ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a set of twenty-six wooden panels currently held at Kew’s Economic Botany Collection. Katō Chikusai produced the set at Koishikawa Botanical Garden in Tokyo in 1878. By taking seriously the methodological and discursive presuppositions that are often and easily overlooked in studies of early Meiji visual objects, this chapter reorients the perspective to one that privileges the context of the production site of the wood panels over their current location. Through historically informed analyses, this chapter highlights how these objects carry two constitutive values — economic and epistemic — of early Meiji Japan.
