Another in a series of blog posts relating to the museum’s “cataloging the archives” project
The UCMP archives contain five large scrapbooks containing museum-related newspaper clippings dating from 1948 to 1989. The earliest clippings in the oldest scrapbook concern UCMP paleobotanist Ralph Chaney‘s 1948 trip to central China to see for himself, Metasequoia, a tree thought to have been extinct since the Miocene. The existence of this living fossil had just been publicized in a paper by Hu and Cheng1. The San Francisco Chronicle made a big deal about Chaney’s trip, sending one of their own writers along, who filed a series of reports.
But it was a later clipping from the October 20, 1953 Daily Californian that caught my attention. It concerned an interesting relationship between Chaney and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Here’s an excerpt:
“Chaney, on a routine trip to Tokyo and the Far East in 1949, personally presented the Emperor with five Dawn Redwood [Metasequoia] trees, which were planted on the grounds of his estate in Tokyo.
“Chaney had known the Emperor from past visits to Japan, and said yesterday he was inspired to make the gift when he heard that Hirohito was very interested in the tree.
“In 1949, when Chaney was in China, he procured five seedlings of the recently discovered tree and delivered them to the Emperor.
“Chaney received occasional news of the progress of the trees, and made a point of stopping to see them whenever he was in Japan. When Crown Prince Akihito visited the campus recently, he presented the professor with a progress report of the trees sent from Hirohito.”
Then, while looking at digital photos of Chaney’s lantern slide collection — volunteer photographer Dave Strauss has photographed Chaney’s entire collection of lantern slides and glass negatives for the museum — I noticed one of a Japanese gentleman standing next to what looked like a Metasequoia sapling. Hmmm …. So I went online and studied a number of photographs of Hirohito. I am now convinced that the image is of the Emperor himself with one of Chaney’s saplings!
And then a clipping from the May 6, 1969, University of California Clip Sheet provided this progress report: “By now, the Japanese have planted 100,000 dawn redwoods, all descended from Chaney’s seedlings.”
You never know what cool story you’re going to find in the archives!
See other blog posts in this series:
• Cataloging the archives: Geology camp 100 years ago
• Cataloging the archives: Unearthing a type
• The Amber Files: Words from the University Explorer
See newsletter articles about the archive cataloging project:
• The Mellon Foundation CLIR grant
• Cataloging the archives: Update I
• Saluting our volunteers [primarily about our volunteers working on the cataloging project]
Or search UCMP’s archival collections yourself!
1Hu, H.H., and W.C. Cheng. 1948. On the new family Metasequoiaceae and on Metasequoia glyptostroboides, a living species of the genus Metasequoia found in Szechuan and Hupeh. Bulletin of the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology New Series 1(2):153-161.