Species Millettia tessmannii

For Charles Millet (1792–1873), a plant collector engaged by the British East India Company in the 1830s, stationed in Canton, China (now Guangzhou), where he was a member of an organisation known as the ‘Canton Factory’ established by Joseph Banks, a group of naturalists and collectors. He collected botanical specimens and corresponded with William Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, and John Henslow, professor of botany at Cambridge University. He collected plants around Macau and also in Ceylon, Malabar and Java. He returned to London in 1834. There is a suggestion that this Charles Millet may have been the French naturalist whose major study was freshwater fauna, but this is not the case.