Event Date
Speaker: Winnie Wong, UC Berkeley
In the mid-18th century, the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China became the sole port of trade through which Chinese tea passed to Europe. The quest for the tea plant — as a living or dried specimen, as a product of knowledge or of manufacture, as an illustration or painting — lay at the heart of European natural history projects in Guangzhou, and especially Carl Linnaeus’ project of plant substitution.
In this virtual presentation, Winnie Wong, associate professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, examines the questions that Chinese and European merchants and naturalists sought to answer. Hosted by Howard Chiang, associate professor of history at UC Davis.
Register here for this online talk.
The annual Liu Lecture honors the memory of Kwang-Ching Liu, a historian of 19th-century China who taught in the UC Davis Department of History from 1963 to 1993.
Sponsored by: Department of History and East Asian Studies Program