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 the principal narratives. Yet still the main protagonists are two Western scientific explorers and botanists—George Forrest (1873–1932) and Joseph Rock (1884–1962). Forrest, a Scottish plant hunter, entered the region seven times, from 1904 to his death there in 1932, to collect for the Edinburg Botanical Garden and other institutions. He is best known for introducing stunning numbers of rhododendrons to the Western world. Rock grew up in Austria, immigrated to the United States, and settled in Hawaii in his teens. He taught himself botany and published extensively on the Hawaiian flora. Then the restless bug bit and he went on a botanical expedition to China in 1922. He spent most of the next three decades in China until he was forced to leave in 1949 because of the communist revolution. When he resided in China, he became fascinated with Naxi culture; he collected ethnographical artifacts, studied the language, and translated many texts of their main religion, dongba.
The Paper Road is divided into two parts, and the chapters are organized thematically in loose chronological order. The first part centers on Forrest and the second on Rock, along with the peoples, cultures, and places they encountered. There was significant continuity of their explorations in China, because the two botanists often used the same area in Yunnan as their bases. They even hired two generations of the Naxi locals as their botanical collectors. By reason and design, the main themes of the chapters in the two parts are broadly parallel. They discuss, among other things, photography and visual encounters between the botanists and the peoples they encountered; the bodily and sensory experiences; the search for an almost mythical place (Forrest: the epicenter of the genus Rhododendron; Rock: the mountain Amnye Machen); the history and culture, particularly the dongba religion and writings, of the region; and, to some extent, the Naxi botanical collectors.
Mueggler proposes a set of interpretive concepts to bring all these threads together. The central one is “the paper road,” which combines the notions and meanings of text, landscape, experience, and archive. Botanical collecting, cultural encounters, geographical explorations, historical records, religious ideas and rituals, or even the simple act of keeping a journal or writing a letter were inscriptions that ended up producing piles of paper—documents, maps, pictures, and manuscripts—which in turn helped shape the material world into landscapes: “At the heart of this book is a metaphor . . . the earth as a book . . .” (p. 16). This is an elegant formulation, yet I am somewhat hesitant to fully embrace it. It just sounds a little too, well, bookish. Paper, archives, and books are more like professors' stock-in-trade than that of plant hunters, performers of religious ceremonies, or people going on adventures. To be sure, a lot of their thoughts, actions, and environments can be understood in textual terms, and it is indeed the case that things on paper can be “just as real” in the sense that they too exert agency (p. 3). It is also true, moreover, that the metaphor can be stretched to resemble old traditions, such as dongba scripts, the Book of Nature, and, one might add, the Hetu and Luoshu. I wonder, however, if this perspective is not doing too much violence to the historical actors' own views and understandings of what they were doing. The metaphor may be a powerful heuristic device—I think it is—but we probably should not allow it to flatten history, materiality, and action too much.
What makes Mueggler's book so remarkable is not only what is said but also how it is said. Mueggler is painstakingly attentive to the personal details of the two botanists, including their thoughts and emotions, and he successfully creates a mood, sensibility, and intimacy that are unusual for an academic book. The reader is drawn into their world, especially because they come through as charismatic characters with complex psychology and adventurous spirits.
Mueggler consistently maintains a critical distance, but the very success of his evocative style and approach poses a risk: sometimes these colorful personalities threaten to turn an intimate epic into a romantic ballad. Very occasionally, the author seems to be skating on thin ice, with unfailing dexterity nevertheless. Some readers might find certain parts of the book, such as the pages on Kant and the sublime, a little forced. Others might find them illuminating. Is there too much speculation? Does the author write too much in metaphors? Can insights, nimble comments, and phenomenological musings fill in for empirical evidence and sustained analysis? There are no simple or uniform answers to these questions. Different readers will respond differently. Regardless, there is no question that this is a superb book. It is bold, innovative, stylish, and captivating. I will use it in many of my courses.
