The Missouri Botanical Garden serves as the coordinating western institution for the monumental Flora of China, an international collaborative program to prepare the first modern, concise, English-language account of the 31,000 plant species of China. Dr. Peter H. Raven, director of the Garden, and Prof. Wu Zhengyi are co-chairs of the joint editorial committee.

One-eighth of the world's known plant species are found in China. As the only nation with unbroken connections among tropical, subtropical, temperate, and boreal forests, China provides invaluable opportunities to study unusual plant associations and adaptations rarely observed elsewhere. Many genera of plants known only from fossil records in North America and Europe are represented in China by living members. Some 7,000 Chinese species are of horticultural importance, and nearly 5,000 are used as medicines.

In addition to the Garden, Western editorial centers have been established at Harvard University, the California Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Institution, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris). There are four Chinese project centers at the institutes of botany in Beijing, Kunming, Guangzhou, and Nanjing.

Of the 25 volumes of text and 25 volumes of illustrations, several have already been published jointly by the Missouri Botanical Garden and Science Press, Beijing. The project began in 1988 and is scheduled for completion in 2010.