In 2017 the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute (TFRI) published two books, Père Urbain Jean Faurie and Bunzo Hayata, to commemorate these two pioneers of botanical discovery and taxonomy in Taiwan. Let’s tell some of the story of plant collecting and naming here in Taiwan.

Taiwan, Japan, and France

“In the era of Japanese rule there were two bronze statues in the Taipei Botanical Garden, one commemorating Faurie, put up in 1917, and one for Hayata, erected in 1936. But they disappeared, leaving only photographs,” says Lee Jui-tsung, an expert on the Taipei Botanical Garden.

Urbain Jean Faurie (1847–1915) was a Catholic priest from the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Missions Étrangères de Paris, MEP). In 1873 he arrived in Japan to proselytize, and there he collected plants which he sold to European herbariums to raise money for missionary work. Faurie came to Taiwan twice, in 1903 and 1913, to collect specimens, and died in 1915 while still in Taiwan. Bunzo Hayata (1874–1934), who specialized in the study of Taiwanese plants, raised funds to put up a com­memora­tive bust of Faurie.

Hayata was a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and he named and published more than 1600 species of Taiwanese flora. He spent ten years producing the ten-­volume work Icones Plantarum Formosanarum (Icones of the Plants of Formosa). After his death, people in Taiwan raised money to erect a memorial to him.

The two memorials were lost after World War II. In 2012 Yang Zhifang, a Taiwanese businesswoman living in Japan, happened to meet Kaoru Saya, granddaughter of the Japanese sculptor Osao Watanabe, in New York, and they got to talking. Saya mentioned that in her home there was a plaster mold of a sculpture her grandfather had made that looked like a Westerner’s face, and she knew that the finished work had been sent to Taiwan. Yang followed up this clue with government agencies in Taiwan and eventually ascertained that the person depicted was Faurie.

Thanks to Yang’s diligence, the TFRI recognized the historical importance of the two bronze memorials, and commissioned Lee Jui-tsung to go to Japan, where Yuji Takahashi and Keishi Oku remade both memor­ials, which were placed in the Taipei Botanical Garden. The TFRI invited grandchildren of Hayata and the great-grandson and great-great-grandson of Faurie’s elder sister to attend the unveilings. This gathering of Taiwanese, Japanese, and French people a century after the first memorial to Faurie was erected was symbolic of the historical ties between us and a sign that Taiwan gratefully remembers these foreign pioneers.

The guests attending the unveiling of the replacement bronze bust of the French priest Urbain Jean Faurie included the great-grandson and great-great-grandson of Faurie’s elder sister, and Kaoru Saya, granddaughter of the Japanese sculptor Osao Watanabe.

photo by Jimmy Lin

Collecting plants in Taiwan

When Lee Jui-tsung, who is a well-known expert on old trails and botany in Taiwan, took on the task of writing the book Père Urbain Jean Faurie, he asked himself, “What kind of a person was Faurie?”

Born in 1847, Faurie left France at age 26 and spent 40 years as a missionary in Japan, but died in Taipei. Lee contacted the MEP in Paris and acquired a photo of Faurie when he was young, as well as letters he wrote. “These things helped close the distance between me and my subject,” says Lee. He also went to Asakusa, Aomori and Hokkaido in Japan to visit the places Faurie worked, and tracked down specimens collected by Faurie that are stored at Kyoto University.

In addition, Lee found a postcard in the collection of Hokkaido University that Faurie had sent to Professor Kingo Miyabe in 1908, in which he joked: “There are fewer and fewer new species. There’s nothing to be done about it. Maybe we should search on the moon or Mars.”

Faurie was the son of a farming family. He had tre­mend­ous powers of observation and could identify unique species in the wild, which he gathered and sold to mu­seums in the West to raise funds to build churches. Scholars estimate that he collected more than 300,000 specimens during his lifetime.

Lee Jui-tsung relates the chronology of Faurie’s career: “Tokyo University was founded in 1877. At that time modern science was new in Japan, and the taxonomies of its flora and fauna were first elucidated by scholars in the West. Faurie had arrived in Japan in 1873, and many of the specimens acquired by these Western scholars were gathered by Faurie.” Faurie visited Taiwan in 1903 and 1913, staying for two years on his second visit, and many of Taiwan’s botanical species are named after him. He was not a plant taxonomist and never published any academic papers, but he provided the materials for scholars to do so, making him a critical behind-the-scenes player in introducing Taiwanese plant life to the West.

Drawings from the book Icones Plantarum Formosanarum by Bunzo Hayata. (courtesy of Wu Yung-hwa)

Drawings from the book Icones Plantarum Formosanarum by Bunzo Hayata. (courtesy of Wu Yung-hwa)

Drawings from the book Icones Plantarum Formosanarum by Bunzo Hayata. (courtesy of Wu Yung-hwa)

Drawings from the book Icones Plantarum Formosanarum by Bunzo Hayata. (courtesy of Wu Yung-hwa)

The specimen card for this botanical specimen bears the names of both Faurie and Hayata, testifying to the shared past of Taiwan, Japan, and France. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

This photo of Faurie was taken in Paris in 1873, just after his graduation from theological seminary. (courtesy of Lee Jui-tsung)

Faurie traveled to Taiwan twice to collect plant specimens, and even visited Alishan. (photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

From nameless to named

In 2016 National Taiwan University Press published Bunzo Hayata: The Making of Plantarum Formosanarum, written by Wu Yung-hwa, and in 2017 the TFRI invited Professor Emeritus Hideaki Ohba of the University of Tokyo to write Bunzo Hayata. The two books analyze Hayata from Taiwanese and Japanese perspectives.

Wu Yung-hwa has long studied Taiwan’s natural history. He says that after the Treaty of Tianjin opened Taiwan to foreign trade, Westerners who came here for trade or other reasons began collecting botanical samples, and at that time specimens from Taiwan were already reaching Britain’s Kew Gardens. However, “In the 19th century, Westerners could only reach about 1000 meters in altitude, about as high as the Yangming Mountains.” In 1895 Japan took over Taiwan and began to survey its resources. Although early on it was difficult to get into the mountains because of their height and resistance from indigenous peoples, they were safer to visit following a military campaign to suppress indigenous resistance that was completed in 1915. With their deep penetration into Taiwan’s mountain forests, Japanese researchers took the lead in naming the island’s flora and fauna.

Bunzo Hayata was born in 1874 in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, and showed great interest in botany from a young age. When Hideaki Ohba came to Taiwan at the invitation of the TFRI, he shared the following story with readers: Ha­yata’s parents died when he was young, and he was poor. He made a living by working in a clothing shop, and had to bow his head to carry heavy loads, as a result of which he noticed the mosses on the ground and became interested in studying them.

Hayata first came to Taiwan in 1900, creating a lifelong link with this island. When he studied at Tokyo Imperial University, the school had already received a large number of specimens from Taiwan, and his teacher Jinzō Matsumura, who was a pioneer in the study of Taiwanese plants, guided Hayata to research this field. When the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office launched a survey of useful plants on the island, Hayata was hired to identify and classify Taiwanese flora.

At that time academic circles worldwide had a great thirst for knowledge of new species. The importance of naming was that “Hayata helped place the flora of Taiwan within the world botanical taxonomic system,” explains Tung Gene-sheng, chief of the Botanical Garden Division at the TFRI. Hayata included the names Formosa, Taiwan, or local place names in many plant names, thereby putting Taiwan on the map of world flora; in fact, “Taiwan” was one of the most alluring names in Western botanical circles at that time.

From 1911 to 1921, with the support of the Japanese Governor-General’s Office, Bunzo Hayata published his ten-volume work Icones Plantarum Formosanarum, written in English and Latin, which greatly helped to intro­duce Taiwanese plant life to the world.

Hayata named and published more than 1600 plant species from Taiwan, placing Taiwanese flora within the world botanical taxonomic system.

The type specimen of Taiwania cryptomerioides, named by Hayata and held by the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, is very precious.

A gift for Taiwan

In 1906 Hayata reached the peak of his academic career when he published the new genus Taiwania. Tung explains that at that time research into ever­green conifers in the West was already very comprehensive, because these tree species are very common in temperate zones and scholars naturally started with what was most familiar to them. Yet Hayata was nonetheless able to identify Taiwania as an entirely new genus.

“Finding a new genus on this island and naming it Taiwania was Hayata’s gift to Taiwan,” says Tung. Many foreign scientists first get to know about Taiwan from the name of the genus and its only living species, Tai­­wania cryptomerioides. “As far as botany is concerned, we can still proudly say that the type specimen of Tai­wania cryptomerioides is our Mona Lisa.” Even today many overseas herbariums want to get a specimen of this tree, because in this way they acquire not just a new species but a whole new genus, Tung explains.

In 1909 Hayata visited herbariums in Britain, France, Germany and Russia, where he was able to compare their specimens with those collected in Taiwan, thereby confirming the new species he had discovered. Tung says, “In this way he linked Taiwan with the world.”

Today the TFRI still holds 58 specimens collected by Faurie and more than 700 gathered by Hayata. Taking out one specimen, Tung Gene-sheng points out that the specimen card bears the names of both Faurie and Hayata, showing that the lives of both these men who loved collecting and researching Taiwanese flora left their marks on this specimen which originated in Taiwan, one as collector and the other as the taxonomist who named the species. Seeing this testimony to the shared past of Taiwan, Japan, and France, to the great era of the naming of Taiwanese flora, and to Taiwan’s interaction with the world, how can one not be moved?

The Herbarium of the Taipei Botanical Garden was formerly used for storing specimens. Today it is a display space where people can learn about the natural history of plant life in Taiwan. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Taiwania is a genus named after Taiwan, and many foreign scientists have been introduced to Taiwan through the scientific name of its only living species, Taiwania cryptomerioides.