1. India: Survey and colonial curation

In India, natural history collections helped make museums possible. From the late 18th century onward, the East India Company gathered plants, animals, minerals, drawings, manuscripts, and manufactured objects through a widening network of surveys, gardens, libraries, and repositories. These included the company’s survey operations; the Calcutta Botanic Garden under its superintendent, William Roxburgh (1751–1815); the library and collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal; and the museum in Calcutta that would later become the Indian Museum. These were not isolated projects. Together, they formed a larger system for accumulating, moving, and reorganizing knowledge about the subcontinent. Natural history specimens were central to that system because they turned field collection into public and institutional knowledge.Footnote ⁶

The importance of natural history becomes even clearer when we look at the careers of early collectors. Francis Buchanan (1762–1829; later Buchanan-Hamilton), a surgeon-naturalist, produced large surveys of Bengal, Mysore, and Nepal, gathering information on plants, animals, fish, climate, topography, agriculture, commerce, and social life. Buchanan corresponded with Roxburgh, sending him seeds and specimens and relying on him for identifications. He also belonged to a wider East India Company natural history world that included figures such as Benjamin Heyne (1770–1819) and, later, Nathaniel Wallich (1786–1854). Buchanan, Heyne, and Wallich were all surgeons by training. During his Nepal mission, Buchanan relied for his botanical work on Babu Ramajai Bhattacharji, a Bengali Brahman from Calcutta, who later accompanied him on his Bengal survey. His collections were often the first of their kind from the places he visited, and his reports had a value that went far beyond their immediate administrative use. Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821), a military surveyor, also depended on Indian assistants trained by the Kavali brothers—Kavali Venkata Borayya and Kavali Venkata Lakshmayya. In southern India, he combined his cartographic skills with the relentless collection of inscriptions and manuscripts. Another East India Company officer, Charles Stuart (1758–1828), likewise illustrates how military men participated in wider regimes of collecting and classification, even when their interests extended beyond natural history proper into antiquarian and ethnographic accumulation. What matters here is not the scale of their collecting, but what it reveals—at the time, knowledge gathering was still a broad rather than a narrow discipline. Natural history, culture, geography, language, and revenue were often assembled in one larger descriptive, imperial project.Footnote ⁷

This project did not rest on European initiative alone. It depended on Indian assistants, scholars, and artists; guides, landholders, and village elders; revenue officials, soldiers, and other intermediaries who made field knowledge usable. Their work went far beyond translation. They identified local names for plants, places, and objects; guided collectors to sites; copied inscriptions and manuscripts; prepared drawings; arranged interviews; and mediated between official inquiry and local memory. Buchanan’s surveys depended on Ramajai Bhattacharji and other community leaders, while Mackenzie relied on Indian assistants trained by the Kavali brothers, especially in the collection of textual records and oral traditions from temples, towns, and villages. The field, then, was not a simple scene of extraction. It was a stratified world of brokerage, in which local expertise was essential but unevenly credited.Footnote ⁸

Natural history collections make this process especially visible. Before a specimen could appear as a museum object, it had to be found, identified, sketched, described, cut, packed, and transported. Buchanan’s work shows how much mediation this required. He compared plants with Roxburgh’s drawings and descriptions, sent living materials and specimens back to Calcutta, and relied on Ramajai Bhattacharji as well as an unnamed Indian painter who recorded species in the field. Yet this collaboration also reorganized the knowledge it gathered. Survey instructions decided in advance what counted as useful: agriculture, climate, commerce, customs, languages, minerals, and natural products. Local expertise thus entered colonial archives through categories shaped by administrative and orientalist priorities.Footnote ⁹

This imbalance became even greater once collections entered museums and scientific institutions. During the 19th century, broad survey collecting gave way to more specialized institutions and more formal systems of display. The British government’s acceptance of the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s collections and the founding of the Indian Museum marked a key step in this transition. These collections included contributions from Indian notables such as Rajendra Mallick, Begum Samroo, and Kalikissen Bahadur. Yet display, trusteeship, and classification remained largely under colonial control. Museums did not simply preserve collected materials. They reorganized them, deciding what would be shown, how it would be labeled, and what kind of science it would appear to represent. Metropolitan museums helped “bring empire home” by turning distant imperial expeditions, collections, and colonial encounters into public displays that conveyed imperial prestige, national authority, and the promise that empire produced useful knowledge for the metropole.Footnote ¹⁰

The Indian case shows asymmetric co-curation at work in the East India Company’s survey world. Ramajai Bhattacharji, the Kavali brothers, and other intermediaries helped turn plants, animals, inscriptions, and manuscripts into usable collections. Yet when these materials entered archives and museums, their meanings were organized largely through colonial systems of display, trusteeship, and classification. The result was not the absence of collaboration, but collaboration whose products were claimed through unequal curatorial authority.Footnote ¹¹

2. China: Missionary museums, technical labor, and unequal curation

In China, natural history museums developed through a different institutional world. Unlike in British India, they did not grow out of a Company-state survey apparatus. They emerged instead from treaty-port, missionary, and learned-society networks, especially in Shanghai. Two institutions were central to this story: the Jesuit-run Zikawei Museum and the Shanghai Museum of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Both brought together collection, preservation, research, and display, and both depended on Chinese technical and intermediary labor to turn specimens into public knowledge.Footnote ¹²

The foreign figures linked to these museums came from different institutional worlds. The Zikawei Museum emerged from Jesuit scientific culture. It first followed the model of the Paris Natural History Museum, placing more emphasis on collecting, classifying, and identifying specimens than on public exhibitions. The French missionary Armand David (1826–1900) helped connect missionary collecting with museum practice, and his work in China contributed to the training of Wang Shuheng, an early Chinese taxidermist later associated with the Shanghai Museum. The Shanghai Museum developed along a different path. It was shaped by customs officials, learned-society naturalists, and treaty-port expatriates. In the early 20th century, John David Digues La Touche (1861–1936), a customs officer and ornithologist, reorganized and expanded the museum’s bird collection, while the British naturalist Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885–1954) later strengthened its public profile through exhibition design and habitat dioramas.Footnote ¹³

As in India, collecting in China depended on local collaborators whose work went far beyond translation or minor assistance. Foreign naturalists needed Chinese intermediaries not only because of language, but also because access to people, places, routes, and specimens required social and practical knowledge. Chinese intermediaries located, collected, prepared, mounted, and sometimes identified specimens. They also helped foreign naturalists move through environments where official suspicion, political unrest, and social barriers could matter as much as terrain. Charles Ford’s (1844–1927) return from an inland expedition during the Canton riot of 1883 makes this dependence clear: he was the only foreigner among 150 Chinese passengers on a Chinese junk, and most of the specimens he brought back were processed by Chinese hands. His department, apart from one newly acquired assistant, was staffed entirely by Chinese workers.Footnote ¹⁴

The Shanghai material gives this broader pattern a more institutional form. Wang Shuheng’s training in taxidermy helped make the opening of the Shanghai Museum possible in 1874. Later, the museum’s growth depended heavily on Tang Wangwang, a professional hunter from Fuzhou whom La Touche first met through the feather trade and then trained in taxidermy. Tang and his family collected birds in the field, learned to preserve them there, and supplied many of the specimens that entered the Shanghai and Zikawei Museums. La Touche’s ornithological work relied heavily on these materials. He acknowledged that dependence by placing a photograph of the Tang family as the frontispiece to the second volume of A Handbook of the Birds of Eastern China. Seen this way, the Chinese case looks less like a simple story of foreign scientific initiative than a history of asymmetric co-curation, in which Chinese field and technical labor made foreign-run museum authority possible.Footnote ¹⁵

These collections were not casual cabinets of curiosities. By the 1930s, the Zikawei Museum, later known as the Heude Museum, held nearly 1,000 mammal skins, more than 1,000 animal skulls, several large-mammal skeletons, thousands of bird specimens, nearly 1,500 species of mollusks from the Yangtze region, and around 50,000 plant specimens. The Shanghai Museum followed a similar path toward specialization. After its early years as a general showroom, it concentrated increasingly on biological specimens from China and Asia, with bird collections becoming especially prominent after its early 20th-century reorganization. The scale of these collections shows that Chinese hunters, fieldworkers, and taxidermists were not peripheral to museum work. Their labor helped create the very abundance that made these institutions appear scientifically authoritative.Footnote ¹⁶

The workshop makes this dependence even clearer. Animal bodies did not become museum specimens by themselves. They had to be skinned, preserved, mounted, and repaired for display. At the Shanghai Museum, taxidermy was not simply a finished Western technique imported from abroad; it had to be taught, practiced, and routinized locally. By the 1890s, the museum recognized that it could not depend on foreign preparators alone and would have to cultivate Chinese expertise. After Tang Wangwang joined the museum in 1907, he and his family turned specimen preparation into a technical lineage that lasted across generations and spread into museums, laboratories, and universities across China. Their work shows that Chinese technical labor was not peripheral to natural history museums. It was part of the infrastructure that made collection, exhibition, and scientific authority possible.Footnote ¹⁷

The Chinese case shows asymmetric co-curation in a treaty-port and missionary setting rather than in a colonial survey state. Chinese clerics, hunters, illustrators, and taxidermists helped locate, prepare, mount, and preserve the specimens that gave the Zikawei and Shanghai Museums their public and scientific authority. Yet the power to catalog, publish, exhibit, and interpret these collections remained concentrated largely in foreign-run institutions and foreign-language scholarly networks. As in India, collaboration made museum knowledge possible, but it did not produce equal curatorial power.Footnote ¹⁸

3. Beyond India and China: The wider life of asymmetric co-curation

The cases of India and China show that museum authority was not simply produced by institutions alone. It was made through asymmetric co-curation, a process that helps us move beyond two simpler stories, one in which museums appear only as instruments imposed from above, and another in which collaboration is mistaken for equality.

The comparison does not treat India and China as politically identical. Rather, it shows how different imperial settings organized labor into museum authority in comparable ways. In India, museum knowledge was tied more directly to East India Company surveys and colonial administration. In China, it emerged more often through missionary, treaty-port, and learned-society networks. In both settings, distributed labor was converted into institutional authority.

Asymmetric co-curation was not confined to India and China. It may also help us think about museums in Russia, Latin America, Southeast Asia, southern Africa, and settler-colonial contexts such as Australia and North America, where Indigenous guides, local collectors, artisans, translators, and specimen preparators often made collections possible without receiving equal curatorial power. It may also apply to metropolitan museums whose displays and catalogs transformed colonial fieldwork into institutional expertise while obscuring the many hands that produced their collections.

To recover these histories is to recast museum authority itself. Professional expertise did not simply replace amateur, artisanal, or intermediary labor; it was built through the incorporation, regulation, and frequent erasure of that labor. Museums were not merely storehouses of objects or straightforward instruments of rule. They were institutions in which imperial power and heterogeneous collaboration were assembled in material form. What they presented as neutral and objective knowledge rested on prior acts of mediation that were social, technical, and unequal.

Seen in this light, the museum appears less as the settled possession of expert institutions than as a public arena where authority is made, staged, and contested. The histories of the Indian and Chinese museums discussed here do more than clarify the different imperial conditions under which these museums emerged. They bear on present questions about museums as public institutions—who gets to produce knowledge; whose labor remains visible or disappears; and how claims to expertise are authorized, challenged, or shared.