Lai Yan Wong (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
lai_yan.wong@kcl.ac.uk

Imagining Nature: Cross-Cultural Representation in the Literary and Visual Cultures of Sino-British Botanical Exchange, 1730–1830

My project examines the textual and visual representations of Chinese plants in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, a period marked by Britain’s growing capacity and desire to collect foreign botany for medicinal, economic and ornamental purposes. Before the First Opium War (1839), trade restrictions meant that Britain often encountered, and imagined, China and its botanical goods through indirect sources. I investigate the role of these media, and their makers, in shaping botanical (mis)understandings through three case studies: rhubarb, dwarf trees (penjing) and chrysanthemums. Drawing on both Western and Chinese materials, my research brings together literature, art history and plant humanities to show how plant representations actively contributed to British ideas about China, particularly in relation to aesthetics, value and cultural meaning.

Principal supervisor: Dr Rowan Boyson