"The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced"
About this Quote
Underneath, you can feel the competitive edge of imperial-era science. “Noticed by every author” is a subtle dismissal of earlier writers as spectators rather than investigators. The phrase “attempted to give some description” lands like a gentle but pointed critique: their methods are hearsy, impressionistic, insufficiently precise. Fortune positions himself as the man who will finally turn an aesthetic practice into reproducible technique.
Context matters. Fortune traveled in East Asia as a botanist during an era when European empires treated plants as strategic assets. The fascination with “how the effect is produced” isn’t only curiosity about horticultural craft; it’s curiosity about control. If a culture can miniaturize a tree, then the process can be extracted, translated, commercialized. The sentence also reveals a characteristic Western framing of East Asian arts as “effects” rather than traditions: the tree becomes a trick to decode, not a philosophy to inhabit.
It works because its restraint carries ambition. Fortune’s understated tone masks a larger project: converting wonder into knowledge, and knowledge into power.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Fortune, Robert. (n.d.). The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dwarfed-trees-of-the-chinese-and-japanese-83291/
Chicago Style
Fortune, Robert. "The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dwarfed-trees-of-the-chinese-and-japanese-83291/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dwarfed-trees-of-the-chinese-and-japanese-83291/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.
