Cinchona ledgeriana" had a yield of 8 to 13 percent quinine in bark grown in Dutch Indonesia which effectively out-competed the British Indian production. It was only later that the English saw the value and sought to obtain the seeds of "C. ledgeriana" from the Dutch. During World War II, the Japanese conquered Java and the United States lost access to the cinchona plantations that supplied war-critical quinine medication. Botanical expeditions – called Cinchona Missions – were launched in 1942-1944 to explore promising areas of South America in an effort to locate cinchona species that contained quinine and could be harvested
Cinchona prefer the pronunciation for the common name of the plant. The national tree of Peru is in the genus "Cinchona". "Cinchona" plants belong to the family Rubiaceae and are large shrubs or small trees with evergreen foliage, growing in height. The leaves are opposite, rounded to lanceolate and 10–40 cm long. The flowers are white, pink or red, produced in terminal panicles. The fruit is a small capsule containing numerous seeds. A key character of the genus is that the flowers have marginally hairy corolla lobes. The tribe Cinchoneae includes other genera "Cinchonopsis", "Jossia", "Ladenbergia", "Remijia", "Stilpnophyllum", and "Ciliosemina". In