Appreciationof.PDFVIP

IN MEMORY OF Appreciation of WU ZHENGYI Wu Zhengyi-- Friend and Colleague Peter H. Raven Missouri Botanical Garden, USA. One of the j oys of my life has been the opportunity to know and work with Wu Lao for the last 34 years of his life, 1979-2013. He came to America as a member of the delegation of Chinese botanists that we organized for the spring of 1979, and it was during the course of that visit there that he and I became acquainted for the first time. During the course of the final meeting of that visit, which was held at the University of California in Berkeley, California, June 1, 1979, Professor Wu and his colleague Yü Te-Tsun, another outstanding botanist, proposed that Chinese and American botanists work together to produce a revised English- language version of the Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae (FRPS; 1959-2004, 80 volumes in 126 books). This great work, in Chinese, was the first comprehensive catalog of all of the plants of the country, but our Chinese colleagues well realized that they did not, in the course of preparing most of their flora, that they had not had access to the literature and type specimens of the West, where most of the work on Chinese plant taxonomy had been carried out for the preceding 150 years. As a result, studies carried out in the isolation of that day in China could not be perfected to the degree that it could have been with access to the historical material, which is why our Chinese colleagues proposed a j oint proj ect to try to rectify the situation. As chair of the American group, I set about to see how this might be possible, and spent a number 集 文 念 纪 of frustrating years looking for a publisher who would be w