On this Day in Chinese History; 22 August

This day, 22 August, in 1659, the Polish Jesuit and missionary, Michał Boym, passed away. As one of the first European scientists to visit East Asia, Boym had created the first systematic botanical encyclopedia about China, the “Flora Sinensis”, that later was verified by experts as being a translation of the “Compendium of Materia Medica”, written by Li Mingzhen in the Ming Dynasty.