Неміс ботанігі және саяхатшысы Энгельберт Кемпфер туралы

German botanist (1651–1716)

Engelbert Kaempfer (16 September 16512 November 1716) from Lemgo was a German naturalist, physician, explorer and writer known for his tour of Russia, Persia, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan between 1683 and 1693. He wrote two books about his travels. Amoenitatum exoticarum, published in 1712, is important for its medical observations and the first extensive description of Japanese plants (Flora Japonica). His History of Japan, published posthumously in 1727, was the chief source of Western knowledge about the country throughout the 18th and mid 19th centuries, when it was closed to foreigners.

Kaempfer was born at Lemgo in the Principality of Lippe, within the Holy Roman Empire. His father was a pastor and his mother helped support the congregation. He studied at Hameln, Lüneburg, Hamburg, Lübeck and Danzig (Gdańsk), and after graduating at Kraków, spent four years at Königsberg in Prussia, studying medicine and natural science.

In 1681, Kaempfer visited Uppsala in Sweden, where he was offered inducements to settle. His desire for foreign travel led him to become secretary to the second embassy of the Swedish ambassador Ludvig Fabritius, whom Charles XI sent through Russia to Persia in 1683. Kaempfer's travelogue of this embassy was later published. He reached Persia by way of Moscow, Kazan and Astrakhan, landing at Nizabad "in Shirvan" (now in Azerbaijan) after a voyage in the Caspian Sea. From Shemakha in Shirvan, he made an expedition to the Baku peninsula, being perhaps the first modern scientist to visit the "fields of eternal fire" around Baku. In 1684 Kaempfer reached Isfahan, then the Persian capital. When after a stay of more than a year the Swedish embassy prepared to return to its homeland, Kaempfer joined the fleet of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Persian Gulf as chief surgeon. In spite of fever caught at Bandar Abbas, he saw something of Arabia (visiting Muscat in 1688) and many of the western coastlands of India.

In September 1689, Kaempfer reached Batavia. He spent the following winter studying Javanese natural history. In May 1690 he set out for Japan as physician to the VOC trading post in Nagasaki. En route to Japan, the ship in which he sailed touched at Siam, whose capital he visited. He recorded his meeting with Kosa Pan, the Siamese Minister and former ambassador to France. In September 1690 Kaempfer arrived in Nagasaki, the only Japanese port then open to Dutch and Chinese ships. Kaempfer stayed two years in Japan, during which time he twice visited Edo and the shōgun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. He conducted extensive studies on local plants, many of which were published in his "Flora Japonica" (part of Amoenitatum Exoticarum). When he visited Buddhist monks in Nagasaki in February 1691, he was the first western scholar to describe the tree Ginkgo biloba. He brought some Ginkgo seeds back that were planted in the botanical garden in Utrecht. The trees have survived to the 21st century. (The curious "–kgo" spelling has long been considered to be an error Kaempfer made in his notes, but Nagata et al. showed that it was the spelling of his interpreter, Genemon Imamura, who spoke the dialect of Nagasaki. Kaempfer also collected materials and information on Japanese acupuncture and moxibustion. His treatise on the cure of colic (Japanese senki) using needles and his presentation of a Japanese "Moxa mirror" had a considerable influence on the reception of Far Eastern medicine in 18th century Europe. In his posthumously published notes on Japan, he mixes careful observation with a strong desire to make these observations conform to European conceptions of Asia. He argues that the Japanese have a separate ethnic origin from the Chinese and claims they descend directly from the builders of the Tower of Babel. Thus he links Shinto to Babylonian religion. Kaempfer settled in his native city of Lemgo, where he became the physician of the Count of Lippe. In Germany he published the book Amoenitatum exoticarum (Lemgo 1712). Among many other Japanese plants, it included an illustration of a camellia and introduced 23 varieties. It was notable for its description of the electric eel, acupuncture, moxibustion, and the hyena. This was the first scientific description of the hyena (about which until then only confused and downright fanciful things had been "reported" since antiquity), and Linnaeus used it extensively. It can be argued that the modern zoological name of the striped hyena, Hyaena hyaena Linnaeus, could or should include the name Kaempfer based on the tradition of taxonomic naming based on who described something first. Kaempfer's other work was also often praised by Linnaeus, including his systematic description of tea, as well as his other work on Japanese plants, and Linnaeus adopted some of Kaempfer's plant names, such as Ginkgo. In 1716, Kaempfer died at Lemgo. Most of his manuscripts and many objects from his collection are preserved in the British Library and the British Museum. Kaempfer's works on Japan had a profound influence on European and German research on East Asia, which culminated in the studies by Philipp Franz von Siebold.

Van Der Pas, Peter W.: Kaempfer, Engelbert. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Kapitza, Peter: Engelbert Kaempfer und die europäische Aufklärung. Dem Andenken des Lemgoer Reisenden aus Anlaß seines 350. Geburtstags am 16. September 2001. München: Iudicum Verlag, 2002. Haberland, Detlef (Hrsg. ): Engelbert Kaempfer – Werk und Wirkung. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 1993. Haberland, Detlef (Hrsg. ): Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716): Ein Gelehrtenleben zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2005. David Mervart: "A closed country in the open seas: Engelbert Kaempfer's Japanese solution for European modernity's predicament," in: History of European Ideas, 35,3 (2009), 321–329. Andreas W. Daum: "German Naturalists in the Pacific around 1800: Entanglement, Autonomy, and a Transnational Culture of Expertise,” in Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Frank Biess and Ulrike Strasser. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019, 79 102.