The publication of this new volume in the Science and Civilisation in China series reminds us once again of the ambitious intellectual project launched by Joseph Needham some sixty years ago and reflects, at the same time, the evolution of our knowledge about this vast field compared to the beginning of the project. Loyal to the initial framework of the project but critical in his way of investigation, Georges Métailié, the Emeritus Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and author of several botanical dictionaries, offered to his readers not a canonical history of Chinese botany as a clearly defined scientific field from ancient times to the present day but an anthropological approach because, despite the existence of a huge number of extensive works pertaining to materia medica and anthologies of texts focusing on flowers or fruits, none of them was produced with the concerns of the science of “botany” in the modern sense of the term. In other words, the object of the book is not to show a scientific study of botany in ancient China as a structured and systematic knowledge of all kinds of plants, but the relations Chinese people have maintained with the plant world and the way in which they “describe, name, classify and interpret plants” (p. 3).

The book was planned to be the second part of a volume written by Needham and some of his collaborators and published in the same series in 1986 (Volume VI: 1). For this reason, the chapters start at the letter f and end at the letter k, which serves as the book's conclusion. However, Métailié’s volume could be read on its own without necessarily referring to the first part because each theme is treated independently and covered thoroughly. The book is structured into three main parts, each of which contains one or more chapters, sections, and subsections. The first part (chapters f, g, and h) is an account of various aspects of Chinese knowledge and perception of plant life, which is based on classic texts for Chinese literati and specialized literature written by traditional medical practitioners. For readers who want to conduct further research using these sources, the first chapter (chapter f) provides a complete view of them and analyses the influence of the texts on one another in terms of various systems of classifications.

The second part (chapter i) tackles the horticultural techniques practiced in ancient China and is certainly a technical history par excellence. This part conforms exactly to the initial idea of the series, which aimed to cover not only sciences but also technologies. That said, the author did not limit this chapter to the study of grafting, sowing, transplanting, pruning, and other such techniques practiced in ancient China – though some detailed passages could be of interest to gardeners even today. Instead, he questioned, through all of these technical details, the cultural and aesthetic implications of cultivating one's garden and creating “landscapes in pots” (penjing 盆景), i.e., people's relations with plants, and especially the relations that literati maintained with plants (pp. 450–82). While the richness of the compiled materials and imagery in the text engages the reader, one can only regret that the textual coverage leaves readers with an appetite for further discussion. For instance, the image (p. 463) chosen from The Garden for Solitary Enjoyment (Duleyuan tu 獨樂園圖, c. 1515–1552), a handscroll painting by the Ming dynasty painter Qiu Ying 仇英 illustrating the text by the same name (Duleyuan ji 獨樂園記), written by Sima Guang 司馬光, is so eye-catching that it invites further questioning on its own.

The third part (chapter j) of the book focuses on the exchange of botanical knowledge between China and selected areas of the world. In this part, the author mobilizes his erudition not only in Chinese and European literature but also Japanese writings on the topic, as China and Japan had a deep and intriguing relationship in this field (pp. 545–67). For the subsection devoted to the discovery of Chinese flora by Westerners, the Russian sinologist Emil Bretschneider (1833–1901), whom Métailié often cites, had certainly already provided a fundamental study with his History of European Botanical Discoveries in China, published in 1898. Yet with all the illustrations and unpublished documents selected by Métailié from diverse European writings and presented in this book (from Garcia de Orta's galangal and China root to Father d'Incarville's list of Chinese plant names), this part brings new insights for future research on intellectual and cultural exchanges, especially on visual and textual communication and transmission of knowledge. This is what Bretschneider's book did not offer. The judicious selection of these illustrations reveals Métailié’s deep familiarity with the sources he uses and suggests that second-hand studies never satisfied him. The only shortcoming in this part is that its scope is mainly limited to history through the end of the eighteenth century, while it was in the nineteenth century that the exchange between China and other parts of the world intensified. Due to this limitation, some significant topics pertaining to botanical exchanges were not included in this part. For example, the “landscapes in pots,” commonly known today as bonsai trees, which drew the attention of many Europeans who spent time in China from the seventeenth century onward, remained a constantly intriguing topic in the correspondences between them and their friends, advisers, or commissioners in Europe. Most of these individuals ignored the Chinese and called them simply “dwarf trees” then, neglecting the traditional significance of the landscape as a whole. The question about how to properly cultivate and limit the growth of a dwarf tree occupied many pages in those correspondences. How the dwarf tree became the popular bonsai that many Westerners have had in their homes since World War II definitely deserves further investigation. Another example is related to Chinese tea. Though Métailié, citing Berthold Laufer's work, already mentions the use of tea in China witnessed by foreign travelers in the ninth century (p. 567) at the beginning of this section, he does not elaborate on the influence of Chinese tea on the rest of the world, especially on British tea culture, which was so profound that the economic conflict generated by this plant – the first Opium War could in fact be more accurately described as a “tea war” due to its origins – totally changed the relationship between China and the Western countries.

The advantage of the ethnobotanical approach adopted in the book is that it encourages readers to understand traditional Chinese botany on its own rather than consider it as “a stage in a process that led to modern botany.”Footnote ¹ This in fact challenges Needham's axiom of a “fundamental continuity and universality of all science,” which led him to study ancient Chinese botanical knowledge by comparing it with European botany (p. 7). Métailié also questions what Needham called “the fusion point,” in which “science in its Western form and in its Chinese form” would somehow fuse together to “melt into the universality of modern science” (p. 12). He argues and presents evidence that there was, in fact, no fusion point, and even no “fundamental continuity” (pp. 658, 669), but parallel development until the 1920s, when the first generation of Chinese botanists trained abroad started conducting field and laboratory research focusing on plants in China (p. 13). These botanists were, however, trained entirely in Western botanical science and had little connection with traditional Chinese plant knowledge. The only continuity between traditional and modern Chinese botany remains probably in the use of some Chinese terms and nomenclature, but even in this regard, foreign influences, such as Western missionaries’ translations and the use of Japanese words derived from classical Chinese, are obvious.Footnote ²

As a direct continuation of Needham's volume on botany published in 1986, it was not until nearly three decades later that Métailié’s volume was brought to publication. It is evident in the text that the time span between the two publications, as well as the generation gap between the two scholars’ scientific training and worldviews, presented an immense challenge in writing what was intended to be the second half of the same text. Our understandings of science have changed significantly as well. As an independent work, this book is an impressive contribution to the history of knowledge about Chinese plants, and the standard binomial nomenclature provided systematically for Chinese plants is also useful for taxonomists that do not necessarily know the Chinese language. Although some sections are heavier on technical details of the botanical sciences than others, readers will be able to find many enjoyable passages and interesting materials derived from an abundance of literature to satisfy their curiosity.