploration.

He keeps returning to this vision. He imagines the world newly born, with no land, and no rivers pouring silt into sea: “Over the whole world, therefore, the sea would rest directly on the crust, the atmosphere directly on the sea.”⁸⁶

The sea is the original source for the form of knowledge that lies at the foundation of the empire: the passion for collecting objects and facts to fill the archive, and the compulsion to extend that knowledge to encompass the world. “A first visit to the seaside inevitably arouses the latent imp in us when we see shells scattered along the beach in their fanciful shapes and colours. Immediately we begin to collect, and we cannot but distinguish different species such as cockles, fans, top, and spirals . . . If there are so many beautiful and curious objects along the sea shore, how many more must there be out of sight beyond the furthest point to which the tide goes out and beyond that again in the vast expanses of the ocean painted blue in our atlases?” In this sense, the sea is the name for an ideology of perception that undergirded the entire imperial project of knowledge creation.

Yet Kingdon-Ward's vision of the sea stretched beyond this ideology toward a fantasy of coherence in which optical immediacy replaces knowledge. Imagined as infinite and serene, the sea was the source for the particular form of perception—that “blissful contemplation”—that he saw as indigenous to rock gardens. He pictured himself as a child, and found that he too could not take his eyes off the sea. “Many of us, when we were children, have sat on the seashore gazing out at the hard line where the sea and sky meet, and thought passionately of all of the wonderful sights hidden beneath the waves . . . What treasures seem to be for ever concealed! What sights!” For this child, the sea was already a rock garden: “Sea-green grottoes floored with tinted corals, gorges fringed with feathery forests of weed, delicate as lace, shells, larger, brighter, more cunningly twisted than any ever known, mermaids perhaps.”

Krauss says of the little Ruskin that the investment of his stare in pattern and detachment from purpose was an example of his “modernist vocation.” Eventually, for Kingdon-Ward too this stare comes full circle: “the motionless, silent, disembodied subject of the stare becomes its equally disincarnated object, becomes, that is, himself an image”: Kingdon-Ward (or Ruskin) staring at himself staring, in blissful contemplation, at the sea.⁸⁸

Conclusions

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southwest China and Tibet were last substantial “white spaces” on the maps of botanic, geographic, and ethnographic knowledge that layered the imperial archives. The mostly British botanical explorers who spent the decades immediately preceding and following the Great War walking through this area sought assiduously to fill in these spaces, even as the mythology of the archive was being undermined and perceptual foundations of the sciences this myth had relied upon destabilized. Hugh Raffles has shown how, in the context of nineteenth-century exploration of the Amazon, “Scientific knowledge turns out to be a negotiation of local knowledges of conjectural context.”⁸⁹

For Frank Kingdon-Ward, writing and revising and reading were technologies of perception, drawing on perceptual instruments such as theodolites, pens, and cameras to shape the body's interface with the world. To make words out of the body's movements over the landscape was to regulate the senses; to regulate the senses was to shape one's inner life and sense of self. The affects that emerged from these projects were neither pre-linguistic nor an effect of representation in language. They were complex products of the process of screening the world that I have been attempting to follow here, in which sensing and representing dialectically shaped each other. It is for this reason that affects emerged with the most clarity in practices such as walking, writing, and revising that straddled perception and language, converting one to the other and back again.

These practices staged the landscape as present in relation to a particular set of others, screening it through a particular set of social relations.⁹⁰

That writing and revising (as well as reading) were the practices to emerge from my own encounters with Kingdon-Ward is a contingent artifact of the archive: every step of Kingdon-Kingdon-Ward's particular project was intensively textual; its products and the social relations that produced and sustained it were worked out primarily through textual practices, rather than (as in many other cases) through maps, photographs, botanical specimens, or living plants. In the end, such practices can only be grasped dialectically: as partial practices, emerging only through fluid intersections with other practices, other modes of social relation, other regimes of affect, writing always involving revising and reading, and so on, both in their moment of production and in their emergence from the archive. To examine each as a moment in a dialectic is to understand the perceptual practices on which science was founded as enmeshed not merely within the immediate context of colonial relations but within a full range of social relations and regimes of affect, as well as the aesthetic endeavors, cosmological yearnings, and projects of self-fashioning to which they gave rise.