Plants and Ethnic Culture of Xishuangbanna, written by Prof. Pei Shengji of the Kunming Institute of Botany, CAS, and Prof. Xu Youkai of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, CAS, has recently been published by Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publishers.

Plants provide the products people need for clothing, food, shelter, transport, health and their material and spiritual life, and have played a vital role throughout tens of thousands of years of human civilization. Culture is the sum of human knowledge, beliefs and values, and of the material and spiritual capacities and wealth created through social practice. As one of the world's most biodiverse regions and home to thirteen ethnic groups, Xishuangbanna in Yunnan has rich ethnic cultural diversity. In this tropical region where biological and cultural diversity are intertwined, plants and culture have merged to form unique ethnobiocultural landscapes: local biological resources have nurtured local peoples and contributed greatly to the formation and development of their cultures.

Taking ethnobotany — the study of the relationships between plants and people — as its starting point, the book examines more than 200 plants of Xishuangbanna in relation to food culture, religious culture, medicinal culture, craft culture and landscape culture, systematically presenting the cultural behaviour and practice of plant use and their relationship with local ethnic cultures. It consists of a general part and a species-by-species part.

The book has 340,000 characters, 217 pages and more than 500 colour photographs. Vividly written and scientifically rich, it represents the authors' lifelong work on the botany of Xishuangbanna.