‘THOROUGHLY CHINESE’: REVEALING THE PLANTS OF THE HONG MERCHANTS' GARDENS THROUGH JOHN BRADBY BLAKE'S PAINTINGS

The paintings in the John Bradby Blake collection should be admired for their sophisticated artistry and accurate depiction of botanical features, but they are also significant because they reveal the diversity of plants grown in the gardens of Chinese in Guangzhou (Canton). They therefore provide a precious insight into a relatively neglected topic in Chinese garden history, namely the cultivation of plants in gardens. This paper identifies one of the gardens from which the plants depicted by John Bradby Blake might have come, and looks at how those plants were used and appreciated in their Chinese context.     

INTRODUCTION

The Oak Spring Garden Library, a legacy of Rachel Lambert Mellon (1910–2014) and now part of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, contains the archive of John Bradby Blake (1745–1773), a young trader who worked for the British East India Company in the late 1760s and early 1770s in Canton (Guangzhou) and Macau. The archive provides an unusually detailed insight into Bradby Blake's life and botanical work, including his attempts to send living plants back to England. The archive also contains almost 200 pieces of exquisitely detailed early British‐Chinese hybrid botanical art, which Bradby Blake prepared with a Chinese artist, Mauk‐Sow‐U. With their emphasis on botanical detail and careful depiction of the detailed structure of flowers, these illustrations are as accurate as any produced at this relatively early date in the post‐Linnaean development of botanical science.     

THE ‘ENGLISH EXPERIENCE’ AMONG THE HUMBLEST CHINESE IN THE CANTON TRADE ERA (1700s‐1842)

This article puts into context the unusual experience of Whang at Tong, the Chinese boy who was brought by John Bradby Blake from Canton to England, against a wider background of 18th and 19th century Canton where a considerable number of Chinese made a living from foreign trade. Referencing various sources and circumstantial materials, I suggest that prior to his first departure for England, Whang at Tong had already been exposed to an English‐Chinese environment in which he was able to make a living by being an in‐between person, perhaps also picking up some English with a few English‐learning kits. He might have benefited from existing foreign knowledge circulated in Canton when he was young; he might also have contributed to the enhancement of this pool of knowledge after he returned home from England in the 1780s. The experiences of Whang at Tong thus open a window to reconsider how cultural encounters between East and West could have taken place, including especially among ordinary people on a daily basis.     

CHINESE VISITORS TO 18TH CENTURY BRITAIN AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO ITS CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE

This essay introduces three 18th century Chinese visitors to Britain, analysing the important role they played in cross‐cultural intellectual and artistic contact between the two countries. Loum Kiqua, a merchant, arrived in London in 1756. He gave the first known performance on a Chinese musical instrument in the West. Chitqua, a portrait modeller who arrived in 1769, exhibited at the newly‐established Royal Academy (becoming the first named Chinese artist to have a work shown in an overseas exhibit). Whang at Tong (Whang Atong, Huang Yadong), was only in his early 20s at the time of his arrival in England in August 1774, but he played a significant role in the transfer of botanical knowledge from China to the West through his connections with John Bradby Blake in Canton and his father John Blake in London.     

THE JOHN BRADBY BLAKE DRAWINGS IN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM,LONDON: JOSEPH BANKS PUTS THEM TO WORK

In the last quarter of the 18th century, Joseph Banks came into possession of a set of botanically accurate, western‐influenced, drawings of Chinese plants, executed in Canton by a Chinese artist and supervised by John Bradby Blake, an East India Company supercargo. Banks realized that these drawings, now in the Natural History Museum, London, would help his collectors in Canton accurately identify the Chinese species he sought as living plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew. Banks commissioned a collector's manual whose illustrations were based on the Blake drawings. In the early 19th century, William Kerr used this manual (now unfortunately lost) to continue the Blake practice – these drawings are at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. John Reeves, many of whose drawings are at the Royal Horticultural Society, used Kerr's commissions to produce the next generation of botanical art in Canton.     

THE PLANTS OF JOHN BRADBY BLAKE

Analysis of the John Bradby Blake plant illustrations in the library of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation identifies a total of 138 species belonging to over 100 genera and 62 families. Especially well‐represented are useful plants of all kinds, including a high proportion of plants that are used in Chinese traditional medicine.     

TWO BOTANISTS,A FINANCIAL CRISIS AND BRITAIN'S FIRST EMBASSY TO CHINA

This essay reveals a financial dimension to Captain John Blake and his son John Bradby Blake's involvement with China, namely, their participation in financing the Canton trade through predatory loans to Chinese Hong merchants. Widespread predatory lending in Canton led to a financial crisis during the late 1770s, which ruined several British and Chinese merchants. In an effort to recover the money they claimed was owed to them, many British traders, including John Blake, formed a lobby group in London and authorized Britain's first Ambassador to China to negotiate with the Emperor in Beijing on their behalf.     

THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY,JOHN BRADBY BLAKE AND THEIR INTERESTS IN SPICES,COTTON AND TEA

The British East India Company was founded to compete with the Dutch in the lucrative trade in spices, but the Company soon abandoned this attempt and concentrated instead on trading cotton goods from the Indian subcontinent, initially to Britain, but subsequently to China in part‐exchange for tea. Dutch control of spice prices and the drain on Company finances of paying the Chinese for ever‐increasing quantities of tea led to attempts to introduce some of the species concerned to British colonies with appropriate climates. As the Company's resident supercargo in Canton, John Bradby Blake collected and sent back to Britain various species for introduction to the Americas, and drew and painted these and many others. Few of these attempted introductions succeeded, but the surviving paintings constitute his lasting legacy.     

BOTANICAL COLLECTING IN 18TH‐CENTURY LONDON

The correspondence exchanged between Captain John Blake, John Bradby Blake, and their associates offers a valuable insight into the sociable world of Enlightenment botany. By considering these sources alongside the records of other contemporary scholars of botany, this paper examines the composition of the community of plant collectors and botanical scholars with whom father and son were interacting in the 1760s and 1770s. The documents also reveal the ways in which botanical knowledge circulated among the members of these communities. Amateur botany, it turns out, was deeply linked to gardening and to the emerging trade in horticultural plants, yet the contributions made by gardeners and nurserymen have been largely overlooked. In sum, the Blake collection at Oak Spring helps to answer larger questions about the nature of Enlightenment sociability, about diversity within botanical networks, and about the ways in which that social diversity affected botanical collecting.     

THE LIFE AND WORK OF JOHN BRADBY BLAKE

John Bradby Blake (1745–1773) first visited Canton as a supercargo for the British East India Company in 1767/68. He returned as a resident supercargo in July 1769. Between then and his untimely death in 1773, in collaboration with one or more Chinese artists, he produced over 150 paintings of Chinese plants, many of which are illustrated in exquisite botanical detail. These paintings and the associated archives in the Oak Spring Garden Library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) provide a detailed glimpse into an interesting life and a previously little known dimension of the social and scientific interactions between the British and Chinese in the late 18th century.     

JOHN BRADBY BLAKE,THE CHINESE TALLOW TREE AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF BOTANICAL EXPERIMENTATION

Recent studies of the spread of the invasive Chinese tallow tree, , Triadica sebifera (L.) Small, downplay the role of the dissemination of seeds in the 18th century compared with the impact of 20th century state‐sponsored agriculture. But the long‐term development of Chinese, then European and American botanical knowledge, even in cases like the tallow tree, can be shown to have enabled and legitimized ecological expansion and large scale environmental experimentation. John Bradby Blake, who obtained, experimented with, described and illustrated tallow tree seed in the 1770s, played an important role in the dissemination of tallow trees to the southeastern American colonies, the British Caribbean and northeast India.     

FOLLOWING THE THREAD TO OAK SPRING: THE AFTERLIFE OF JOHN BRADBY BLAKE'S CANTON DRAWINGS

For more than 175 years, the remarkable botanical drawings made in Canton by a Chinese artist working with the British East India Company supercargo John Bradby Blake, were handed down from generation to generation within the same family. They first appeared publicly in 1959 when the estate of Sir Frederick Cripps of Ampney Park, Gloucestershire, came up for auction. A Bristol art dealer bought the drawings, but on the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Mellon had other ideas for them. This article follows the trail from London, via Ampney Park and Bristol, to Oak Spring, Virginia.     

JOHN BRADBY BLAKE AND JAMES KERR: HYBRID BOTANICAL ART,CANTON AND BENGAL,c. 1770

The collection of botanical paintings commissioned by John Bradby Blake (1745–1773) from a Chinese artist in Canton c. 1770, is one of the star items in the outstanding collection of botanical books and paintings assembled by Rachel Lambert Mellon and now housed in the library of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. A remarkably similar collection, commissioned from several Indian artists by Dr. James Kerr (1737–1782) in Bengal and Bihar, is now scattered among the collections of the Natural History Museum London, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the New York Botanical Garden. Discussion of the Blake and Kerr collections is preceded by some introductory background to the creation of such art – its hybrid nature, its role in the visual documentation of useful plants in European, Asian and colonial contexts, and the botanical and artistic networks in which the two collections were created.     

Classification of Chinese herbs based on the cluster analysis of delayed luminescence

Traditional Chinese material medica are an important component of the Chinese pharmacopeia. According to the traditional Chinese medicinal concept, Chinese herbal medicines are classified into different categories based on their therapeutic effects, however, the bioactive principles cannot be solely explained by chemical analysis. The aim of this study is to classify different Chinese herbs based on their therapeutic effects by using delayed luminescence (DL). The DL of 56 Chinese herbs was measured using an ultra‐sensitive luminescence detection system. The different DL parameters were used to classify Chinese herbs according to a hierarchical cluster analysis. The samples were divided into two groups based on their DL kinetic parameters. Interestingly, the DL classification results were quite consistent with classification according to the Chinese medicinal concepts of ‘cold’ and ‘heat’ properties. In this paper, we show for the first time that by using DL technology, it is possible to classify Chinese herbs according to the Chinese medicinal concept and it may even be possible to predict their therapeutic properties. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Genes,genomes and identity. Projections on matter

This paper aims to show that references to genes and genomes are counterproductive in legal and political understandings of what it is to be human and a unique individual. To support this claim, I will give a brief overview of the many incompatible meanings the term ‘identity’ has gathered in reference to genes or genome in the contexts of biology and family ancestry, personal identity, species identity. One finds various and incompatible understandings of these expressions. While genetics is usually considered to deliver definitive knowledge about history and the future, genomics seems to work with more complicated relations between DNA, inheritance and phenotype. In genomics, ‘identity’ is no longer about identification and status markers but about individualization. Regulatory and legal documents project from traits to genomes, implying that the individuality is at least represented, if not created, in a unique genome. Boundaries between humans and other animals, between different ‘kinds’ of humans, and between all individual humans are re‐established via reference to the chemical matter of DNA. My analysis will show how this trend is a reactionary response to modern understandings of identities as social products and that it ignores new biomedical understandings of human bodies.     

Escape from the Red Queen: an overlooked scenario in coevolutionary studies

Almost all eukaryotic organisms undergo sexual recombination at some stage of their life history. However, strictly asexual organisms should have higher per capita rate of reproduction compared with those that have sex, so the latter must convey some advantage which overrides the reproductive benefit of asexuality. For example, sexual reproduction and recombination may play an important role in allowing organisms to evolutionarily ‘keep up’ with parasites. Host–parasite coevolution can operate via negative frequency‐dependent selection whereby parasite genotypes adapt to infect host genotypes as they become locally common. By producing more genetically diverse offspring with unique genotypes, sexual organisms have an advantage over asexual counterparts. Essentially, sexual hosts are more difficult for coevolving parasites to ‘track’ over time. This scenario has been named the “Red Queen hypothesis”. It refers to a passage in Lewis Carroll's ‘Through the Looking Glass’ in which the Red Queen tells Alice: ‘it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place’; this statement resembles the negative frequency‐dependent dynamics of host–parasite coevolution.     

The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or,rescuing kinship imaginaries from the ‘symbolic’

This article revisits well‐travelled ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese family dynamics to draw attention to desire as a product of family life and to how crucial elements of family organization and ideology can be understood, in turn, as effects of desire – that is, as instituted fantasies. Although my case in point is the Chinese family, the analysis addresses the category ‘family’ cross‐culturally. In any of its variations, the ‘family’ exists at two synergistically implicated levels: first, it comprises an important part of the reality into which individuals are socialized; second, it embodies in instituted form individuals' attempts to realize – to bring into being – social arrangements as they would like them to be. In the Chinese case, at least two ironies are embedded in this synergy. First, women are primary producers and reproducers of the family in the ‘real world’, despite the fact that patriliny as ‘instituted fantasy’ downplays or veils their agency. Second, the normative subordination of the son to a patriarchal father, expressed and mediated through institutions including ancestor worship and valorization of filial piety, veils a valorizing of the son as agent or protagonist of filial action. Although ultimately unrealizable, patrilineal and familial fantasies animate Chinese family life and are thus an important constituent of Chinese realities. To these ends the analysis re‐purposes ‘the symbolic’ and ‘imaginaries’, categories widely employed in contemporary gender studies and social theory, arguing that understanding kinship enjoins incorporating desire's role both in defining institutions and in motivating their creators.     

Paths of Relationship,Spirals of Exchange: Imag(in)ing North Pentecost Kinship

In Stone Men of Malekula: Vao (1942), a text that was published more than twenty‐five years after he carried out long‐term fieldwork in Vanuatu, John Layard introduced a new technique for rendering kinship data in diagrammatic form. Inspired in part by Gregory Bateson, his ‘circular technique’ was derived from diagrams drawn up according to the genealogical method, and was designed to overcome certain structural problems identified within these. One important implication of the ‘circular technique’ that is not made explicit in Layard's analysis is a resonance with many of the idioms and metaphors that ni‐Vanuatu evoke in talking about relationships of exchange and kinship. Where processes of birth, death, marriage and exchange are conceptualised in terms of a broad flow of departures and returns across discernible trajectories, images incorporating circles and spirals are utilised as key metaphors for understanding social relationships through space and time. Focusing on the Raga‐speaking district of North Pentecost, Vanuatu, this article explores such idioms while presenting a revision of Layard's circular technique.