FLOWER POWER: Joseph Rock, dressed in Tibetan clothing, prepares to explore. HARVARD-YENCHING LIBRARY OF HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITYOn a botanical expedition to China’s Yunnan Province in 1925, explorer Joseph Rock and his entourage were unexpectedly ambushed by a group of bandits. The caravan, which included servants, porters, military guards, and research assistants, retreated to a nearby hill and waited, weapons ready. Another, less-well-armed caravan traveled the same path, and the bandits chose to prey on it instead. Rock watched through his field glasses, and witnessed native soldiers on horseback appearing out of nowhere to disperse the bandits.
Rock’s adventures in China’s far west weren’t always so precarious. The Austrian-American also enjoyed fine dinner service and hot baths in a collapsible tub, even in remote desert regions. According to a contemporaneous National Geographic article, he once said, “You’ve got to make people think you’re someone of importance if you want to live in these wilds.”
Rock’s photo of Meconopsis integrifolia taken in 1925 in Gansu Province, ChinaHARVARD-YENCHING LIBRARY OF HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
The US Department of Agriculture, Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and its Museum of Comparative Biology, and other institutions paid Rock’s way to Asia to collect plant and bird specimens and other treasures, and he spent three decades on the task. He first went to Assam in northeast India and the countries then known as Burma and Siam in 1920 to collect seeds of the chaulmoogra tree (Taraktogenos kurzii) and related species, which produced a substance used to treat leprosy. Rock was then sent to China, where he gathered tens of thousands of herbarium specimens.
Many of Rock’s herbarium sheets—pieces of plants ...
