Plant hunters have searched the globe travelling to far and distant places for millennia, but only in recent times have plant breeders realised the value of the earth’s germplasm. Vietnam, with an area of 330,000km2, contains at least 12,000 plant species (Chang & Bartholomew 1984) and is one of the centres of distribution for the genus Camellia. Together with China and South America it is still a relatively unexplored region (Chapman & Wang 2002).