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China's vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties.
Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature – contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of "traditional" systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to "modern" ones.
Nicholas K. Menzies is Research Fellow in Chinese Botanical Science at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. He is the author of Our Forest, Your Ecosystem, Their Timber: Communities, Conservation, and the State in Community-Based Forest Management.
"There is no comparable study in English. Menzies makes a real contribution to the growing field of history of science in modern China."
– Fa-ti Fan, SUNY Binghamton
"An amazing and unique work. This story of botany is the story of the development of modern China writ large."
– Michael Dove, Yale University
"A pioneering work whose audience includes historians of science, technology, and medicine, and environmental historians and anthropologists."
– Minghui Hu, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Traditional Latin binomials of global applicability have been applied to plants over less than three centuries. Here Nick Menzies describes in detail their relationship to traditional Chinese names and their application to Chinese plants. This is a fascinating study from biological, linguistic, and philosophical points of view, and in relation to human views of the natural world."
– Peter H. Raven, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis
