Joseph Rock
Categories: careers, Things to See, Things to do, Follow your Dreams, History
— Joseph Rock
The 1949 affidavit quoted above shows the absolute determination of a man under often heartbreaking conditions. Joseph Rock was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1884. He escaped his family’s plan that he join the priesthood, he survived tuberculosis, and as the quote above shows, he overcame world crises. Rock was devoted solely to his work in a way that is both enviable—he threw off distractions and entanglements—and simultaneously unsettling. But Rock was not simply a compulsive workaholic. He loved opera. He maintained a wide circle of friends, and with them, until his death, he used the nickname “Pohaku,” which is the Hawaiian word for rock. Joseph Rock’s peripatetic lifestyle, a series of travels and expeditions punctuated by brief periods of rest in the United States or Europe, seems most clearly traced by a timeline.
1905: Rock arrived in New York
1907: Diagnosed with tuberculosis and advised to seek a dry climate; instead headed to Hawaii
1908: Resigned his teaching job due to ill health and joined the Division of Forestry, Territory of Hawaii, as a botanical collector (primarily self-taught)
1911: Transferred to the College of Hawaii as a botanist, placed in charge of the herbarium
1913: Became a naturalized citizen
1919: Was officially appointed professor of systematic botany
1920: Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, Bureau of Plant Industry, U.S.D.A., sent Rock to Indochina, Siam, and Burma in search of chaulmoogra seeds, the first usable cure for Hansen’s disease
1922: Took up residence in Likiang
1923: National Geographic Society took over sponsorship of Rock’s travels
1924–1927: Rock led Harvard’s expedition to West China and Tibet and then rested in America
1927–1930: Led the National Geographic Society’s Southwest China–Tibet expedition
1930: Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology sent Rock to China for two years; honorary law degree granted by Baylor University
1932–1933: University of California Botanical Garden underwrote Rock’s research
1935: Conflicts between Chinese nationalists and communists forced Rock to evacuate his library
1938: Japanese bombing of Kunming made Rock evacuate library to Indochina
1940: Rock led the National Museum’s expedition to Annam and Cambodia
1941: Japanese bombing destroyed the plates of Rock’s four-volume work at a printer in Shanghai
1944: Rock evacuated by plane to the United States, where he became an expert consultant and geographic specialist; fourteen years of work lost at sea
1945–1950: Was research fellow of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (now the Harvard-Yenching Library), returning to China late in 1946
1949: “Bandits” threatened Likiang, forcing Rock to flee once again
1955–1957: Rock botanized back in Hawaii
1962: Honorary doctor of science degree awarded by the University of Hawaii, where Rock was professor of Oriental studies, shortly before his death
Rock was first sent to China in the early 1920s by the United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) to collect seeds of a tree that later were used in the treatment of leprosy. His explorations resulted in the introduction of conifers, rhododendrons (493 species), potentilla, and primula to the U.S. Nonetheless, biographer Hubert Rhodes wrote in 1956 that Rock’s collection process—collecting all plants, not just searching for exotics—had important implications and opened possibilities for reforestation in North America’s severest northern climates. Rock also introduced blight-resistant chestnuts. He deposited a sizable collection of birds and mammals at the U.S. National Museum, the Arnold Arboretum, and Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. During his later years, botanizing back in Hawaii in the 1950s, Rock noted ominously that many native species he had collected earlier in his career had vanished completely.
“Rock’s most outstanding characteristic was his breadth of vision,” Egbert Walker wrote of him in 1962. Indeed, Rock’s interests included linguistics, herbarium and collection development, ethnography, and photography. He even developed his photographs in the field and used them to illustrate his scientific and popular publications, notably in a photojournalist series of nine articles forNational Geographic Magazine from 1922 to 1935. His efforts in linguistics are widely recognized; he spent years collecting and translating 8,000 volumes of original Naxi literature, including their religious tracts. Naxi manuscripts in the Library of Congress are from Rock; the Library’s Web site, lcweb.loc.gov/acq/devpol/colloverviews/tibetan.html, claims that “the complete Coni redaction (317 volumes), which was acquired by Joseph Rock in 1928, is one of only a few known to still exist today.” Rock’s Naxi dictionary, over which he labored for so many years, was finally published after his death.
Life
He was born in Vienna, Austria, but moved to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1907, where he became an authority on the flora there. As the Territory of Hawaii's first official botanist, he joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii in 1911, established its first herbarium, and served as its first curator from 1911 until 1920, when he left the university to spend the next few decades exploring the botany of Asia.
He began by hunting the Chaulmoogra tree in Burma, Thailand and Assam. From 1922 to 1949 he spent most of his time studying the flora, peoples and languages of southwest China, mainly in Yunnan, Sichuan, southwest Gansu and eastern Tibet. Many Asian plants that he collected can be seen in the Arnold Arboretum.
He was based near Lijiang in the village of Nguluko (Yuhu), and wrote many articles for the National Geographic magazine (see "Works and memory" below) about his expeditions to places such as Muli, Minya Konka (Gongga Shan), the three sacred peaks of Shenrezig, Jambeyang and Chanadorje in what is now known as Yading Nature Reserve, and the Salween (Nujiang) river. These articles brought him modest fame, and were said to have inspired the novel Lost Horizon, by James Hilton, about a fictional remote Himalayan community known as Shangri-La.
Rock was cherished for his eccentricities, as well as his knowledge of botany and of ethnic minorities. He always travelled with a complete set of silverware, which was laid out for him at mealtimes. He also travelled with a rubber bathtub, which his servants filled with hot water so that he could enjoy that most European of luxuries: a good soak in the bath.
Botanically, he had been preceded to Yunnan, one of the most interesting botanical hotspots in the world, by other, more accomplished botanists, in particular Jean Marie Delavay, George Forrest and Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti, another Austrian, all of whom discovered and scientifically described many more plants than Rock did. Nevertheless, Rock's contributions to botanical knowledge were significant.
After 1949, he returned to Honolulu where he died in 1962.
In March 2009, the University of Hawaii at Manoa named its herbarium after him.
Works and memory
The spectacular Rock's Peony Paeonia rockii is named after Rock. Rock produced a 1,094-page dictionary, numerous scholarly papers, and two histories of the Nakhi (Naxi) people and language of northwestern Yunnan, which have been widely used for the study of Nakhi culture, language and religion.
The most important of his written works are:
- The Ancient Nakhi Kingdom of Southwest China. 2 vols., illustrated. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948.
- A Nakhi-English encyclopedic dictionary. Rome: I.M.E.O., 1963.
- His National Geographic magazine articles:
"Hunting the Chaulmoogra tree" (1922) 3:242-276
"Banishing the Devil of Disease Among the Nashi: Weird Ceremonies Performed by an Aboriginal Tribe in the Heart of Yunnan Province" (1924) 46:473-499
"Land of the Yellow Lama: National Geographic Society Explorer Visits the Strange Kingdom of Muli, Beyond the Likiang Snow Range of Yunnan, China" (1924) 47: 447-491
"Experiences of a Lone Geographer: An American Agricultural Explorer Makes His Way through Brigand-Infested Central China En Route to the Amne Machin Range, Tibet" (1925) 48: 331-347
"Through the Great River Trenches of Asia: National Geographic Society Explorer Follows the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salwin Through Mighty Gorges" (1926) 50: 133-186
"Life among the Lamas of Choni: Describing the Mystery Plays and Butter Festival in the Monastery of an Almost Unknown Tibetan Principality in Kansu Province, China" (1928): 569-619
"Seeking the Mountains of Mystery: An Expedition on the China-Tibet Frontier to the Unexplored Amnyi Machen range, One of Whole Peaks Rivals Everest" (1930) 57:131-185
"Glories of the Minya Konka: Magnificent Snow Peaks of the China-Tibetan Border are Photographed at Close Range by a National Geographic Society Expedition" (1930) 58:385-437
"Konka Risumgongba, Holy Mountain of the Outlaws" (1931) 60:1-65
"Sungmas, the Living Oracles of the Tibetan Church" (1935) 68:475-486
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http://drjosephrock.blogspot.com/2005_02_27_drjosephrock_archive.html
KHAM THEN AND NOW. A PHOTOBLOG SHOWING HOW EASTERN TIBET LOOKED IN THE 1920S AND HOW THE SAME PLACES AND PEOPLE LOOK NOW. BASED ON THE EXPLORATIONS OF BOTANIST JOSEPH ROCK
ABOUT THIS BLOG
Dr Joseph Rock was an Austrian-born American botanist, anthropologist and explorer. He lived in South West China from the 1920s to 1949. During that time he went on many expeditions to remote parts of the Tibetan borderlands, collecting plants, taking photographs and collating maps. He described his trips in several articles in the National Geographic journal. After reading his articles, I was inspired to revisit places he described in Sichuan and Yunnan such as Muli, Yading, Deqin and Gongga Shan. This blog describes my travels and compares Rock's pictures with ones I have taken in the same places.
A note of interest I thought I would pass along: in addition to bird and mammal specimens he collected for Harvard's Museum of Comparitive Zoology mentioned above, Joseph Rock made extremely significant botanical contributions via the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. An article of his rich botanical legacy can be found here: http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/860.pdf
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