Letter and landscape: early Soviet plant hunting in Transbaikalia and the relocations of Tibetan medicine between environments and epistemologies.

The early decades of Soviet rule saw dramatic developments in medicine and public health. Many regions of the new state, particularly the so-called 'national peripheries', underwent extensive health reform. Vernacular medical practices, which were often embedded in religious doctrines, were to be eradicated. Paradoxically, a keen interest in alternative medical knowledge also emerged, resulting in institutionalised research in ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology and recruiting heterodox practitioners as research partners. This article discusses how Buryat Tibetan medicine of Transbaikal Buddhist monasteries became a lucrative source of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge in Soviet natural science and medicine during the interbellum period. Mining this knowledge as an archive and a mapping tool to unlock the 'productive forces' of Eastern Siberia, Soviet scientists sought to fight 'pharmaceutical hunger' and to discover new items for state exports. The article draws on the documentation of scientific expeditions to Transbaikal Buddhist monasteries and natural habitats to reveal how attempts to adapt Tibetan knowledge for Soviet needs contributed to epistemological translations between heterodox and orthodox medicine, while also highlighting particular sites and environments and the people associated with them. Thus, it argues, the Soviet version of modern pharmacological science emerged as intrinsically local and heterogeneous.