The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Secret Land of Myanmar

In the great tradition of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, this book is a first-person narrative of daunting travel and scientific discovery in the little-known country of Myanmar. Dr. Kress explored many areas in this enigmatic country, surveying its teak forests, bamboo thickets, timber plantations, rivers, and mangroves to document its incredible botanical diversity. Myanmar is one of the great biodiversity "hot spots" in Asia, but because of its social isolation and reputation for political repression it has been closed to—or avoided by—many scientists. Nevertheless, Dr. Kress was determined to search for and record plants that had not been studied since they were first discovered by Western botanists over a century ago. Among the rarities he came upon was a new species of plant called "the weeping goldsmith," a ginger flower whose Burmese name was derived from the legend that the local goldsmiths were reduced to tears because none of their own creations could rival its exquisiteness.

Dr. Kress also relates how he came to appreciate the people and culture of Myanmar through an understanding of their flora, natural habitats, and human-dominated environments. Included are fascinating excerpts from his field journals that serve as counterpoints to the accounts of earlier plant explorers. Illustrating the text are some 200 of Dr. Kress's own color photographs of the incredible plants, people, landscapes, and temples he witnessed in his travels as well as 30 archival images of Burma taken by past explorers. The back matter features an illustrated portfolio of representative native plants.

This lively armchairexploration should appeal to a general readership as well as to botanists, conservationists, and environmentalists.

A distinguished Curator and Research Scientest at the Smithsonian Institution, W. John Kress, recounts his natural history exploration over the course of nine years in the wild lands of Myanmar in search of rare, beautiful, and scientifically unknown plants.

The Barnes & Noble Review

"One of my jobs," writes Smithsonian Institution botanist Kress, "is to travel to remote areas to document the remaining unknown plant diversity." To wit, his typical day in the salt mines is spent surrounded by wildflowers -- the "weeping goldsmith" being one such -- in an exotic locale. Poor baby. Kress further activates your envy bone by returning with achingly spectacular photographs of landscape and flora, and an old-fashioned field journal of everyday marvels that he will polish into a book, carefully retaining the freshness of being there: sheltering under a giant fig tree from the monsoon rains, cresting a pine ridge to discover a rare ginger in bloom, pounding a local brew in the afternoon s 113-degree heat. In this instance, "there" is staggeringly beautiful Myanmar, where, nevertheless, not all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Myanmar s government -- a corrupt, crackpot junta of homicidal golfers with a talent for social control and immiseration, and a pathological determination to keep the rest of the world at a cool remove -- throws one obstacle after another in Kress's path. Yet despite the bureaucratic restrictions, he manages to cover significant ground. The country is indeed a biodiversity hotspot, as Kress s photo documentation attests; it is also a place of great otherness when approached from the West, a land where you can t throw a betel nut without hitting a gilded pagoda. In an agreeably formal, slightly antique voice, Kress draws the country out for the reader: its cloud forests, bamboo villages, and waterways; rice paddies, temples, and rattletrap river towns; Bengal tigers, mountain spirits, and true jade. Through all the strange weather and government flapdoodle, the ethnic complexities and swarms of mosquitoes -- not to forget the day he inadvertently lunched on a hallucinogenic plant -- shines Kress s passionate mission to catalog the country s plants, the most loving gift this taxonomist could give to the Myanma people. --Peter Lewis

W. John Kress is a Curator of Botany and Research Scientist at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the co-author of A checklist of the trees, shrubs, herbs, and climbers of Myanmar and Plant Conservation — A Natural History Approach, and has written many botanical articles. Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and has written many books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, and Light at the Edge of the World.