Science Quote by Robert Fortune

Fortune’s line reads like a mild ethnographic aside, but it’s really a colonial-era power snapshot disguised as horticultural color. He frames the Chinese gardener’s devotion as almost irrational - “so high… in the favour” that the worker will supposedly defy an employer, even quit outright, rather than abandon a beloved plant. On the surface, it’s admiration: an image of craft pride strong enough to risk livelihood. Underneath, it converts a person into a case study: the gardener becomes a specimen of “Chinese” temperament, useful for explaining why certain plants thrive, circulate, or resist Western control.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet ideological work. “Even against the wishes of his employer” assumes a hierarchy in which the employer’s preference is the natural baseline and the gardener’s expertise is an inconvenience. It’s a neat inversion: the one with hands-on knowledge is cast as stubborn; the one with money is cast as reasonable. Fortune’s attention isn’t really labor politics, though it brushes them. It’s about access. If local growers will “cultivate them extensively” regardless of orders, then plant varieties and cultivation secrets are not simply commodities to be purchased; they’re embedded in personal loyalties, habits, and cultural prestige.

That matters in Fortune’s historical moment, when British collectors and scientists were extracting botanical knowledge across Asia to fuel imperial agriculture and taste. The “favourite flower” is doing double duty: it’s romance for the reader, and it’s a warning label for the would-be importer. You’re not just buying plants. You’re tangling with attachments that don’t answer to your market logic.