Maxime Decaudin | I fancy Hong Kong’s environmental history

Maxime Decaudin (Max) is a French architect, he was a lecturer of the Landscape Architecture Department at HKU and is now working on his environmental history PhD. As a guest curator of the Centre's latest exhibition Ecology In The Making - A History of Amateur Naturalists in Hong Kong, he reveals the forgotten part of Hong Kong nature.

Max: I didn’t know anything about Hong Kong before coming in 2012. Hong Kong is often stereotyped as a major financial centre, but I soon discovered the city’s natural beauties with my students.

For the past 5 years, I have been studying the transformations of Hong Kong’s landscapes, I ask questions like why do we have country parks, islands, and forests? Why no one farms in the valleys anymore and why are we building more land on the sea?

Through my research, I have come across the stories of many fascinating individuals that contributed to the knowledge and appreciation of nature here, they discovered, collected, studied, or even improved and protected Hong Kong’s nature in the past. I started my PhD in 2015, and thought I would write an environmental history of Hong Kong. But I found so much to talk about that now, 5 years later, I only focus on 19th century landscape transformations.

The current exhibition also featured a few Nineteenth-century Collectors, they are my favorites because they made botanical and geological discoveries before, during, and after the taking of Hong Kong island by the British in 1841. Their stories give a good idea of how important naturalists were in the nineteenth century and how much nature changed during this period. The fact that these individuals were not always scientists is a great incentive for all of us to think of their own role in the future challenges.

Max went to The National Archives located in the UK for research.

When Max visited Kew Gardens to look for information about John Eyre last year, he told an administrator there that he was organizing an exhibition in Hong Kong. The administrator told him “I have something for you” and showed him a few big, grey paper boxes with John’s watercolour paintings. She said she did not have the time to process and digitalize his works, therefore they had been kept in these boxes all the time. She thought it was a pity and hoped that more people could see his paintings. As a result of this coincidence, we now have the opportunity to appreciate his work.