Writing from the island of Ambon in the Moluccas in the mid-16th century, the German-Dutch soldier, merchant and botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius provided the first modern binomial description of the species in his work Herbarium Amboniense, in which he introduced the species to European science as Ganitrus Ganitri. note the work was also published in the Hague and Utrecht simultaneously by others. Few ever read the work at the time, as it was considered a trade secret by the V.O.C., and published long after Rumphius had died. When Carl Linnaeus introduced his new standard of taxonomic nomenclature, he missed out on using this work, as he only received his copy after having worked on the 1753 edition of his Species Plantarum. The specific epithet ganitrus was derived from ganitri, the name for this species in Sundanese and Malay.
