“The Lapponicum Sea”: Matter, Sense, and Affect in the Botanical Exploration of Southwest China and Tibet

Abstract

In his own mission to versify the planet, or at least an exemplary portion of it, Captain Francis Kingdon-Ward (1885–1958) returned repeatedly, even obsessively, to certain places on the alpine plateaus of Northwest Yunnan and Southeast Tibet, where the vegetation, refracted through the Aleph of what I shall argue was a deliberate, laborious, and disciplined optical practice, became liquid, a sea: