Ordering the Myriad Things

"English-language literature on the history of science is still stubbornly Euro-centric, and international scholarly discourse has engaged insufficiently with Chinese resources that document sophisticated premodern knowledge of the natural world. The case of botany is especially useful for investigating "traditional" systems of organization, classification, observation, and description and their transition to "modern" ones. China's vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants is best known but not limited to a rich corpus of Materia Medica. Written sources include horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose. Their authors were keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, their intent was to inquire into and to verify what had been written about plants in the referential classical texts rather than to deploy a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and explain new and unknown species or properties. Ordering the Myriad Things is the story of how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany over a period of about a hundred years between 1850 and 1950. A dramatic shift occurred during this period, from the "traditional" study and representation of plants as objects steeped in a rich cultural heritage to the "scientific" study of plants and organisms in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants, and investigations of their broader ecological status. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and unknown geographies, but fueled a new knowledge of China itself"--