How I got curious

I started being interested in the Nepenthes species coming from Indochina (a not geographical but just cultural old term to indicate the countries of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) a few years ago, in the June of 2001. I was working at Kew Gardens, in London, and I saw in their Nepenthes collection a plant that I was also growing at home. But I had bought that plant as N. thorelii, while the plant at Kew was labeled N. smilesii. I had never heard that name before.

A few days later I visited Martin Cheek, a world specialist about Nepenthes taxonomy, at the Kew Herbarium. In that occasion I asked him some infos about the N. smilesii that he had labeled. He explained me how all the Nepenthes species coming from Indochina were generally and wrongly sold as N. thorelii or sometimes N. anamensis. That's because the cp growers don't know what exactly these species look like. But, they think, "nothing more than those two species can come from Indochina". Martin also told me how the plant that I had seen in the Kew nursery matched exactly with the type specimen of N. smilesii, described by Hemsley in the 1895. See the Hemsley's description here.

That was enough to inspire me a tremendous wish to understand what was the truth about the Nepenthes coming from those mysterious countries. Can you imagine? I found myself with a "forgotten species" at home, while probably many other new or poorly known species were sold all around the world labeled as "N. thorelii" just because the growers don't know what they really are!! And all those countries are still full of yet un-described species!

Why such a mystery?

What's the reason of such a poor knowledge about the species from this area?

All these countries apart from Thailand have suffered of long terrible horrors due to internal and international conflicts. They kept their borders and territories closed for decades to the western visitors, including botanists. Only in the last ten or twenty years, each one to a different degree and with a different speed, they started again to improve their touristic resources availability. But great areas are still dangerous because of mines that remained from the war times or because of internal fights that are still going on or just because of organized groups of people that can catch you up on the mountains and rob you or kill you just depending on their/your religious or political opinion and amount of alcohol in their blood.

Please, I remind you that so far I've been just in Thailand, an absolutely safe place (much safer than Italy actually, where I live!). So I'm just reporting, about the other countries, what I've been told by most of the people who have been there or what I've read on a few guides. For what concerns Thailand, even if you don't have problems with mines or bandits, you still have an objective difficulty if you want to make any kind of scientific research in such an exotic Country, where everything works differently from what you learned in your life. But you'll know what I mean when you'll give a look at the maps.