MRI Public Forum | Representing the Tropical “Hortus”: Natural Knowledge in Michael Boym’s Flora Sinensis (1656)

event

MRI Public Forum | Representing the Tropical “Hortus”: Natural Knowledge in Michael Boym’s Flora Sinensis (1656)

17

Mar

The Macau Ricci Institute is hosting the MRI Public Forum: “ Representing the Tropical “Hortus”: Natural Knowledge in Michael Boym’s Flora Sinensis (1656)” on 17 March, from 18:30 – 20:00, at the Conference Room of USJ Ilha Verde Campus.

INTRODUCTION:

Representing the Tropical “Hortus”: Natural Knowledge in Michael Boym’s Flora Sinensis (1656)

The Polish Jesuit missionary Michael Boym (1612–1659) wrote some of the earliest European studies on China’s natural history. His seminal work, Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656), is not merely a botanical catalogue but a complex representation of China as a land of unparalleled fertility. While Boym’s text promotes Chinese cultivation techniques and exotic flora, its hand-coloured print images particularly emphasize plants from the southern, tropical regions of China.

This lecture argues that these tropical zones functioned in the European imagination as a kind of pseudo-greenhouse—a naturally abundant space where desirable fruits and spices flourished without need for intervention. Through an analysis of Flora Sinensis, I demonstrate how Boym’s project was shaped less by a strict scientific survey of native botany and more by a logic of availability and fascination. His work represents a moment where empirical observation merged with the economic and cultural desire for the exotic. Consequently, this study proposes a shift in how we read early modern botanical books: rather than categorizing them by their native origin, we should examine them as records of cross-cultural encounters, where visual representation was dictated by what was accessible, remarkable, and valuable to the observer. In Boym’s case, the “science” of flora is inseparable from the allure of the tropical.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr Eszter Csillag

Dr Eszter Csillag is a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Jao Tsung I Academy of Sinology, Hong Kong Baptist University. She holds a Ph.D. degree in art history of The University of Hong Kong. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on seventeenth-century Polish Jesuit Michael Boym’s contributions to knowledge transfer from China to Europe, based on his illustrations, which range from botanical to medical, and geographical to zoological.

She studied for her BA at the Sapienza University of Rome and her MA at Roma Tre University, where she specialized in seventeenth century Italian Baroque art. Her most recent publication is in Proceedings of the British Academy with the title “Transporting Images, Transplanted Fruits: The Pineapple, the Jesuits and the Afro-Asia Trade” in the book The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification: Re-presenting a Global Fruit (eds. Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu, Liverpool University Press, 2025).

She had been recipient of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship and, in 2022, was a Visiting Student at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

DETAILS:

Date: Tuesday, 17 March 2026
Time: 6.30 PM – 8.00 PM (GMT+8, Macau time)
Location: Conference Room, 2/F Residential Hall, USJ Ilha Verde Campus
Language: English

Chair: Fr. Jaroslaw Duraj S.J., Director of the Macau Ricci Insttute