Beijing itself has 17 native varieties of orchid and most of them have little aesthetic value. The Beijing Botanical Garden began introducing different varieties into its collection in 1999. In the past four years, 2,000 global varieties have been introduced from 50 countries around the world, such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Africa and Australia. Southeast Asia has also been represented.

Among the collection housed at the conservatory, over 200 are of a rare variety and over 1,000 are rare for the fact that people have not seen them, according to Chen Jinyong, vice-director of the conservatory.

Beijing has now one of the finest, globally prolific preservation collections of orchid in the world.

The cataloguing and viewing of this rare and precious collection will take time. To date, less than one-third of the collection has been seen and over 1,000 orchids are still waiting to be allocated Chinese names. Conservation techniques determine the viewing process as a single rare orchid will only be viewed once five orchids of the same type have been cultivated.

Vice-director Chen says that this is less about discrimination and more about establishing a collection that reflects the principles of the conservatory’s curatorship. Thus, an orchid needs to have ornamental qualities, an embodied native characteristic and contain some plant-type diversity. In other words, they need to be typical of their country of origin in order to build a collection that is representative of the planet’s orchid species.

The Beijing Botanical Garden Conservatory has attained a worldwide reputation and holds influence with orchid curators from around the world. Recently, Japan expressed interest in reviewing the collection and some of the conservatory’s procedures.

(China.org.cn by Zhang Tingting, February 18, 2002)