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Proposed changes to the Article on Carl Peter Thunberg

Early Life

Thunberg was born and grew up in Jönköping, Sweden. At the age of 18, he entred the Swedish Uppsala University where he was taught by the famous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus who was mainly known for his work Philosophia Botanica (1751). Thunberg graduated in 1767 after only 6 years of studying - an incredibly quick graduation at this time. In order to deepen his knowledge in botany, medicine and natural history, he was encouraged by Linnaeus in 1770 to travel to Paris and Amsterdam. In Amsterdam and Leiden where he stayed to study the city's collection of plants and musea, Thunberg met the Dutch botanist and physician, Johannes Burman and his son Nicolaas Burman who himself had been a disciple of Linnaeus.

Having heard of Thunberg's inqusitive mind, his great skills in botany and medicine and Linnaeus' high esteem of his Swedish pupil, Johannes Burmann and Laurens Theodor Gronovius, a Councillor of Leiden, convinced Thunberg to travel to either the Western or the East Indies to collect plants and animal specimen for the botanic garden in Leiden which was still lacking exoctic exhibits. Thunberg who had ever since been fascinated by the secretive and mainly unkown East Indies was eager to travel to the Cape of Good Hope and apply his knowledge.

With the help of Burmann and Gronovius, Thunberg entred the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, V.O.C.) as a surgeon on board of the Stavenise. As since 1637, the East Indies where under Dutch control, the only way to enter the colonies was via the V.O.C. Hence, equipped with Gronovius' commission to collect specimen in the East Indies and send them back to Leiden in regular intervals, Thunberg debarked in December 1771. In March 1772, he reached Cape Town in South Afrika.

Thunberg in South Africa

In 1772, Thunberg reached Cape Town in South Africa. During his three-year stay, the Swede managed to perfect his Dutch and dwelve deeper into the scientific knowledge, culture and societal structure of the "Hottentotten", the Dutch name for the Khoikhoi, the native people of South Africa. Thunberg's travel to Africa is processed in the second volume of his travelogue.

The Khoikhoi were the first foreign culture with which the Swede was confronted. The different customs and traditions of the native people elicited both disgust and admiration from the Swede. For example, he considered the Khoikhoi's custom to grease their skin with fat and dust as an obnoxious habit about which he wrote in his travelogue:

"For uncleanliness, the Hottentots have the greatest love. They grease their entire body with greasy substances and above this, they put cow dung, fat or something similar." Thunberg, 1793, p. 180

Yet, this harsh judgement is moderated by the reason he saw for this practice and so he continues that:

"This stops up their pores and their skin is covered with a thick layer which protects it from heat in Summer and from cold during Winter." (ibid).

This behaviour - to try to justify rituals he did not understand - also marks his encounter with the Japanese people.

Since the main purpose for his journey was to collect specimen for the gardens in Leiden, Thunberg regularly undertook field trips and journeys into the interior of the country. Between September 1772 and January 1773, he accompanied the Dutch superintendent of the Company garden, Johan Andreas Auge. Their journey took them to the north of Saldanha Bay, east along the Breede Valley through the Langkloof as far as the Gamtoos River and returning by way of the Little Karoo. During this expedition and also later on, Thunberg kept regular contact with scholars in Europe, especially the Netherlands and Sweden, but also with other members of the V.O.C who sent him animal skins. Shortly after returning, Thunberg met Francis Masson, a Scots gardener who had come to Capetown to collect plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew. They were immediately drawn together by their shared interests. During one of their trips, they were joined by Robert Jacob Gordon, on leave from his regiment in the Netherlands. Together, the scientists undertook two further inland expeditions.

During his three expeditions into the interior, Thunberg collected a significant number of specimens of both flora and fauna. In 1773, he was given the opportunity to travel further to Japan. Although the journey was known to be very burdensome and unpleasant due to the rough waters, Thunberg's curiosity about the country induced him to accept the offer.

In 1774, he reached Batavia, then the captial of the Dutch East Indies, where he stayed for two months. In January 1775, he debarked in Japan.

Stay in Japan

In August 1775, he arrived at the Dutch factory of the V.O.C. (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) at Dejima, a small artificial island (120 m by 75 m) in the Bay of Nagasaki connected to the city by a single small bridge.However, just like the other Dutch merchants, Thunberg was hardly allowed to leave the island. These severe restrictions to the freedom to move had been imposed by the Japanese shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1609 after the Portguese who had been the first to arrive in Japan in 1543, had garnered the shogun's rage through their missionary attempts. The only locals who were allowed regular contact with the Dutch were the interpreters of Nagasaki and the relevant authorities of the city.

Shortly after the Stavenise's arrival on Deshima, Thunberg was appointed head surgeon of the trading post. To still be able to collect specimen of Japanese plants and animals as well as to gather information on the population, Thunberg soon began to systematically construct networks of information with the interpreters by sending them small notes containing medical knowledge and receiving botanical knowledge or rare Japanese coins in return. Quickly, the news spread that a well-educated Dutch physician was in town who seemed to be able to help the local doctors cure the Dutch disease, another word for syphilis. As a result, the appropriate authorities granted him more and more visits in the city and finally even allowed him one-day trips into the vicinity of Nagasaki where Thunberg had the chance to collect specimen by himself.

During his visits in town, Thunberg began to recruit disciples, mainly the Nagasaki interpreters and local physicians. His major knowledge contribution lied in the teachings of new medical treatments such as an - apparently efficient - mercury cure and of the production of new medicine. During this process, however, he also instructed his pupils in the Dutch language and European manners of conduct, thus furthering the growing interest into the Dutch and European culture on the side of the Japanese, known under the term rangaku. The Swedish writer Marie-Chrsitine Skuncke (2013, p. 101) even points out that Thunberg who had brought some seeds of European vegetables with him, showed the Japanese some botanical practices, thus contributing significantly to an expansion of the Japanese horticulture.

On the other hand, Thunberg also profited from his teachings by himself. As he as a former medical student was mainly interested in medical knowledge, the Japanese showed him the practice of acupuncture. The cooperation of Thunberg and the local physicians even led to a knowledge fusion which brought about a new acupuncture point called shakutaku. The discovery of shakutaku was a result of Thunberg's anatomic knowledge and the Japanese' traditional medicine of neuronic moxibustion. Yet, he likewise brought back knowledge on Japan's religion and societal structure, thus boosting an increasing interest into Japan, an early cultural form of Japonism.

In both countries, Thunberg's knowledge exchange hence led to a cultural open-up effect which too manifested in the spread of universities and boarding schools which taught knowledge on the other culture. For this reason, Thunberg has been given the title of being "the most important eye wittness of Tokugawa Japan in the eighteenth century" (Ortolani, 1995, p. 281).

Due to his execellent scientific reputation, Thunberg was given the opportunity in 1776 to accompany the Dutch ambassador M. Feith to the shogun's court in Edo, today's Tokyo. During the slow journey, the Swede was given the chance to collect a great number of specimen of plants and animals and likewise to talk to Japanese locals in the villages they traversed on their way. It is in this time that Thunberg wrote two of his scientific master pieces, the Flora Japonica (1784) and the Fauna Japonica (1833). The latter was finished by the German traveller Philipp Franz von Siebold who visited Japan between 1823 and 1829; yet, von Siebold based the Fauna Japonica on Thunberg's notes which he carried with him all the time in Japan.

Additionally, on his way to Edo, Thunberg managed to obtain a vast amount of Japanese coins which he described in detail in the fourth volume of his travelogue, Travels in Europe, Africa and Asia, performed between the Years 1770 and 1779. The coins presented an important informational repository and the culture, religion and history of Japan as their possession as well as their export by foreigners had been striclty forbidden by the shogun. This prohibition had been imposed on order to prevent Empire of China and other rivals of the shogunate from copying the money and flooding the Japanese markets with forged coins. Consequently, Thunberg's transport of Japanese coins granted European scholars an enitrely new perspective on Japan's money economy and allowed them to draw conclusions on Japan's culture and religion through monetary embellishments and the materials used to produce the currency.

In November 1776, after Thunberg had returned from his trip to the shogun's court, he left Japan and went on to Java, an island that nowadays belongs to Indonesia. From there on, he travelled to Ceylon in July 1777, today's Sri Lanka. Here again, his major interest lay in collecting plants and other specimen.

In 1778, Thunberg left Ceylon to return to Europe.

Reasons for his Travels

Out of the literature on Thunberg and his travelogue, three reasons for why he undertook his journey at this time can be filtered out.

1. Next to being encouraged by Linnaeus and Gronovius to travel to Japan, the fact that for half a century, no new information on the mysterious country in the East had reached Europe attracted Thunberg to provide new insights on the Japanese. In 1690, Engelbert Kaempfer, a German traveller, had sailed to Japan and spent two years on the island of Deshima. Kaempfer's travelogue which was published in 1729 became a famous work on the shogunate; yet, when Thunberg came to Japan, Kaempfer's writings were already more than fifty years old. The time was right for new knowledge.

1. The Age of the Enlightenment furthered this scientific hunger for new information. In the light of the increasing emphasis on using the rational human mind, many students were keen to leave the boundaries of Europe and apply their knolwedge and gather new insights through empirical travels into the unknown.

1. Thunberg himself was a very inquisitve and intelligent man, a "person of acute mind" (Screech, 2012, p. 2) who always sought new challenges. Hence, undertaking the journey was in Thunberg's personal interest and complied well with his character.

References

Fujita, R. (1944). Researches on Pressation Points and Papule Points and Related Subjects. Ninth Report: From the Angle of Oriental Medicine, Part 2. Kanazawa, Japan

Jung, C. (2002). Kaross und Kimono: „Hottentotten“ und Japaner im Spiegel des Reiseberichts von Carl Peter Thunberg, 1743 – 1828. [Kaross and Kimono: “Hottentots” and Japanese in the Mirror of Carl Peter Thunberg’s Travelogue, 1743 – 1828]. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany

Kornicki, P. (2010). Catalogue of the Japanese Coin Collection (Pre-Meiji) at the British Museum. British Museum Research Publication n°174

Nordenstamm, B. (2013). Carl Peter Thunberg and Japanese Natural History. Asian Journal of Natural and Applied Sciences, 2 (2), pp. 1 – 7

Ortolani, B. (1995). The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Princeton UP

Rietbergen, P. (2004.) Becoming Famous in the Eighteenth Century: Carl Peter Thunberg Between Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan. De Achtiende Eeuw, 36 (1), pp. 50-61

Screech, T. (2012). Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1775 – 1776. Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York

Skuncke, M. C. (2013). Carl Peter Thunberg: Botanist and Physician.Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, Uppsala, Sweden

Svedelius, N. (1944). Carl Peter Thunberg (1743 – 1828) on His Bicentenary. Isis, 35 (2), pp. 128-134

Thunberg, C. P. (1791). Resa uti Europa, Africa, Asia, förrättad åren 1770-1779. Tredje Band. Published by J. Edman, Uppsala, Sweden

Thunberg, C. P. (1793). Travels at the Cape of Good Hope, 1772-1775. Emeritus Prof. V. S. Forbes, London

Thunberg, C. P. (1796). Travels in Europe, Africa and Asia, performed between the Years 1770 and 1779. Published by W. Richardson, London, UK

Totman, C. D. (2000). A History of Japan. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford and Malden