This book is a collection of exciting, if somewhat uneven, essays that examine about ten European and American scientific explorers and collectors in southwestern China in the early twentieth century. Taken together, the chapters help fill a lacuna in the history of knowledge production about southwestern China and its peoples, cultures, animals, and plants. The scientific explorers discussed here were among the most important modern researchers on China's borderlands during that time period. What they discovered, collected, and produced did much to shed light on the mosaic of natural, ethnic, and cultural worlds in the region. In China, however, the history and memory of their achievements were suppressed during the Communist era, while in Europe and the United States, their activities fell outside the scholarly interests of China specialists. Today, in China, the memory and reputation of these scientists, once condemned as “imperialists,” are being revived in a largely positive light. This book is therefore timely, not only because it brings back to life a group of historical actors who deserve more scholarly attention, but also because it provides a window onto the politics of memory in contemporary China.

The scientists and explorers discussed in the book include plant hunters George Forrest, Reginald Farrer, and E. H. Wilson; ethnographers Joseph Rock, Fritz and Hedwig Weiss, Paul Vial, and David Crockett Graham; and archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson. It is only for the sake of convenience that I introduce them in these terms, for most scientific collectors and explorers at the time worked in multiple fields of research. Rock started out as a botanist, but most of his work in China was ethnographic. Graham was a missionary who collected zoological specimens, folklore, and ethnographic materials before turning his attention to archaeology. Andersson is best remembered for his archaeological discoveries, but he was originally hired by the Chinese government as a geologist. Wilson, one of most celebrated botanical collectors during his time, dabbled in field photography, as did many others in this colorful group of characters.

The chapters are mainly biographical essays that follow the careers, travels, and research interests of these scientific explorers. The essays by Erik Mueggler, Jeff Kyong-McClain and Geng Jing, and Magnus Fiskesjö are among the most scholarly and substantial. They examine, respectively, the dynamics of vision (i.e., seeing and being seen) in scientific exploration and cultural encounter, Graham's archaeology in the context of twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, and the relationship between Andersson and the Chinese geologist Ding Wenjiang (the only Chinese scientist who receives more than glancing notice in the book). Rock's complex career is covered by a team of five co-authors from different disciplines. For some reason, Graham gets the special treatment of two essays, one on his archaeology (mentioned above) and the other on his involvement in religion and ethnography. Denise Glover's essay on Wilson discusses visual observations in botany and photography. The essay by filmmaker Tamara Wyss on Fritz and Hedwig Weiss is fascinating because of its personal touch (the subjects are the author's grandparents) and its attention to the sole woman explorer represented in this volume. Margaret Swain's chapter on Vial is notable in part because it is the only one focused on French missionary-researchers in southwestern China; considering the crucial importance of French missionary-explorers and naturalists in the region, this relative neglect is unfortunate.

Stevan Harrell's excellent introduction draws out significant common themes that are sometimes hidden in the essays themselves. He emphasizes the layered structure of imperialism—composed of the Euro-American “big imperialism” and the Chinese “little imperialism”—in the borderlands. He highlights such issues as imperial epistemologies (e.g., scientific observation and classification), power relations (e.g., imperialism and cultural encounter), and the role of natives in the process (e.g., the Chinese and local participants).

Overall, many of the essays could have benefited from more substantial integration of the broader historical context and of scholarship on the history of science and the history of modern China. By the late nineteenth century, Western scientific explorers had been roaming in the Qing Empire for many decades, and some also had ventured into the various borderlands of China. Without this historical background, it is hard to define the significance and distinctiveness of the scientific, epistemological, and cultural actions of these latter-day explorers, other than noting the fact that they did their work in a relatively unexplored region. I am surprised to see so little mention of the scholarship on nineteenth-century natural history, anthropology, and scientific exploration, or of the historical context of late Qing and Republican China. (The exceptions are Fiskesjö's and Kyong-McClain and Geng's essays, which prove that a focus on Euro-American exploration need not leave out the Chinese context.) The presence of Chinese and other native participants is frequently noted, yet not systematically discussed. That being said, this volume is a very valuable contribution that advances our understanding of an unfairly neglected topic in the study of China's borderlands.