When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.

1840年代，伦敦南部基尤（Kew）的皇家植物园向公众开放时，它们被当作“世界文字”展示：来自世界各地的植物群，还有壮观的热带（殖民时期）标本以英国帝国至高无上的地位为中心。但是，该集合中仍然明显缺少一种比英国文化更着迷的外来植物物种：榕树，其不可转让性在花园的“文字”中留下了很大的空白，从而有效地刺破了这种错觉。理查德·格罗夫（Richard Grove）恰当地称其为“绿色帝国主义”的生物政治设计的全面全球指挥基础。本文展示了在19世纪和20世纪初，