Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold (17 February 1796 – 18 October 1866) was a German physician, botanist and traveller.

[1] He read the books of Humboldt, a famous naturalist and explorer, which probably raised his desire to travel to distant lands.

[1] Invited to Holland by an acquaintance of his family, Siebold applied for a position as a military physician, which would enable him to travel to the Dutch colonies.

[1] On his trip to Batavia on the frigate Adriana, Siebold practiced his knowledge of the Dutch language and also rapidly learned Malay.

However, he was given a room for a few weeks at the residence of the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, Baron Godert van der Capellen, to recover from an illness.

With his erudition, he impressed the Governor-General, and also the director of the botanical garden at Buitenzorg (now Bogor), Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt.

[1] These men sensed in Siebold a worthy successor to Engelbert Kaempfer and Carl Peter Thunberg, two former resident physicians at Dejima, a Dutch trading post in Japan, the former of whom was the author of Flora Japonica.

[1] As only a very small number of Dutch personnel were allowed to live on this island, the posts of physician and scientist had to be combined.

The Dutch East India Company did not, however, actually employ the Swedish botanist and physician Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828), who had arrived in Japan in 1775.

[2] In 1824, Siebold started a medical school in Nagasaki, the Narutaki-juku,[3] that grew into a meeting place for around fifty students.

Many specimens were collected with the help of his Japanese collaborators Keisuke Ito (1803–1901), Mizutani Sugeroku (1779–1833), Ōkochi Zonshin (1796–1882) and Katsuragawa Hoken (1797–1844), a physician to the shōgun.

During his stay at Dejima, Siebold sent three shipments with an unknown number of herbarium specimens to Leiden, Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp.

In 1825 the government of the Dutch-Indies provided him with two assistants: apothecary and mineralogist Heinrich Bürger (his later successor) and the painter Carl Hubert de Villeneuve.

Each would prove to be useful to Siebold's efforts that ranged from ethnographical to botanical to horticultural, when attempting to document the exotic Eastern Japanese experience.

But he also obtained from the court astronomer Takahashi Kageyasu several detailed maps of Japan and Korea (written by Inō Tadataka), an act strictly forbidden by the Japanese government.

[1] When the Japanese discovered, by accident, that Siebold had a map of the northern parts of Japan, the government accused him of high treason and of being a spy for Russia.

[1] Satisfied that his Japanese collaborators would continue his work, he journeyed back on the frigate Java to his former residence, Batavia, in possession of his enormous collection of thousands of animals and plants, his books and his maps.

[1] Philipp Franz von Siebold arrived in the Netherlands in 1830, just at a time when political troubles erupted in Brussels, leading soon to Belgian independence.

Hastily he salvaged his ethnographic collections in Antwerp and his herbarium specimens in Brussels and took them to Leiden, helped by Johann Baptist Fischer.

Both institutions merged into Naturalis Biodiversity Center in 2010, which now maintains the entire natural history collection that Siebold brought back to Leiden.

During his stay in Leiden, Siebold wrote Nippon in 1832, the first part of a volume of a richly illustrated ethnographical and geographical work on Japan.

This work was co-authored by Joseph Hoffmann and Kuo Cheng-Chang, a Javanese of Chinese extraction, who had journeyed along with Siebold from Batavia.

[9] The zoologists Coenraad Temminck (1777–1858), Hermann Schlegel (1804–1884), and Wilhem de Haan (1801–1855) scientifically described and documented Siebold's collection of Japanese animals.

A significant part of the Fauna Japonica was also based on the collections of Siebold's successor on Dejima, Heinrich Bürger.

He returned to Japan in 1859 as an adviser to the Agent of the Dutch Trading Society (Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij) in Nagasaki, Albert Bauduin.

[1] The botanical and horticultural spheres of influence have honored Philipp Franz von Siebold by naming some of the very garden-worthy plants that he studied after him.

Examples include: Though he is well known in Japan, where he is called "Shiboruto-san", and although mentioned in the relevant schoolbooks, Siebold is almost unknown elsewhere, except among gardeners who admire the many plants whose names incorporate sieboldii and sieboldiana.

Although he was disillusioned by what he perceived as a lack of appreciation for Japan and his contributions to its understanding, a testimony of the remarkable character of Siebold is found in museums that honor him.