Octavius William Borrell
The Marist Brother Octavius William Borrell was born in Greek Smyrna (today İzmir, Turkey) in January 1916. In 1931, at the age of 15, he joined the Marist Order, and continued his secondary schooling at the Marist Brothers training college at Herakleion. From September 1935 until 1952, Brother William taught at Collège Sainte Jeanne D'Arc, a French–English bilingual school in Shanghai, with additional teaching at Collège Saint Ignace. During this period, he continued his own education, completing his baccalauréat. While in Shanghai, Borrell became associated with the "Musée Heude", formerly the Zikawei Museum (徐家汇博物院) located on  the grounds of "Université l'Aurore", a private French-language university, located in the Shanghai French Concession. From 1942 to 1945 he was the curator of museum's botanical department, and also collected specimens for the institution. With a colleague at the museum, Brother Paul August, together they wrote the manuscript, "Flore de Changhai". Around the same time, a second manuscript on the trees and shrubs of Shanghai was prepared with a student, Xu Bingsheng. During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Borrell and other missionaries spent 3 years in an internment camp. In 1952, Borrell left China to work in other  schools. The contents of the "Musée Heude" was ultimately divided between several different government institutions, including the Shanghai Natural History Museum. It is unclear if any of the plant collections made in this period have been preserved. Teaching after 1952, and retirement. Borrell continued to teach in schools, including in Dumfries, Scotland, in Malaya, Sarawak, and Taiwan. He went on to teach at St. Francis Xavier's College, Kowloon, Hong Kong From 1974 to 1979, and again in 1980, he was posted to Saint Xavier's Secondary School on Kairiru Island in Wewak, East Sepik, Papua New Guinea. He was  finally posted to Melbourne in 1980, after which he retired and “began his work to complete the many projects that he had begun over the years,” including completing his studies into the floras of Kairiru, and of Shanghai. In 1981 and 1985 he returned to Kairiru to make further botanical collections. Return to Shanghai and "Flora of the Shanghai Area". In 1991, Borrell returned to Shanghai for six months, where he worked with staff in the Botany department of the Shanghai Natural History Museum, and became reacquainted with Professor Xu Bingsheng (徐炳声) of Fudan University. Borrell visited the Shanghai Botanical  Garden, and collected on the rapidly urbanising outskirts of Shanghai, to ultimately produce an English-language translation and revision of his "Trees and Shrubs of Shanghai" manuscript, which became the multi-volume "Flora of the Shanghai Area". Brother William died on 18 July 2007 at Bulleen, Victoria, Australia, aged 91.