Why has botanical information about China been limited?
Extensive systematic collections of Chinese plants were not begun until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At first, Westerners explored mainly in readily accessible areas. Chinese botanists started collecting and studying their flora in the 1920s and 30s, making extensive collections over much of China. From the late 1930s until 1949, China was mostly inaccessible to both western and Chinese botanists because of the war with Japan and internal disturbances. The size and complexity of the Chinese flora, the relatively recent period of botanical exploration and the periods of disruption in botanical study have resulted in relatively few comprehensive published works. Since 1949, however, with stabilization of the political situation in China, and with increasing emphasis on basic biological research by the Chinese government, there has been a considerable increase in botanical exploration. A decade after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a project was started to produ
