20 Facts About Joseph Rock

Joseph Francis Charles Rock was an Austrian-American botanist, explorer, geographer, linguist, ethnographer and photographer.

Josef Franz Karl Rock was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a steward of a Polish count.

Joseph Rock eventually ended up in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1907, where he would remain for 13 years.

In 1913 Joseph Rock was part of a small expedition to the remote Palmyra Atoll, which resulted in the publication of a comprehensive description of its flora.

In 1920 Joseph Rock left Hawaii for what would prove to be decades of residence and expeditions in Asia, mostly in Western China.

The valley of Lijiang is dominated by the Yulong range, at whose foot Joseph Rock established a residence in the village of Nguluko.

Nevertheless, Joseph Rock managed to collect and send back to his sponsors in the US large quantities of plant and bird specimens, as well as many thousands of photographs of geographical, botanical, ethnographic and historical interest.

Joseph Rock witnessed some of the brutal consequences of the Golok rebellions when the Warlord general Ma Qi's Chinese Muslim army campaigned against the fiercely independent nomadic Goloks and ravaged the Labrang Monastery.

Joseph Rock finally left Choni in March 1927, but not before acquiring from Choni's famous printing press complete sets of the Kanjur and Tanjur canon of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, 317 volumes in total, printed from 18th century wood blocks considered among the very finest quality.

Joseph Rock approached closer to Minya Konka than any other Westerner and with characteristic romantic exaggeration declared it to be higher than Everest, although at the time he was not alone in this wishful miscalculation.

Joseph Rock wrote a two volume cultural history of the Nakhi and many studies of the texts and ritual ceremonies of the Dongba, a term that refers to both the religious texts and the shaman priests who composed them.

Joseph Rock worked with a number of dongba priests to produce transcriptions and detailed readings of the most important ceremonial texts, as well as a dictionary-encyclopedia.

Joseph Rock collected numerous manuscripts or "books" and is responsible for the large majority of the Nakhi works that exist outside of China, a third of all surviving Nakhi texts, huge numbers of which were destroyed particularly during the Cultural Revolution.

Joseph Rock spent a year in southern Vietnam, which gave him a relatively stable circumstance for writing until further Japanese advances forced him out.

Joseph Rock shipped his manuscripts prepared for publication and much of his collection to safety in Europe, but all were lost when the ship was torpedoed in the Arabian Sea.

However, in the aftermath of the defeat of Japan, communist forces soon took control of Lijiang, making life increasingly difficult for the few foreigners residing there, and Joseph Rock left with his collections and manuscripts for the last time in August 1949.

Joseph Rock completed his monumental A Nakhi-English Dictionary Encyclopedia, both a dictionary of the Dongba script and an encyclopedia of Nakhi culture, and arranged for its publication in the year of his death in 1962.

Joseph Rock never married, and there is no clear evidence that he ever had an intimate relationship of any kind.

Joseph Rock generally viewed the Chinese harshly and temperamentally sided with the non-Han peoples among whom he lived and explored, who had been pushed into these remote areas by Chinese's insatiable need for all good cultivatable land.

However, Joseph Rock developed a real affection and admiration for the Nakhi, who he tended to see as a comparatively unspoiled people, and in the later years of his time in China repeatedly declared his wish to live out his life in Lijiang.