Temporality and materiality in Father Pierre Nicolas LeChéron d’Incarville’s herbaria, from the Jesuit missionin China to the Jussieu collection in Paris (1740–1757) / Axel Le Roy

Published in Archives of Natural History 52:1 (2025), pp.:130–150, 2025.

Abstract:
Father Pierre Nicolas Le Chéron d'Incarville (1706–1757), who travelled to China in 1740, was a Jesuit missionary and correspondent of Bernard de Jussieu, a botanist at the Jardin du Roi in Paris. The letters and specimens sent by d'Incarville to Jussieu reveal the different temporal scales and the materiality of the scholarly practices involved in the acquisition of botanical knowledge in Macao, Canton and Beijing in the mid-eighteenth century. This paper will examine these temporal traces in the herbarium, before looking at the work of collecting itself and the many difficulties encountered in the field. These included the impossibility of travelling freely in China due to the political and religious context, the importance of the cycle of seasons for botanical classification, and the hazards of weather on herborization. The strategies developed by d'Incarville to save time and circumvent these difficulties will also be discussed, notably through the exchange and purchase of services from Chinese intermediaries.