Rubber factlet

I am presently reading a fictionalised account of the life of Roger Casement by Mario Vargas Llosa, on which I will report further in due course, but a taster in the meantime.

Reading all about the horrors perpetrated in the Congo by the Belgians at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, I was moved to look up rubber in Chambers, where I found no mention of the Congo at all, although it seems that traditional rubber trees mainly flourish in the tropical belt, including, one might think, the Congo. Perhaps as colonialists with a spotted record of our own, the (1950's) editors of Chambers thought it better to omit the spots of others, even large ones.

But I do find mention of the Soviet dandelion and turning to Wikipedia I find that there is indeed a plant looking very like the dandelion, grown in the former Soviet republics of central Asia and from the root of which you can indeed extract rubber. A tad dearer than the stuff from the tropics, but it was all the thing in the heyday of the Soviets.

There is also a brief discussion of the chemistry of rubber from which I learn that man made fibres emulate in a clean and tidy way what happens in a naturally messy way in the various rubber yielding plants from around the world. Obvious once you have been told.