South Central China and Tibet: Hotspot of Diversity
For
over a century, Arboretum staff have explored and documented the natural
and cultural resources of Asia. In 1924, a three-year expedition departed
for one of the most unusual areas on earth—the first of many Arboretum
expeditions to a region that is floristically one of the richest in the
world. Seventy years later, other Arboretum expeditions returned to collect
and inventory the flora. Today the Hengduan Mountain region, comprising
western Sichuan and eastern Tibet (Xizang), is considered by international
conservation organizations to be a hotspot of biodiversity, a term used
to designate areas with a high number of endemic species (those found
only in a single region) that are under severe threat of destruction due
to human activities.
Members
of these expeditions returned to the Arboretum with seeds and live plants,
dried herbarium specimens, stuffed birds, and images not only of plants
but of people and landscapes as well.
These web pages provide access to the natural history and ethnographic
collections that resulted from these expeditions and are now held at Harvard
University Herbaria, Museums, Libraries, and Archives. The digital format
links these various repositories allowing students and scholars to move
through time and within collections, accessing material that not only
depicts the area's natural and ecological resources, but also documents
the social and cultural history of China and Tibet.
The Expeditions: Historical and Modern
1924-1927 Expedition
The
first director of the Arboretum, Charles S. Sargent, sent plant explorers
to Asia throughout his fifty-year tenure, and it was he who initiated
Joseph Rock's expedition in 1924. The Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology,
seeking to acquire bird specimens from this area, cooperated in the project.
Sargent directed Rock to collect and photograph plants and the landscape
along the Yellow River (Huang He) and in two mountain ranges, the Amne
Machin (Jishi Shan) and the Richthofen (Qilian Shan). Rock also collected
along the Yangtze River, at the Gansu-Sichuan border, in the Tebbu region
of southwestern Gansu, and around the Koko Nor (Qinghai Lake) in northeastern
Tibet. The three-year expedition resulted in more than 20,000 herbarium
specimens, over 1,000 bird specimens, several hundred packets of seeds,
653 photographs, and a correspondence between Rock and Sargent that exceeded
300 letters and telegrams.
1997, 1998, 2000 Expeditions
Summer 1997, 1998: Western Sichuan
Summer 2000: Southeastern Tibet
In
1997, under the auspices of the Biotic Surveys and Inventory Program of
the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Arnold Arboretum began a three-year
program that brought together Chinese and American botanists and mycologists
to inventory the plant and fungal diversity of the Hengduan Mountains.
These expeditions resulted in the addition of 32,623 specimens, of which
7,970 were unique, of vascular plants, bryophytes, and fungi to the collections
of the Harvard University Herbaria and of other herbaria worldwide.
Other Arboretum-Supported Exploration in this Area
Arboretum
botanists exploring this region have included Ernest H. Wilson (1907-1911)
and Shiu Ying Hu (1939-1940). Hu's visit was especially significant because
she was the first woman to enter what was at the time a bandit-infested
part of China. Camillo Schneider of Germany, stranded in the Yunnan portion
of the region upon the outbreak of World War I, collected specimens there
for the Arboretum from 1914 to 1918.
The Arboretum has also supported exploration by a number of Chinese botanists, yielding plant material from many species that were previously unknown here. Among the most important of the Chinese collectors were T. T. Yü, R. C. Ching, C. W. Wang, C. Wang, F. T. Wang, H. Wang, K. M. Feng, T. K. Wang, T. L. Hu, H. T. Tsai, C. Y. Chiao, S. C. Sun, and K. Chang. The Arboretum's Hengduan collections also include herbarium material collected by French missionaries and explorers from the large European herbaria in Edinburgh, London, Paris, Leiden, Stockholm, Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Vienna, and, more recently, Tokyo.