Circulating knowledge: the scientific encounter between Joseph Banks and Puankhequa II during the ‘Canton System’ era

ABSTRACT During the first large-scale encounter between China and Britain, Puankhequa II (hereafter, Pan), the president of the company of merchants in the Thirteen Factories period, played a key role as an intermediary in scientific exchanges. Pan’s position and expertise in natural history enabled him to support natural history collectors within Joseph Banks’s empire of knowledge. This study examines the gifts and letters exchanged between Pan and Banks, alongside an analysis of Pan’s late work, Miscellaneous odes of the West (Xiyangzayong), to illustrate an important aspect of the Sino-British scientific and cultural encounters during that period. It reveals that Western scientific inquiries into China primarily focused on domains such as natural history, geography, cartography, climatology, horticulture and traditional Chinese craftsmanship, and that the scientific and cultural encounters of this era exhibited conspicuous bidirectionality. Moreover, Pan’s writings reflect the ‘contradictory’ perspective that many Chinese held toward the West. While Pan was intrigued by Western technologies, he regarded them primarily as curiosities, mirroring the broader Chinese attitude toward Western science at the time.