Flora Sinensis Facsimile Edition

Vienna, 1656. A Jesuit newly back from the collapsing Ming empire laid a folio of Chinese plants before a fifteen-year-old Habsburg. That book was Flora Sinensis, written by Michał Boym and printed by the Jesuits of Vienna; the copy preserved in the Biblioteka Kórnicka in Kórnik carries the shelfmark 412.

Michał Boym Between Macau and the Last Ming Court

Born around 1612 into a family of Hungarian descent settled in Poland, Boym applied ten times before his superiors released him for the Asian mission. He sailed in 1643, wintered in Mozambique, stopped briefly at Goa, and reached Macau. Posted to Hainan in 1647 and later driven to Tonkin by the civil war, he assembled there the materials that would become Flora Sinensis. He went on to serve the Yongli emperor as envoy to Rome, and died in 1659 on the road from Hanoi to Nanning.

Twenty-Two Plants, Each With Its Own Plate

The core of the volume treats twenty-two plants, each in a separate chapter, most of them a single page of description facing a full-page illustration. Boym records fertilization, branching habit, fruiting, and above all medicinal use. A shorter section on Chinese animals follows, less orderly than the botany and frankly marvelous in places: a phoenix, a hippopotamus whose teeth are said to heal wounds, a stone crab that resists identification.

Botany as Diplomacy at the Habsburg Court

The treatise was dedicated to Archduke Leopold Ignaz, crowned king of Hungary in 1655, and shaped throughout as a coronation gift. His name stands on the title page, two introductory works address him, and China's personified Flora speaks to him directly. Among them runs a panegyric of one hundred verses, each a chronogram resolving to 1655 — an appeal, in Baroque dress, for Habsburg support of the Ming cause.

A Book That Outlived Its Errand

The embassy failed. The plants did not: breadfruit, papaya, and dwarf banana entered European literature here, and Boym's copy of the Nestorian inscription at Xi'an would occupy sinologists long after the dynasty he served had fallen.