Carved by the forces of plate tectonics and rising to a dramatic elevation, the Himalayan-Hengduan mountain range cradles an array of highland flora. These “sky islands,” where fractured plateaus rise amid sinking lowlands, seem to float in a sea of contrasting landscapes between Yunnan and Tibet. These diverse topologies give rise to a remarkably intricate and distinctive ecology, transitioning from tropical rainforests in the south of the Himalayan-Hengduan mountain range to high-elevation alpine landscapes on the plateaued northern terrain, which includes the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.¹

One of the most enduring contemporary myths about the Himalayas is the fictional “Shangri-La” described in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933): a tranquil, idyllic sanctuary where harmony prevails and time appears suspended.² The valley’s untouched natural beauty, exotic flora and fauna, and inscrutable inhabitants speaking unfamiliar languages reinforced its depiction as a mystical geography. Yet Hilton had never visited the Himalayas; his Orientalist vision of Shangri-La was largely inspired by the writings and photography of Joseph F. Rock, an early twentieth-century American plant hunter whose detailed accounts of the region invited such wondrous reveries.

I first heard stories about Rock and other “plant hunters” in passing, whether as memories told by my grandfather or by rifling through dusty books in my grandparents’ apartment. Only a few years ago, on a family trip to the village of Nvlvk’ö in Yulong Nakhi Autonomous County, did I begin to pay attention to the footsteps Rock left across the greater Himalayan region, and his close associations with the Nakhi, the ethnic group to which my family and I belong.¹ Starting in the nineteenth century, the development of Western horticultural science gradually gave rise to the profession of “plant hunters”: botanical explorers who gathered seeds and prepared specimens for imperial gardens, research institutions, and horticultural companies around the world.² The title of “plant hunter” suggests an active and often perilous quest, evoking vivid scenes of adventurers seeking out rare, vulnerable species in remote and untamed landscapes.

Following the First Opium War, the rise of missionary and colonial activity in Southern China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia spurred extensive surveys of the region’s landscapes and resources. However, during China’s transition from imperial to republican rule in the first three decades of the twentieth century, local warlords carved out their territories, making travel to the borderlands treacherous—not only because of their already forbidding mountainscapes, but also due to constant militant conflicts and shifting territorial control in these liminal regions. Plant hunters and missionaries often entered the Himalayan-Hengduan mountain region through trade ports in southern and southeastern China, such as Guangzhou, or via Vietnam in Southeast Asia. These arduous conditions made their expeditions legendary, as they faced life-threatening dangers: unpredictable terrain and climate, unknown diseases, and violent bandits.

Rock was among these explorers, and his story embodies the tension between colonial and counter-colonial epistemologies of the Himalayas. While his botanical expeditions yielded an impressive collection of plant specimens and photographs, his engagement with local traditions set him apart from many other plant hunters who viewed the Himalayas merely as a site for botanical extraction. He immersed himself in indigenous languages and rituals and compiled a translated dictionary of Dongba scriptures: a system of cosmological pictographs for improvisational ritual practices that recorded the Nakhi’s means of spiritual wayfinding, which provided Rock with a new orientation toward botanical exploration.

In addition to the plant species Rock collected, the images he captured during his botanical expeditions were among the earliest and most thorough photographic records of Himalayan landscapes and cultures. It is impossible not to be drawn in by his captivating photographs of plants, places, and people. I instinctively felt an admiration for his work—yet so too was I aware of Rock’s keen, taxonomic gaze, and his photographic approach that seemed to oscillate between his fascination with the Himalayan landscape and his mission to produce a complete, universal, objective survey of the region.

Using Rock’s photographs as a cartographic guide, I set out in 2024 to retrace the paths he and his Nakhi guides once took during their 1920s plant-hunting expeditions in the Himalayas. By walking these routes, visiting botanical archives, and juxtaposing our photographs of the same region, I created a palimpsest of our journeys, one that compelled me to confront the passing joyfulness and excitement, persistent weariness, and ethical ambivalence in Rock’s botanical expeditions. But for my project, I began from a different vantage point: Zomia, rather than the mythologized “Shangri-La” that permeates plant hunter lore. As a term drawn from several Tibeto-Burman languages, Zomia means “hill people.”¹ Anthropologist James C. Scott borrowed the term from historian Willem van Schendel to denote the vast, resistant mountain geography of the South and Southeast Asian massif, positioned against lowland ethno-nationalist assimilation. This is a space where lives—human and more-than-human—dwell at the periphery of imperial imaginaries. Here, outcast sensibilities—once deemed illegible, incommensurable, and therefore unaccounted for in the epistemic fantasies of botanical geography—coalesce into the Zomia garden.

Before delving into Rock and other plant hunters’ journeys, I assumed that the plant hunters, armed with Western scientific knowledge and resources, always held the upper hand during their botanical expeditions. While that may have been true in their working relationships with the Nakhi, in many cases, their empirical frameworks quickly collapsed in the unruly “Zomia.” In coordinating their collecting routes, plant hunters often oversimplified the complexity and changes of mountainous terrain. Lacking on-the-ground experience in the mountains, they had to depend on the botanical expertise and navigational skills of local guides to lead the way and provide protection, at times fending off wild beasts and ruthless bandits, though such feats were rarely acknowledged in their botanical histories.

Zomia’s rejection of expansion, assimilation, and certainty provides a speculative framework for reconceiving the histories of plant hunters in the Himalayas beyond conventional adventure narratives, which tend to position the landscape as easily conquered and amenable to resource extraction. By revisiting their collecting routes, it became clear to me that the knowledge and intuition of Zomia inhabitants continuously reshaped the journeys of the plant hunters, rather than the other way around. Rock, especially, was moved by Zomia’s sensibility.

Rock first travelled to Burma in search of chaulmoogra—a plant believed to be a potential cure for leprosy—on a commission from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).¹ In 1922, he journeyed further north into Yunnan, China, where he met fellow plant hunter George Forrest in Dali. At the time, Forrest was collecting rhododendrons with the help of the Nakhi guides with whom he had built relationships during his earlier work in Lijiang. Forrest recommended Lijiang as an ideal base for Rock’s expeditions and botanical research; Rock eventually settled in the old Li family house in the village of Nvlvk’ö, nestled at the foot of the Yulong Snow Mountain.² In the 1920s, Rock and his Nakhi crew travelled to the Haba Snow Mountain, Kingdom of Muli, the Amnye Machen Mountains, and Mount Konka.³ For over twenty-seven years, Rock and his team collected more than 50,000 plant specimens, preserved nearly 1,000 bird skins and over 200 colourful butterflies, and took 1,055 photographs.⁴

While Forrest never tried to learn Mandarin, much less the Nakhi language, Rock embraced indigenous knowledge and customs. Rock’s engagement with Dongba rituals—blessings, purges, and other cosmological interventions—began to inform, if not outright replace, his botanical interests. Among these practices, many narratives traced the geographical journeys of Nakhi ancestors—their arrival in this world and the return of souls to their ancestral lineage in the afterlife. After studying Dongba scriptures, Rock grew fixated on the notion that Nakhi ancestral migrations might align with his own botanical collecting expedition to the Amnye Machen with the Nakhi, a fantasy that deepened while he worked on his Na-khi-English Encyclopedic Dictionary in Lijiang.⁵ This wishful thinking suggests that botanical expeditions might have unconsciously traced in reverse the routes of Nakhi historical journeys as recorded in the wayfinding scriptures. When Nakhi guides led plant hunters through these landscapes to find rhododendrons, among other mythical plants, they were, in effect, retracing our Nakhi ancestors’ footsteps, but on their terms.

For Rock, botanical expeditions eventually opened toward a more profound translation mission: to chart the unspoken social relations that tie together people and geographies. Language came to function like cartographic coordinates, orienting Rock’s movements and understanding in a foreign place. The urge to think and feel—with all its spontaneity and affective force—manifested in the sensitivity of Nakhi oral ballads and the improvisation of Dongba rituals. This intuitive way of relating to land, foreign to Rock’s cultural background, generated a productive cultural friction as he composed his geo-cosmological dictionary and encouraged him to reorient his perspective on Himalayan botanical history.