Biography

Chinese botanist who founded the South China Botanical Garden in 1929. Woon-Young Chun was born in Hong Kong and attended Massachusetts Agricultural College in the U.S. from 1910-1913. He went on to study forestry at New York State College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1915. From New York Chun went to Harvard, where he remained until 1919 when he was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship to undertake a collecting expedition. On the advice of C.S. Sargent, he went to explore the island of Hainan and gathered an enormous number of specimens, which were shared with the Arnold Arboretum.The task had not been easy, however; Chen was taken ill with malaria after nine months on the island and his body covered with sores from leeches and malnutrition. His left hand had swelled to the size of a boxing glove and the end of his fieldwork came when he was carried out of Hainan's Five Finger Mountains on a stretcher, to recuperate in Nanjing. A worse fate came to his collections destined for Harvard; they were lost in a fire at a Shanghai warehouse before they could be shipped.

In 1920 Chun was appointed Professor of Forestry at the University of Nanking (Nanjing). Two years on, not wanting to be at a Christian-run university, he transferred to the National Southeastern University as Professor of Botany. His 1921 work, Chinese Economic Trees, was the first botanical book in English authored by a Chinese botanist. In 1922 he undertook another expedition, in north-west Hubei Province, accompanied by S.S. Chien, R.C. Ching and a former assistant to Augustine Henry, "Old Yao". This time Chun was successful in sending a consignment of plants to the Arnold Arboretum, but in 1923 disaster struck again when the Southeastern University's science building burned down and the herbarium was lost. This setback was ameliorated by the receipt of a set of National Geographic Society collections made by forestry student Ren Chang Ching in 1924, and the return of botanist Hsen-Hsu Hu from studies in America, with whom Chen began fruitful collaborations in 1925, resulting in their illustrated series Icones Plantarum Sinicarum (1927-1938). Chen took a year's leave from Southeastern that year, in order to research the South China flora, spending most of this period at Hong Kong Botanical Garden.

Chun came to Sun Yatsen University as Professor of Botany in 1927 and was appointed director of its new botany institute in 1928. Here he founded a botanical garden the following year and set about an ambitious programme of collecting in South China, augmented by specimen exchange with other herbaria. The institute was renamed the South China Botanical Institute in 1954, and later became the South China Botanical Garden, with Chun as its director until his death in 1971.

Chun represented the Botanical Institute of Sun Yatsen University, the Science Society of China and the national government at the Fifth International Botanical Congress in Cambridge, England, in 1930, which was the first time the meeting held a symposium on the flora of China. He was steadily becoming accepted as the leading authority on the flora of South China, both at home and abroad. 1938 brought a temporary halt to his work, however, as Guangdong fell to the Japanese. Chun managed to escape to Hong Kong, where he was able, with his staff, to resume research to an extent, until Hong Kong too was captured in 1941. Chun persuaded the Japanese forces to allow his work to continue and his botanical operations were moved back to Guangdong. This action brought him trouble later on, when the Chinese Nationalist government accused him of collaboration with the enemy. The charges were quashed, but the post-war years were unhappy for Chun, with a lack of funds affecting morale at the institute. Chun was also prevented from taking up an invitation to work with E.D. Merrill in the U.S. (at the bidding of Sun Yatsen University's chancellor).

A few years after the Chinese Communist Party took power, Sun Yatsen University was placed under the auspices of the new Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chun's institute became the South China Botanical Institute. In the same year (1954) Chun jointly proposed (at the National People's Congress) the creation of protected forest reserves in each Chinese province. The idea was endorsed by the State Council. He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1955 and steered clear of political trouble by publishing only in Chinese and not criticising Soviet science (unlike H.H. Hu). His work continued until the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, when he was accused of having illicit relations with foreign research institutions (through specimen exchange) and was persecuted. As the miseries of the Cultural Revolution peaked in 1971, so Chun reached his nadir. Terminally ill, he died in hospital that January, after which it was (falsely) reported that Chun, on his deathbed, had endorsed Chairman Mao's policies.

Sources:
J.H. Barnhart, 1965, Biographical Notes Upon Botanists, 1: 346
W.J. Haas, 1988, "Transplanting Botany to China: The Cross-Cultural Experience of Chen Huanyong", Arnoldia, 48: 9-25
H.L. Li, 1945, "Botanical Exploration in China during the last Twenty-Five Years", Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 156(1): 28.