ABSTRACT
Zuo Zongtang's practices of cultivating garden vegetables and his plans to bring vegetable seeds to Hami open up a window onto the aesthetics and politics of horticulture in Qing borderlands in the late-nineteenth century. Zuo is best known for his military campaigns in the northwest of the empire which succeeded in suppressing the so-called 'Muslim Rebellions' and reconquering the empire's westernmost territory, Xinjiang, in a period of imperial disarray. Evidence of the movement of seeds and vegetable varieties from China proper to Gansu and Xinjiang in the late nineteenth century is reason to reassess late Qing history in light of the relationship between horticulture and settler colonialism around the world. The spread of vegetable seeds and other horticultural specimens from the center of the Qing Empire to the northwestern peripheries in nineteenth century does not seem to have exhibited the same patterns of unequal exchange nor the same organizing principles as the transfer of biological materials through European colonial networks.
