Shinya Takeda (Forest Science)
In high school, whenever I grew tired of studying for university entrance exams, I invariably reached for an exploration travelogue. I experienced the grueling trek across Antarctica through Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, and, while reading Samitaro Uramatsu’s Tatta Hitori no Yama (A Mountain All Alone), I daydreamed about freely climbing mountains once I became a university student. This escape from reality taught me how to travel the world through the pages of a book.
After entering university, I began reading books to gather information about mountains, and soon I was hooked on the fascinating stories of plant hunters. One such inspiration was the collection of works by Frank Kingdon-Ward, who explored the remote regions of Northern Myanmar, Yunnan, and Assam. His book Burma’s Icy Mountains details his visits to the northernmost part of Myanmar. Since Ward passed away in 1958, I never had the chance to meet him. However, there were two instances when I felt the palpable trace of his existence.
The first instance occurred in 1984. I was assisting the former Nepalese Minister of Sports and his wife during their visit to Japan, and we attended a luncheon at the Kyoto Royal Hotel in Kawaramachi Sanjo. At the lunch, Professor Sasuke Nakao recounted a story that was later recorded in his book, The Cultural History of Flowers and Trees, as follows: “I knew Ward’s name and had admired him since I was a junior high school student. When the results of my own botanical collection in Nepal, conducted after the war as part of the Manaslu expedition, were published in English, Ward wrote the book review. I was very happy about this. However, in his review, he expressed doubt regarding my description of the yellow color of a new species of cherry blossom I had discovered in Nepal.” Professor Nakao looked truly delighted as he told this story of how, through the discovery of the yellow cherry blossom, he faced off with Ward, an explorer he admired so much.
The second instance was in March 2011, when I visited the Tocklai Experimental Station (Tea Research Association) in Assam, India. Despite my sudden arrival, the staff kindly showed me around. Towards the end of the tour, I unexpectedly found a specimen collected by Ward displayed on the wall of the tea variety exhibition room. Regarding the wild tea research based at the Tocklai Experimental Station, the chapter “In Search of Tea” in Ward’s Pilgrimage for Plants includes the following passage: “Camellia sinensis is a plant of the foothills, not of the plains. Is it not significant how its cultivation, even its very existence, seems to cling around places where the much-travelled Tai race is, or has been, or could have been? The long road of their migrations is still bordered with tea-bushes. Will anyone claim that this is a coincidence?” Reading this, I was struck by the geographic contiguity of Assam and Southeast Asia.
Ward writes in Pilgrimage for Plants that from a young age, he fueled his imagination by successively reading the classics of biological exploration and became captivated by plant hunting. The longing for places imagined through books becomes the driving force of the next generation’s investigation and research. Such mysterious power resides in travelogues of exploration, from Ward’s works to others considered classics.
(Illustration by Atelier Epocha)
This article is also available in Japanese. >>
「あこがれの北の果て」（竹田晋也）
