Robert Saunders, an East India Company surgeon, travelled with Samuel Turner's embassy from Bengal to the Panchen Lama in 1783. His report, read to the Royal Society in 1789 and printed in the Philosophical Transactions, is a day-by-day naturalist's diary: thermometer readings, limestone and chalk beds, wild strawberries, firs, rhubarb, poisoned arrows, goitre, borax and salt. Tartars barely appear. The only mention is a remark that true rhubarb grows in the northern provinces of China, in Tartary and in the Russian dominions. This corpus copy is the 1789 journal printing.
How they knew
Eyewitness
Who “Tartar” means here
Tartary is used only once, as a geographical label for the cold lands north of China where rhubarb grows. No Tartar people are described.
Why read it
A reminder that for an eighteenth-century naturalist, Tartary was simply the name of a region on the map, the home of the rhubarb trade.
Watch out
Almost nothing here is about Tartars. The OCR prints the long s as f and garbles some plant names.
Editorial contextAfter seeing a wild rhubarb near the snowline in Bhutan, Saunders notes that the true medicinal rhubarb grows in cold country: the north of China, Tartary and parts of Russia. He then describes his own experiment drying a root, which lost far less weight than the traders claimed. Rhubarb was one of the great goods Europeans associated with Tartary.
The true rhubarb (Rheum palmatum) is likewise the native of a cold climate ; and though China supplies us with much of this drug, it is known to be the growth of its more northern provinces, Tartary, and part of the Russian dominions.
Robert Saunders (Philosophical Transactions, 1789)