German teacher and botanist. Hans Wolfgang Limpricht (known as Wolfgang) was born in Breslau, where he obtained his PhD in 1902. Around this time he collected plants in the Carpathian Mountains and published his works Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Taccaceen (a dissertation on the Taccaceae family) and Die Laubmoose Deutschlands, Österreichs und der Schweiz (on German, Austrian and Swiss mosses).

Limpricht left Germany for Shanghai in 1910, where he took up the post of director of the School of Languages and docent at the German medical school there. He left these posts after three years, however, to join the Stötzner expedition to Wen-shan-hsien in Sichuan's Min Valley. Limpricht made extensive explorations in the south-west of the province and in the Tibetan borderlands, aided in this hostile region by his friendship with an army general named Chang. Leaving Tatsien-lu on June 19, 1914, his first challenge was to ascend Mount Zhara, traversing the 25,000-feet high slopes carpeted in primulas and dwarf rhododendrons. He carried on into the drier climate of Tibet, climbing down into the Yangtze Valley below Dege. Limpricht reached Batang on August 18 and returning to Tatsien-lu, heard news of the outbreak of war. At once he set off eastwards, visiting Chengdu and Chongqing on his way back to Shanghai.

Limpricht spent the next few years as a teacher in Tientsin, meanwhile continuing to collect plants in his holidays and spare time. A number of new plants were named after him by Ludwig Diels and other German botanists. He left China in 1920 and published an account of his botanical explorations there in 1922, under the title Botanische Reisen in den Hochgerbirgen Chinas und Ost-Tibets. He also collected in Japan. Limpricht's father was the bryologist Karl Gustav Limpricht.

Sources:
J.H. Barnhart, 1965, Biographical Notes Upon Botanists, 1: 382
E.H.M. Cox, 1945, Plant Hunting in China: 209-210.