A slave to collecting

In the wake of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, József Eötvös, Minister for Public Education and Religious Affairs under the newly inaugurated Hungarian government—seemingly out of the blue—issued an order that the recently returned American émigré János Xántus should join the Austro-Hungarian East Asia Expedition slated to depart in late 1868 with the task of recording observations and collecting material relating to natural sciences, ethnography, and applied art.

Although the assignment seemed unexpected, the choice of person was far from it. János Xántus escaped from Austrian captivity as a 24-year-old artillery officer after the failure of the 1848–1849 Revolution and War of Independence and after a detour in London emigrated to the United States. During his ten-year stay in America, Xántus turned from an enthusiastic amateur into a dedicated and educated natural history collector who added ten thousands of animals and plants to the collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, while not forgetting his homeland: he provided more than seven thousand animals to the Hungarian National Museum.

After such preludes he became the first director of the Pest Zoo, then gave up this post in order to fulfill Eötvös's assignment. The second part of the volume reviews the causes, antecedents and course of the Austro-Hungarian East Asian expedition. It follows Xántus' almost two-year collection trip, presents the tension between the Hungarian and Austrian participants of the expedition that deepened to the point of separation, and Xántus's collection trip to Borneo and Ceylon, which he carried out independently. It gives a review the collection of more than 155,000 items Xántus brought home from East Asia, the first exhibition he created based on it, the founding of the Department of Ethnography of the National Museum in 1872, and Xántus' collection trip in Hungary for the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna. It sheds light on the conflicts of interest and different development trajectories surrounding the birth of the Hungarian ethnographic and applied arts museology. The last part of the volume summarizes the quarter of a century Xántus spent as the Head of the Department of Ethnography, sheds light on the background of the “era of lethargy and vegetating”, and finally on the years when the museum embarked on the path of recovery under Xántus' leadership, which, however, later continued without him.