Language: Bilingual in English and Chinese
China is rich in plant resources, with approximately 30,000 species of higher plants. Recently, in compiling the flora of China and exploiting plant resources, a great number of works have been published. They are mostly in Chinese and scatteredly distributed in hundreds of Chinese series and books, which are not readily available or accessible even to Chinese readers, and are eventually little known to the outside world.
To meet the needs of international exchange of information, this bibliography is written in English and Chinese, with emphasis on Chinese publications, particularly those published in mainland of China. Only the works that have been examined by us are included. There are as many as nearly 400 herbaria in China, most of which contain only several thousands of specimens or less each. Of them three hundreds and and twenty-eight are listed in the "Index of Chinese Herbaria". The abbreviations used in the Index Herbariorum are all adopted, and others are used here for the first time. Those which no longer exist are preceded by an asterisk.
An index to Chinese authors with both Chinese characters and Roman letters are provided, arranged in Chinese phonetic alphabet order. Among the three indexes, general, regional and systematic, provided in this bibliography, the systematic one of basic importance. Only the genera of angiosperms are arranged within their respective families, following fundamentally the treatment of Engler's system (1936), as adopted in Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae, while other higher plants are not divided into different families to which the genera belong, and all the genera and suprageneric taxa, such as families, tribes, etc., are equally arranged under their respective bryophytes, pteridophytes or gymnosperms in alphabetic order. This is because the generic numbers in these groups are not so many as in angiosperms, and more systems of them have been adopted by different botanists.