As chaplain on a ship of the Swedish East India Company, Linnaeus’
student, Pehr Osbeck, reached south China in 1751. Wherever
circumstances permitted, he went on land to collect natural objects and
to make natural history observations about a region that was a tabula
rasa for natural history in general, and the project of Linnaean botany
in particular.

This paper will address how a characteristic feature of the
knowledge-making process of eighteenth-century natural history was
reflected in the publication of the accumulated material; namely, the
insight that in the rapidly growing field of natural history, and botany
in particular, projects with large regional, let alone global,
aspirations were, by their nature, works in progress. They could not be
accomplished by an individual scholar, nor achieved in a single, one-off
publication because of the continuing stream of new information and the
many inevitable errors that constantly demanded correction.