Melvyn C. Goldstein (BA 1959, MA 1960) is Distinguished University Professor and John Reynolds Harkness Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western University, from which he retired this past June after more than 55 years on the faculty. He has written and edited dozens of books on the history, anthropology, and language of Tibet, all alongside amassing an incredible (and also award-winning) bonsai collection, which now forms the core of the Melvyn C. Goldstein Bonsai Garden at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens.
Professor Henry M. Cowles caught up with Goldstein on the occasion of his retirement to talk about his illustrious career, his bonsai collection, and how the two have intertwined.
Why did you major in history?
I made that decision almost 70 years ago! At some point early on in my time at the University of Michigan, I was drawn into the orbit of Professor Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, who was not only a historian of Russia but also a Russian prince who served in the White Army until its defeat in 1920. After receiving my MA in 1960, my plan was to stay to do a doctorate with him on Russia and Mongolia. But little did I know, Professor Lobanov-Rostovsky was planning on retiring that year—which is precisely what he did. I was disappointed of course, but Professor Lobanov had me over for dinner and told me that because the department had not decided on a replacement, I should go study with his friend Professor Nicolas Poppe, a famous scholar on Mongolia at the University of Washington. So I got in my car and drove to Seattle in the summer of 1960.
How did you end up training in anthropology—and specializing on Tibet?
Well, when I got to the University of Washington, they had just been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to set up one of eight centers for Tibetan studies around the world. These centers were meant to train young scholars to help preserve knowledge of traditional Tibetan society and culture, about which there was a lot of concern after the Dalai Lama’s failed uprising in Lhasa. Even though I had no particular interest in Tibet when I arrived, some faculty persuaded me to study Tibetan along with Mongolian. As I began to learn Tibetan, I started interviewing some of the refugees that the program had brought to Seattle from India to help teach Tibetan, and I quickly realized that I liked the interviewing more than the language study—and that was how I found anthropology. To me, anthropology and history were related, because they both let me get to see how societies work from the ground-up, how history and culture get made.
What was it like when you first made it to Tibet?
Tibet was closed to Western researchers then, so my early work was with refugees—first in the United States, and then while living for two years in a Tibetan refugee settlement in India where the Dalai Lama had set up his exiled government. After that I was able to do fieldwork in northern Nepal with indigenous Tibetans, but it was only after relations with China changed under Nixon that I was finally able to get to Tibet by securing a fellowship for summer research in Lhasa, although even that took three years of waiting for the Chinese government to grant me permission. Thus, it was only in 1985, almost twenty years after getting my PhD, that I finally made it to Lhasa for fieldwork. But to get to Lhasa, you had to connect through Beijing and wait for multiple days. And so, I found myself in Beijing, staying at hotels—each of which had bonsai in their enclosed gardens, and so I spent time admiring these beautiful trees and got to know them. That was how I met bonsai and decided I wanted to learn to raise them myself.
Ah—I knew they were coming! Tell me about your time with the trees.
Well, at first I was merely an admirer, because the house where I lived near the campus of Case Western Reserve did not have a backyard you could fence off to cultivate them. But ten years later, I moved into the house where I live now, and I finally had space to keep trees—and I went to work. At that time, the nearest teacher was in Erie, Pennsylvania, and so I would drive an hour and a half to study with him almost every weekend. In those days, I was doing longitudinal studies with Tibetan nomads, about how they had adapted to living at high altitudes, and when my Tibetan graduate student and I would stop in Beijing on the way back from fieldwork, I would buy a few trees. Some of them were heavy and delicate to transport, and so he would help me get them through the airport and the USDA examination and then back home.
My collection began to grow, and so I began working with more and more people to cultivate and care for them; it was really a group effort. And eventually, of course, the collection got so big and had won enough awards that my alma mater got interested, and so I was able to donate what is now the Matthaei Botanical Garden’s Melvyn C. Goldstein Bonsai Garden.
And tell me: how do you see these two things, your books and your trees, relating?
So many ways! I always remember what one of my Japanese teachers, who led a school in California on Azaleas, said about bonsai: we buy our trees, but we don’t own them. We are just looking after them, and then we pass them on. I think in some ways scholarship is like that: we meet the world where it is and we do our best to tell its story. My books are full of documents that would be hard for others to access; the hundreds of oral histories I collected in Tibet are now housed at the Library of Congress and available online. Like my trees, these will survive me and allow others to engage with the world in their own ways.
Another connection has to do with collaboration. Some people think scholarship and bonsai are solitary, but in both I have been lucky to have amazing partners and collaborators, teachers and students. We gather around a tree or text, and something wonderful happens. Even now, I am writing a book about this amazing monastery that in the 1950s had 10,000 monks. Can you imagine? Some people think of monasteries as isolated and quiet, but this was vast, a bustling place with monks of all sorts, from brilliant scholars to those earning a living through tailoring or crafts or petty trading. That monastery is like scholarship and bonsai, at least for me: from the outside, it seems solitary, but look inside: it is teeming with life, with people, with trees.
The Melvyn C. Goldstein Bonsai Garden at U-M’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens
Melvyn Goldstein has been collecting, cultivating, and caring for bonsai for nearly fifty years. In 2023 he donated more than 100 trees in his world-class collection to U-M’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, who rechristened their bonsai garden in his honor. One of the nation’s premiere spaces for this art form, it is free and open to the public from May to November (learn more).
