Armand David

Tan Weidao (谭卫道; September 7, 1826 – November 10, 1900), born Armand David (full name Jean Pierre Armand David; French; also transliterated in Chinese as 阿曼德·戴维 or 阿曼德·大卫), was a French Basque, a 19th-century Catholic Lazarist (Congregation of the Mission) and a naturalist whose main fields were zoology and botany. In 1869 he saw the giant panda in Sichuan and was the first scientist to realize that the giant panda might be a species unique to China.

Life

David was born in the village of Espelette, in the arrondissement of Bayonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, on the border between France and Spain. Before he joined the Congregation of the Mission in 1848, he had already shown a love of the natural sciences.

In 1862 he was ordained a priest and was soon sent to Beijing, China, where he began collecting material for a natural history museum. His collections were mainly zoological, but were also rich in botany, geology and paleontology.

Later, at the request of the French government, the important specimens he had collected were sent to Paris, where they caused a great sensation and aroused intense interest. The Jardin des Plantes in Paris commissioned him to go out to China again to collect further specimens. He succeeded in obtaining many specimens of animals and plants then unknown, and the contribution of his comprehensive collections to the development of systematic zoology, and especially to the advance of zoogeography, was generally recognized by the scientific community.

Père David later summarized his research in his address to the International Catholic Scientific Congress held in Paris in April 1888. He had discovered more than 200 kinds of animals in China, 63 of them then unknown to zoologists, and 807 species of birds, 65 of which had never been described before. He did extensive work collecting reptiles, anurans and fish, and sent them to taxonomists for further study. He also collected moths and insects in great numbers, most of them unknown at the time. The contribution of Père David's scientific journeys to botany can be roughly gauged from the following facts: among the rhododendrons he collected there were no fewer than fifty-two new species, and among his primroses about forty were then unknown, while the mountains of western China held a still more considerable number of unknown plants. Most of these specimens were sent to the museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The “davidii” in Buddleja davidii, the scientific name of the butterfly bush, commemorates his discovery of this species. There are also Acer davidii (青榨槭), Hemiptelea davidii (刺榆), Rosa davidii (西北蔷薇), Sophora davidii (白刺花) and Davidia involucrata (珙桐).

From Europe's point of view, Père David's greatest discoveries were “Père David's deer,” the milu, found in 1866 in the imperial hunting park in Beijing, and the giant panda, found in 1869 at Dengchigou in Baoxing County, Sichuan. The former had long since disappeared from the wild, and only a small number were preserved in the imperial enclosure; but David sent milu specimens back to Europe, making the species known to science; only later were live milu taken to Europe by others. The milu in China today were reintroduced from Europe.

In the midst of his work as a naturalist, Père David did not neglect his work as a missionary; he was also admired for faithfully keeping the rule of his congregation and for his devotion to missionary work. He died in Paris, France, on November 10, 1900, aged 74.

Profile

• Name: Jean Pierre Armand David (谭卫道)
• Born: Armand David, September 7, 1826, Espelette, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France
• Died: November 10, 1900 (aged 74), Paris, France
• Religion: Catholic
• Nationality: French
• Ethnicity: Basque
• Occupation: missionary, botanist, zoologist
• Holy orders: Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists)