Naturalists of Korea: The Explorers Who Mapped Korea's Nature

Korean Naturalists is a collection of natural history vignettes focused on Korean nature. Each chapter portrays a natural historian who in some way has contributed to our present understanding of nature on the Korean peninsula, north and south. The book is also a story of Korean history, as human history and nature are inseparable. The chapters follow a pattern of science, biography and historical events that shaped the progress of natural history in Korea, from the earliest natural historian, Shin Saimdang in the sixteenth century, to Park Chun Hee in the 1960s. Korean natural history is treated in a western sense, and many of the players are western. However, the Koreans themselves are at the center of the accounts, as it is, and remains, a uniquely Korean story.

Entomology, ornithology, botany, ichthyology and other disciplines are included as each figure portrays their own field and passion of natural history, from Roy Chapman Andrews on Siberian Tigers to Seok Ju-myung on butterfly variation. The collection of figures is not the author's preference of east or west, but rather, those who made their mark on Korean natural history.