A contemporary of George Forrest and Frank Kingdon-Ward, Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti (1882–1940) was a distinguished Austrian botanist who joined Camillo Schneider on a plant-hunting expedition to Yunnan in 1914. Stranded by the outbreak of World War I, he spent five seasons exploring, surveying, and collecting botanical specimens—over 13,000 in total. His extensive travels took him throughout Yunnan and into Sichuan as far north as Muli, west across the Salween and Mekong rivers to the frontiers of Burma and Tibet, and finally through Guizhou and Hunan to Changsha. Repatriated in 1919, he published an account of his travels in 1927 titled Naturbilder aus Südwest-China.

This new English edition, translated and published by David Winstanley, includes substantial new material about Handel-Mazzetti’s life and personality.

Among the early plant hunters of Southwest China—such as Frank Kingdon-Ward, George Forrest, and Ernest Wilson—Handel-Mazzetti remains relatively lesser known. He met George Forrest in Lijiang two years before Joseph F. Rock arrived in the town. The two Austrians shared an amiable conversation while Rock was back in Vienna. Handel-Mazzetti would later serve as Keeper of the Botanical Department at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

This edition includes 48 black-and-white photographs by Handel-Mazzetti and 7 maps. Complete and unabridged, it also features a biography of the botanist.