| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Fa-ti Fan. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 238. $49.95.
The normalization of the history of China's encounter with overseas power during the Qing and Republican periods is steadily developing. Scholars in a range of fields have moved on from a reliance on narratives of imperialist assault and resistance to nuanced examinations of the dense pattern of cultural interactions that took place, and explorations of the transmission and the exchange of ideas and things among Chinese, Manchus, and their (uninvited) foreign guests. The context of such discussions remains bounded by imposed treaties (such as that of Nanking, 1842, for example), which were themselves occasioned more often than not by war or displays of military might, but no serious discussion is now tenable that fails to move beyond the gross ordinary facts of imperialism.	1
In this book, Fa-ti Fan brings to the literature on Sino-Western interaction in the late Qing a richly textured and lively examination of the lives and works of British naturalists, both amateur and professional. These men were sent to China or worked there as consuls or customs officials, and in their spare time they engaged in research and debate on the natural history of China. The men discussed in this book range from wealthy merchants such as Thomas Beale, who before his bankruptcy and suicide in 1841 created a famous garden and aviary in Macao (pp. 44–45), to William Kerr, dispatched by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to collect plants in Canton, whose nine years of activity there were undermined by the practical difficulties of shipping materials back (much died in transit) and by his own social isolation and fall into drunkenness. A notable omission is the Shanghai oligarch Sir Thomas Hanbury (1832–1907), briefly mentioned in the text, whose achievement is probably the longest lasting of all the British China-hand horticulturalists, but whose famous garden, La Mortola, was developed on the Italian Riviera. The limits to British interest in Chinese natural history—the ultimate blindness of some to its richness and potential—might also profitably be explored.	. . .

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