Ren-Chang Ching
Ching started to correspond with pteridologists in the West (H. Christ, C. Christensen, W. R. Maxon and E. Copeland), thereby creating a basic library on Asiatic ferns for reference.In addition he started to make extensive collections of ferns, particularly from the provinces south of the Yangtze, but he knew he needed to see the type specimens in western herbaria.In Copenhagen, he consulted the fern expert Carl Christensen, and then worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for more than a year.He again visited Copenhagen in 1932 and then Vienna, Prague and other European herbaria before returning to China later that year, where he joined the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology (later Academia Sinica), Beijing.Ching remained in Yunnan until 1949, when he returned to Beijing to head the Taxonomic Section in the Institute of Botany, Academia Sinica, where his energies were largely focussed on education and forestry.