Abstract

The Polish Jesuit missionary Michael Boym (1612–1659) wrote some of the earliest European studies on China’s natural history. His seminal work, Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656), is not merely a botanical catalogue but a complex representation of China as a land of unparalleled fertility. While Boym’s text promotes Chinese cultivation techniques and exotic flora, its hand coloured print images particularly emphasize plants from the southern, tropical regions of China.

This lecture argues that these tropical zones functioned in the European imagination as a kind of pseudo-greenhouse – a naturally abundant space where desirable fruits and spices flourished without need for intervention. Through an analysis of Flora Sinensis, I demonstrate how Boym’s project was shaped less by a strict scientific survey of native botany and more by a logic of availability and fascination. His work represents a moment where empirical observation merged with the economic and cultural desire for the exotic.

Consequently, this study proposes a shift in how we read early modern botanical books: rather than categorizing them by their native origin, we should examine them as records of cross-cultural encounters, where visual representation was dictated by what was accessible, remarkable, and valuable to the observer. In Boym’s case, the ‘science’ of flora is inseparable from the allure of the tropical.