Beschreibung:

A collection of approximately 370 original botanical watercolours done at Amoy by Dr Bun-Ko, circa 1700, watercolours of flowers, fruit and plants on individual sheets of laid mulberry paper, each identified in Chinese script and mostly within pen and ink ruled borders, some with additional manuscript notes, the majority inscribed in a contemporary hand 'Done at Emoy in China by Doctor Bun-Ko, bro[ugh]t thence by Mr Chr[istopher] Brewster 1701' to lower margins, the largest sheet 38 x 22cm, but mostly 22 x 22cm and similar sizes James Cuninghame, a Scottish physician attached to the East India Company's 'Factory' in Amoy, commissioned a set of coloured drawings of indigenous plants from a Chinese physician, Dr Bun-Ko. Cuninghame asked Christopher Brewster to take the pictures, together with herbarium specimens, back to England, and present them to James Petiver in 1701. Petiver was a scholarly apothecary who was very actively involved with the Chelsea Physic Garden. The number of species collected by Cuninghame is estimated at nearly 600. The British Library holds 789 of the drawings in Addit. MS. 5292. Two other volumes containing 400 and 249 drawings made at Amoy form Addit. MSS. 5293, 5294. 'Cuninghame was the first European to have successfully returned botanical collections from China, and he sent to other botanists, including Dubois, Pluknet, and Petiver, many new plants including flowering and fruiting specimens of tea, for which he was repeatedly thanked in their works', (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). (approx. 370)