The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China

THE MONKEY AND THE INKPOT THE MONKEY AND THE INKPOT NATURAL HISTORY AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS IN EARLY MODERN CHINA Ca...

Author: Carla Nappi

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THE MONKEY AND THE INKPOT

THE MONKEY AND THE INKPOT NATURAL HISTORY AND ITS TRANSFORMATIONS IN EARLY MODERN CHINA

Carla Nappi

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2009

Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nappi, Carla Suzan, 1977– The monkey and the inkpot : natural history and its transformations in early modern China / Carla Nappi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03529-4 (alk. paper) 1. Natural history—China—History—16th century. 2. Medicine, Chinese—History— 16th century. 3. Li, Shizhen, 1518–1593. Ben cao gang mu. 4. Li, Shizhen, 1518–1593— Influence. 5. Li, Shizhen, 1518–1593. 6. Naturalists—China—Biography. 7. Physicians—China—Biography. 8. Scholars—China—Biography. 9. Learning and scholarship—China—History—16th century. 10. China—Intellectual life—960–1644. I. Title. QH21.C6N37 2009 508.0951—dc22 2009009041

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Ex-Voto

vii

ix

Note on Conversions

xiii

Prologue: A Curious Instinct, A Taste for Ink

1

1 Conception: Birth of a Naturalist

12

2 Generation: Anatomy of a Naturalist

33

INTERLUDE Here Be Dragons: A Reader’s Guide to the Bencao gangmu

50

3 Transformation: Elements of Change

69

4 Transformation: Sprouts of Change

83

5 Transformation: Bodies of Change

96

6 Transformation: Creatures of Change

111

Conclusion. Rot and Rebirth: The Afterlife and Reincarnation of a Naturalist

136

Appendix A. Li Shizhen, Lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages]

151

Appendix B. Contents of the Bencao gangmu [Systematic materia medica] Notes

155

159

Glossary of Chinese Characters Index

229

207

ILLUSTRATIONS

P.1.

Huang Yong Ping, 108 Cards (1993)

I.1.

Images of a dragon and dragon’s bone from the Bencao gangmu (1596) 54

4.1.

A lily from the Bencao gangmu (1596)

5.1.

Guoluo wasps from the Erya yintu [Illustrated Erya]

99

5.2.

An imp of darkness from the Bencao gangmu (1596)

102

6.1.

Beasts from the Bencao gangmu (1596): a mihou and a guoran 125

6.2.

A xingxing beast from the Gujin tushu jicheng [Compendium of images and texts, ancient and modern], early eighteenth century 127

6.3.

A feifei beast from the Bencao gangmu (1778)

C.1.

Little Li Shizhen gives a botany lesson

C.2.

Li Shizhen gets a lesson from the hunters

C.3.

Probing the belly of the beast

138

3

87

137 137

128

EX-VOTO (AN OFFERING)

Since this volume ends with a series of body parts, I thought it appropriate to begin similarly. The blood and bones of this book were built with the help of a small corps of thoughtful and generous friends, colleagues, teachers, and institutions. Though the blemishes and imperfections of its flesh are my fault, the book and I both benefited enormously from the ministrations of several very dear and generous people. I offer the following in votive testimony to their guidance and support. Two dancing, well-shod feet to several institutions that supported the project in its inception. Grants from the History Department and the Program in East Asian Studies at Princeton University and from the National Science Foundation helped fund the early research. I enjoyed a productive semester at the Institute for History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, with special thanks to Li Jianmin for his hospitality and to Angela Ki-Che Leung for generously providing a copy of an Anhui barefoot doctor’s manual from her own collection. The Needham Research Institute granted me funding and a stimulating home, where I enjoyed muntjac-watching and game pie during a wonderfully productive semester. Thanks especially to John Moffett (who helped identify Joseph Needham’s handwriting, which appears in the Conclusion of this book), Vivienne Lo, Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, Christopher Cullen, and Sue Bennett. The History and Philosophy of Science and Technology program at Stanford University hosted me for a year, and I’m grateful for Jessica Riskin’s sponsorship and Paula Findlen’s guidance while I was in that beautiful place. A stomach full of nourishment to the institutions and individuals that helped nurture the beginnings into a manuscript and beyond. The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis supported a delightful and transfor-

EX-VOTO

mative year. Thanks especially to Ann Fabian, Jackson Lears, Paul Clemens, Tim Alves, and Lynn Shanko. Montana State University provided support in the final stage of manuscript preparation, and I will be forever grateful for the help of departmental goddesses Diane Cattrell and Deidre Manry. The interlibrary loan angels at Princeton, Rutgers, Cornell, and Montana State University were a tremendous help to the project, with special thanks to the polymathic Martin Heijdra of the Princeton East Asian Library and to the infinitely patient and resourceful Mary Guthmiller of Montana State University. The Cornell East Asia Program provided a congenial and supportive home in the final stages of editing. Some of the buggy material in Chapter 5 appeared in a different form in Endeavour magazine, which allowed its appearance here. The Asian division of the Library of Congress provided permission to reprint images from their 1596 copy of the Bencao gangmu, and I thank Mi Chu for shepherding me through that process. Two eyes full of curiosity to teachers and colleagues who have taught me much over the past several years. The late Stephen Jay Gould provided encouragement and guidance to (while confiscating jellybeans from) a wayward paleobiology major who was just discovering the history and philosophy of science. My continued interest in the weird plants and animals of the past owes much to his early support, and to the wisdom, mentoring, and fossils of Doug Erwin and Andrew Knoll. Since its inception, this project benefited from countless hours of guidance and advice from Graham Burnett, Angela Creager, Benjamin Elman, Tony Grafton, Marta Hanson, and especially Susan Naquin. I am grateful to Graham for first suggesting that I look at Huang Yong Ping and to Marta Hanson and Federico Marcon for generously sharing unpublished work with me. Colleagues at Montana State University offered support and advice while I was finishing the manuscript, especially Jim Allard, Prasanta Bandyopadhyay, Rob Campbell, Kristen Intemann, Tim LeCain, Michelle Maskiell, Mary Murphy, Michael Reidy, Bob Rydell, Lynda Sexson, Michael Sexson, Billy Smith, and Brett Walker. A marvelous weekend seminar at the Folger Institute led by Raine Daston helped me resituate a crucial part of the manuscript. It was a privilege to discuss this work with such a brilliant group of scholars and fellow travelers. A wunderkammer full of shiny and curious bones and teeth to members of the Corona crew at Montana State University, who shared countx

EX-VOTO

less hours of creative inspiration, camaraderie, and cookies. It was my great fortune to be embraced by this group of explorers, and my continued sanity owes a great debt to afternoons with them. Able ears for listening and a nose for sniffing to my students at Rutgers and Montana State University for their curiosity and enthusiasm and for reminding me how much I enjoy my work. A set of strong shoulders and lungs full of gratitude to the scholars who have set an example for the study of Chinese science and medicine with their own breaking of paths. This book would not have been possible without the scholarship of Nathan Sivin, Paul Unschuld, and Benjamin Elman, who were early inspirations and to whose works I still constantly return. Thanks especially to Nathan, who gave me a name at the beginning of this work and has supported my work since in countless ways. Two industrious hands to the editors and readers responsible for helping turn a pile of pages and stories into the book you’re viewing now. Ann Downer-Hazell and Vanessa Hayes nurtured the manuscript in its formative stages, and Elizabeth Knoll, Matthew Hills, and Cheryl Lincoln saw it to completion. Thanks especially to the readers whose comments and suggestions improved the manuscript immensely: Tim Brook, Paula Findlen, Bruce Rusk, Lynda Sexson, Nathan Sivin, Paul Unschuld, and an anonymous reader for Harvard University Press. Bruce in particular was an exceptionally careful and thoughtful editor. I am also grateful to the reviewers of the Montana State University Scholarship and Creativity Grant, who made completion of the book possible. A pair of embracing arms to the individuals whose friendship, support, and ridiculous YouTube links buoyed me through the writing and research process, with special hugs for Emily Brock, Noah Feinstein, Colin Klein, Reggie Jackson, Thi Nguyen, Sharrona Pearl, Sara Pritchard, Lynda Sexson, and Grace Shen. It is an unexpected blessing to share laughter, friendship, wine, and (in one case) an El Bulli meal with such brilliant artists, gifted scholars, and loving people. My heart to my family for their love and support and for keeping me laughing and relatively sane. My most delicious and sweet-smelling xi

EX-VOTO

thank-yous to Mom and Dad, to Rachel and Shiv, and to my late grandfather, who gave me the perfect advice exactly when I needed it. Though I have had to erase most of her editorial changes and she ate the corners off several primary sources, my cat, Habibna, also generously provided support and snuggles during these past few years. My heartfelt gratitude finally to Bruce Rusk, my best friend, my most critical and insightful reader, my ever-willing coadventurer, and my partner in all matters of the spirit, the body, and the mind. Rock and roll, my habibis. May your mornings be full of sprinkle cheese and meatballs, your afternoons full of music and blankets, and your nights full of San Marzanos and sexiness.

xii

NOTE ON CONVERSIONS

The magnitude of the following units of measure changed (sometimes dramatically) over the course of the early modern period and differed by location. The following is a guide to approximate equivalents of the most common units. Values are based on Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 234– 246. 1 chi = 12.5 inches 1 dou = 10.5 quarts 1 ge = 3.4 fluid ounces 1 hu = 50 liters 1 jin = 20.7 ounces 1 li = 0.3 mile 1 sheng = 33.6 fluid ounces


PROLOGUE: A CURIOUS INSTINCT, A TASTE FOR INK

The Monkey of the Inkpot: This animal, common in the north, is four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow. It is marked by a curious instinct—the taste for India ink. When a person sits down to write, the monkey squats cross-legged near by with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over. Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied. (Wang Tai-Hai, 1791) —J. L. Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

Stop for a moment, look up from this book, and close your eyes. Try to remember, if you can, the very first time you were taken to a natural history museum. Maybe it was a tiny, local museum. Perhaps it was one of those enormous ones with an imposing elephant standing guard or a giant squid tentacling overhead. Recall touching glass cases full of puffer fish, staring up at a giant sloth, and wondering what bugs or beasts you might discover around the next corner. Now imagine (you can open your eyes) that your museum also contained the creatures you pondered in wonder, from fairy tales and films and in the stories you read under the covers at night. Opening Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings is like stepping into such a fantastical paper zoo, an experience both dreamlike and disorienting.1 In this collection of monsters and myths, where to begin? The chimera cage or the musical serpents? Take a dip with the kraken, or stop and stare at a jinni? When you track down your own copy of Borges’s book, prepare to discover new monsters on every page. One of those will be the tiny ink 1


monkey, a northern Chinese pest that patiently sat on scholars’ desks waiting for the opportunity to quaff leftover ink.2 This naughty monkey was one of several Chinese denizens of Borges’s bestiary. China was itself a collection of words, ideas, and monsters that particularly exercised Borges’s interest, not least because it represented a kind of geographically and conceptually distant utopia. Borges was fascinated by the (im)possibility of understanding worlds removed from his own. He fixated on the role of creatures and languages in creating these worlds, and his “monkey of the inkpot” was a perfect metonym for the embodied word: in savoring the ink, the monkey’s body consumed the very possibility of language. Foucault later famously described a Chinese encyclopedia invoked in another of Borges’s works as a heterotopia, a collection of elements so nonsensical that it effectively occupied no place at all.3 China was a dreamworld that simultaneously existed nowhere and everywhere, its natural landscape populated by a seemingly impossible combination of monstrous monkeys and mundane herbs. The imagined existence of Chinese natural knowledge at the interface between magic and modernity has continued to occupy scholars and artists struggling to re-place this utopian bestiary.

108 Cards Sitting in a library in the 1950s, Borges marveled at a Chinese story written centuries before his time. Sitting in his studio in the early 1990s, the artist Huang Yong Ping also imagined how a modern Western reader might approach a Chinese medical encyclopedia written four hundred years earlier.4 Huang considered the reactions that might accompany such an encounter, from amusement to utter incomprehension, and a physical representation of Foucault’s heterotopia was born. The artist created a compendium of 108 cards, each coupling a description of an ingredient listed in the 1596 Chinese pharmaceutical natural history, Bencao gangmu [Systematic materia medica], with an image from contemporary Western art. On card 56, Huang paired a familiar image of a newborn from a Benetton advertisement with a Bencao gangmu formula for a drug using human placenta. On card 52, an image of Pierre Manzoni’s famous can of artist’s feces illustrates a recipe for a medicinal potion made with human excrement. In the full set of cards, Huang created an embodiment of what he considered to be the “rupture of a type of knowledge,” as images 2

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Figure P.1. Huang Yong Ping, 108 Cards (1993). Source: Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong, eds., House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2005), 33. Used with permission of the artist.


of dead flies on Duchamp’s foot cast met a textual world of yin, yang, and qi, and the audience was urged to contemplate this epistemological discontinuity in time and geography. 108 Cards invites one of the most basic and difficult questions in any historical investigation: is it possible to understand a world removed from one’s own in time or space? The following chapters approach this problem by examining the moment in the history of knowledge-making in China during which the inspiration for Huang’s 108 Cards was created.

Preternatural History Huang’s cards and Borges’s monkey gesture together at several issues central to understanding the history of natural history: the importance of location, the role of curiosity, and the connection between language and the natural world in its textual, physical, and perceptual manifestations. These issues have been persistent concerns of a growing body of literature that treats the emergence and growth of a natural history tradition in what we might, for convenience’s sake, call the Western world. Though Li Shizhen (1518–1593), the author of the Bencao gangmu, seems not to have been aware of works in European languages, he was fascinated by accounts of creatures and drugs from Western regions. In turn, his work was later taken up by a global array of scholars, from French Jesuits and Japanese naturalists to Charles Darwin. As academic scholarship on natural history has typically focused on its emergence and practice in the West, we might wonder how Li’s mode of learning about the natural world (and the tradition that his work both built on and transformed) differed from that of the early modern European naturalists more familiar to the history of science. Consider, for example, how naturalists in early modern China or Europe might have learned something about a dragon, a being that rears its horned head again later in our story. If a report of a dragon surfaced in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europe, several resources were at the naturalist’s disposal.5 First, the scholar would likely judge the credibility of the initial report as indicated by the author’s social status and network of relationships.6 Next, he might have access to a cabinet of curiosities (his own or that of a wealthy acquaintance) containing physical specimens against which to visually compare a received account. The emergence of these physical collec4


tions went hand in hand with a flourishing of textual collections, and scholars like Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) could also look for stories of dragons in the paper museums that they accumulated to explain the objects in their private museums.7 Images of dragons created by artists commissioned to render them would have been available for comparison,8 and a scholar could consult a local or personal library for descriptions of serpents in classic texts to discern the potential significance of the dragon as a portent, a marvel, or a valuable commodity. If extant accounts are to be believed, a sixteenth-century naturalist in China might likewise have stumbled upon a dragon specimen. Even if he was not one of the lucky few to have seen a live dragon in the throes of serpentine battle or lust, he might have indirectly observed the creature. Whether he noticed an ejaculation of rain resulting from human prayers to the water-bringing dragons of the sky, found dragon bones at the head of a river, or bought a pricey bag of powdered bone from a drug peddler, our early modern naturalist probably looked to available texts or artifacts to plumb the natural history of the creature and thus contextualize his observations and learn how to properly use his purchase. The expanding late Ming (1368–1644) print market was changing the textual landscape in which the natural one was reflected and understood, making a large number of texts newly available to the literate public at what Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) called “ridiculously low prices.”9 A man from a well-connected family such as Li’s had ample opportunity to study the book collections of wealthy friends or to be appointed to civil service positions that would have secured him library access in large metropolitan areas.10 If he had such a library at his disposal, he might consult scholarly jottings, poetic commentaries, or classic literature for images or accounts of the dragon. In the absence of such an opportunity, or as a way to supplement modest book collections, an interested scholar might also refer to texts reprinted in a number of scholarly collectanea, to information in widely circulated popular almanacs, or to quotations in the cheap encyclopedias that flooded late Ming markets. Since dragon bones were among the earliest documented materia medica in Chinese medical texts, he may also have riffled through the contents of what were known as bencao texts, compendia of information on the properties of medicinal drugs, to see what past specialists in herbal medicine had claimed about their properties.11 In addition to the increase in available texts, new objects had come into the medical and literary canon 5


as a result of trade and tributary relationships and a seemingly inexhaustible demand for exotica. A scholar’s studio in the late Ming might have housed a modest collection of artifacts, writing implements, and objects of connoisseurship not unlike the kunst- and wunderkammern of Renaissance Europe, and the scholar would likely have opened his collection to perusal by friends and colleagues who were engaged in their own pursuits of a connoisseur’s refined sensory knowledge and a scholar’s refined skills in navigating the literary archive.12 Perhaps the naturalist had an opportunity to travel and amass local anecdotes about dragons to compare with his observations. In any case, comparison among all of these sources (textual and physical specimens, images and stories, his own experience and that reported by others) would have been a critical means of learning something about a dragon and its history. As in early modern Europe, natural history emerged in early modern China from a concern with negotiating among diverse sources of evidence. In his Bencao gangmu, Li Shizhen consolidated and transformed this evidence in an effort to bring the epistemic practices of commentary to bear on understanding and using objects in a natural landscape whose constant flux frustrated classification and stability. Though natural history in mid-sixteenth-century China was not as intimately linked with medicine as it was in Europe during the same time, Dr. Li was working hard to change the situation.13 The man whose immense book would go on to be credited as a precursor of modern science emerged in a social and cultural context ripe for juxtaposing the connoisseur’s sensibility, the scholar’s judgment and broad learning, and the collector’s encyclopedic sampling of an expanding printed world with a doctor’s concern for harmonizing cosmic and corporeal change. Transformation was a basic premise of the natural world, so understanding its workings and manifestations was crucial to knowing when to harvest plants or animals for medical use and how to change them into drugs that would heal or nourish the human body. Many naturalists had paved the way for Li’s approach, but he was significant in his commitment to using evidence from epistemically varied sources to grasp some idea of what normal change was, simultaneously distinguishing between what we might call preternatural events (unusual but still of the world) and supernatural ones, and between the believable and the absurd.14 Li was effectively creating an idea of how normal bodies operate in a natural universe full of metamorphoses and transformations. This book is centrally concerned with how a new natural history emerged from Li’s effort to define norms of cosmic 6


change and how a struggle with the epistemology of nature was crucial to his mapping of the early modern Chinese landscape.

Localizing Epistemology Li approached his work in the Bencao gangmu by putting an existing literature on natural objects into a medical context and by using evidentiary practices from one literary realm to prove claims in another. The resulting text reflected late Ming concerns with the commodification of objects, the increasing availability of print media, and efforts to naturalize parts of what had been the divine realm. This book uses an intimate reading and analysis of Li’s major encyclopedia of materia medica to reveal the epistemic commitments in this textual cabinet of natural curiosities, investigating the ways Li gathered and stored information, distinguished between trustworthy and unreliable sources of knowledge, and identified basic principles of observation and experience. My approach is ultimately not to individuate or identify a uniform system of reason within the Bencao gangmu, but to show the pulses and mechanics of knowledge-making with all of its inconsistencies and revelations. This significantly differs from the approach that has characterized much of the study of Chinese science and medicine (especially its premodern history), which has often invoked a “Chinese” logic, or way of knowing about the world.15 The Bencao gangmu is now routinely held up as a definitive source on Chinese views on nature, with Li Shizhen frequently cited by literary and medical scholars as a reliable authority and standard-bearer on the practices and beliefs of doctors and naturalists and on the identification and use of plants and animals in premodern China.16 For many people, the Bencao gangmu has essentially become a dictionary of Chinese knowledge in the early modern world. Can we define modes of logic, or of reasoning more generally conceived, that are local to particular historical or cultural contexts? In a trivial way, the answer is yes. At least, this seems to be the premise behind several comparative studies within the history of science and medicine that explore the possibility of multiple coherent systems of knowledge that operate on different principles.17 Even when not explicitly comparative, some studies assume the possibility of more than one style or system of reasoning by attempting to describe an indigenous logic. This has recently taken the form of analyses of the ways in which numerical systems, linguistic forms, or modes of argument operate in non-Western 7


contexts (especially in Africa and Asia), implicitly identifying styles of logic or reason by means of their assumed components: language, numbering, rules of speech or of decision-making.18 Some of these studies have posited “styles of reasoning,” or logics, that are localized in time or space, fueling a debate between strong universalists (those who do not think the idea of multiple ways of being true is coherent) and relativists (those who do).19 Academic humanists are at a crucial point in rethinking the idea of local logic, reason, or truth, as an increasingly globalized arena of public discourse makes this seemingly dry academic problem critical in understanding and negotiating the current world and the decisions made by individuals and institutions on our behalf. This set of issues has been formative in my own reading of the Bencao gangmu and its place in early modern natural history. I hope that bringing a fresh perspective to this medical encyclopedia helps readers explore the book as a source of history, literature, and historical epistemology rather than simply as a representation of a premodern Chinese system of thought. Li certainly saw himself as part of a lineage of scholars with a particular arsenal of tools for investigating the natural world. The natural history of the Song (960–1279) and Ming dynasties was characterized by the use of analogy and comparison to measure and identify natural objects and by an attempt to locate these identifications and observations in a broader cosmological framework. Though scholars of the natural world did not necessarily share a single style of reasoning, those early modern individuals who participated in what I call “natural history” did share some elements that helped form a kind of diachronic scholarly community. Conventions of citation, construction of an intertextual frame involving specific texts, and performative acts of commentary and debate helped structure this mode of learning about the natural world. Li worked within some of these conventions in an attempt to create an authoritative guidebook for a new way of practicing medicine and natural history, founded on the principle of broad learning and an understanding of cosmic change. However, to see Li as representative of some sort of scholarly consensus or cultural ethos radically misreads his work and his approach. Ascribing a coherent mode of reasoning to even a single text, let alone a discipline or nation, unravels in the case of a book that exhibits several (sometimes conflicting) approaches to making and weighing evidence about the natural world. Li Shizhen took it upon himself to collect and criticize ancient and contemporary natural and medical knowledge, 8


mediating among competing claims about the substances that filled the pages of Chinese medical and literary texts. Could dragons die a natural death? Was it possible for wasps to pray or chant and thereby transform other creatures into wasps just like themselves? Was turtle sperm, vomited up by a shark and found floating in the sea, really the powerful cure it was reported to be? These were just a few of the topics that sparked scholarly debate, and much of the Bencao gangmu was devoted to resolving such quandaries. The natural history of a plant or an animal, in turn, often helped determine the ways in which that plant or animal could be used as a drug, so the answers to such questions about natural objects could, for Li, determine the life or death of his patients. The following chapters explore the questions raised above to chart a course through one scholar’s choices and conundrums as he tested his and others’ beliefs, decided what was normal or strange, and constructed a set of rules for interpreting evidence of and authorities on the natural world. Close attention to Li’s language as he used it in specific contexts also reveals a great deal about his methodology and commitment to a medical practice informed by natural history. Of course, his ultimate goal was to become an authority himself and (to the extent possible) to resolve many of the debates that had plagued medical and literary studies of nature. We look at the result of these efforts hundreds of years after Li’s death, as he was resurrected as an iconic figure in ways that effectively undermined many of his original intentions.

Life Cycles: A Synopsis of the Work With occasional exceptions, in the following pages I have explicitly avoided measuring Li’s text in terms of more familiar natural history texts from the European tradition. Though such comparisons can be enlightening, most studies of the Bencao gangmu in Western languages have approached Li’s work in direct relation to that of naturalists such as Pliny the Elder, Charles Darwin, or Carl Linnaeus. Reader, I ask your indulgence in following me along a different path, through the mountains and backyards of Li’s text on its own terms, or at least as close to them as we can manage. The idea of metamorphosis, which permeated discourse about the natural world in early modern China, was of particular import to the epistemology of the Bencao gangmu, and we take it as our meandering guide. The chapters are organized according to the concepts of generation and transformation that formed the basis of many of Li’s 9


ideas about nature and that helped him make decisions regarding the reliability of claims about the things of the world. Chapter 1 places Li Shizhen and the Bencao gangmu into the context of late Ming natural history and medicine. It offers the reader social and intellectual background for understanding Li as a doctor and a scholar. This chapter provides a broad conceptual grounding for the discussion of natural history scholarship in the late Ming, including poetry, collections of jottings, encyclopedic and monographic works on natural objects, and commentaries on the treatment of plants and animals in classical texts, and it explores the intersection of this material with medical literature. Chapter 2 introduces the tool kit of the early modern naturalist in China. It follows his senses as epistemological guides, his education, and the citation practices that informed his scholarship. The Interlude that follows is a reader’s guide to the Bencao gangmu, explaining through a sample entry the content and organization of the text. The main body of the Bencao gangmu was organized according to a classification of natural objects designed to move from the most fundamental to the most exalted: from elemental substances like water, earth, and fire, through several types of plants and animals, and finally to mankind. The 52 chapters (juan) included more than 11,000 recipes for almost 1,900 natural objects or drug ingredients. Different kinds of text, types of citation, and modes of proof were used in describing many of these categories, as Li’s description of an object and invocation of evidence were influenced by the sources at his disposal. Claims regarding the transformations of elemental substances would require different kinds of proof from arguments concerning peonies or mummies. Chapters 3 through 6, the heart of this book, are divided into sections that broadly recapitulate the structure of Li’s text. This serves two purposes: First, it allows us to focus on the different modes of constructing belief that operated for different kinds of natural objects. At the same time, it functions as a guided walk through the textual and natural landscape of late Ming natural history, introducing key figures in that landscape while examining epistemic approaches that shaped knowledge of them. These sections are organized around case studies that highlight major epistemological issues or critical debates that suffused both the Bencao gangmu and the literature with which it was in dialogue. The Conclusion continues the story by looking at episodes from the modern reinvention of Li Shizhen and his work, including the reimagining of Li’s text in the eighteenth century as a result of Qing (1644–1911) 10


colonial expansion and the recasting of Li as a barefoot doctor and a modern comic book icon. This final chapter also reemphasizes the significance of the Bencao gangmu as a rich historical source on the cultural and intellectual history of China. Huang’s cards, Borges’s bestiary, and Li’s compendium all sought to reconcile knowledge distant in time, space, or language with the contemporary knowledge of an individual reader, patient, doctor, or scholar. Much like Huang’s recipes and Borges’s creatures, the beings dancing in Li’s work did not always fit comfortably within the walls of the classification Li set out for them. He was well aware that his universe was constantly transforming and that the power of those metamorphoses ultimately frustrated any attempt at systematic grouping or definitive knowledge of natural objects. However, he sought to channel those transformations into a medical practice informed by natural history, one that could reconcile nature’s metamorphoses with those of the human body and help heal people. In order to do so, he had to make sense of the often contradictory information and evidence filling his senses and his bookshelves. The following is an exploration of the ways in which language and categories, and their transformations, shaped his view of nature and ultimately linked the monkeys in his text to the inkpots that helped create them.

11

1 CONCEPTION: BIRTH OF A NATURALIST

The Death of the Accidental Doctor It was 1593, and Li Shizhen’s body lay cold on the bed. His cottage was a mess. “Poverty Place,” as Li had poetically dubbed the home of his twilight years, was full of ink and knives, books and animal skins, poems and pepper seeds. Li had prided himself on his lifelong pursuit of broad learning of things (bowu), and the books and objects filling his modest riverside home were a testament to his determination to know as much as possible about the world around him. They also revealed the obsessive personality of a man bent on inking his own name into the canon of pharmaceutical and natural history that he had spent his life learning and practicing. Li had not been a particularly healthy man, and he undoubtedly sampled many of the dried herbs on his shelves. A series of odd and debilitating illnesses plagued him as a child: an eye disease brought on by habitually eating black pepper seeds (hujiao), recurring bouts of influenza, and undisclosed maladies that ostensibly caused him to fail the exams that would have guaranteed him a lucrative career in the civil service.1 From a very early age, Li had received a classical education in preparation for these civil exams. His childhood was spent moving from school to school, devoting himself to a curriculum that led from the Four Books (Sishu) on through “eight-legged essays” (bagu wen, or zhiyi), poetry, and other canonical and historical texts.2 This was not a course taken lightly: when Li was thirteen, his father assured him that success in the examinations was the only way to carry on the family’s good name, and Li intensified his preparation until he was sick from the effort.3 Happily, he passed the prefectural exams in Huangzhou and at fourteen earned a midlevel licentiate (xiucai) degree. Unfortunately, this was the only exam success that Li was to enjoy. After three more years of intense study, Li traveled to the provincial capital of Wuchang to sit for the next 12

CONCEPTION: BIRTH OF A NATURALIST

level of the examinations (xiangshi). Along with roughly 95 percent of candidates that year, he failed.4 After a third convincing failure, and given a physical constitution that had been weakening with each attempt, Li received his father’s blessing to abandon the examinations and take up the family trade. Li’s family lived comfortably as medical practitioners in their district of Qizhou (now Qichun in Hubei province). His grandfather had made his living as a traveling bell doctor (lingyi), one of many “physicians who crossed rivers and lakes” (jianghu yi), ringing a bell to announce his presence to potential clients. This class of medics was looked down on for openly peddling their medical skills to make money, in contrast to the literati doctors (ruyi), who enjoyed both a reputation for scholarship unmuddied by the concern for monetary gain and, typically, the financial means to afford such luxury. Li’s father, Li Yanwen, however, enjoyed a relatively secure reputation as a medical scholar, treating patients in Qizhou and composing several treatises on diagnostic methods and on local products, such as mugwort and ginseng.5 Li Yanwen was more financially secure than his own father had been, as the family had acquired some farmland during his youth and did not have to rely on medicine for the majority of their income. He passed the local civil exams and attained the rank of licentiate, and authored at least five works on medicine, all of which have since been lost: Sizhen faming [Elucidation of the four methods of clinical examination], Yixue bamai zhu [Notes on the eight conduits of medicine], Douzhen zhengzhi [Smallpox diagnosis and treatment], Renshen zhuan [The story of ginseng], and Qi ai zhuan [An account of Qizhou mugwort]. Once Yanwen took Shizhen on as an apprentice, the two traveled together as the father schooled his son in the family business. After practicing with his father and taking up a brief government post as an official medical consultant in the Imperial Medical Office (Taiyi yuan) in Beijing, Li Shizhen spent thirty years of his life traveling throughout southern China. As he treated patients, interviewed local farmers and hunters, and read as widely as possible, Li gathered material for his planned medical encyclopedia. By 1561, an exhausted Li was ready to settle into a more relaxed middle age, and he returned to Qizhou to begin writing. Li moved into a garden house on the shore of Rain Lake, took the name Binhu (Near the Lake) to mark this new phase of life, and playfully named his new home after a favorite line from the Shijing [Poetry classic]. Li imagined his “Poverty Place” (Kesuoguan) as an appropriate 13


homage to the poem: “He has reared his hut in the bend of the mound / That large man, with such lightness of heart.”6 A large man? Perhaps. It is difficult, however, to imagine him so lighthearted. Li devoted more than thirty years of writing, researching, experimenting, and interviewing to the construction of his Bencao gangmu, the most extensive single text on pharmacology and natural history that had ever been produced in Chinese by anyone, let alone by a single author.

The Poet of Poverty Place Thirty years in court and at key posts afield, You’ve pitied all the deaths you’ve seen upon the battlefield. Long alone in the mountains, fragrant landu blossoms wait: Who will spread your works throughout the Four Seas? Singing “White Snow” to a tune of long ago, I spend my drunk days boating in clear streams among Five Lakes. The perch taste delicious as the autumn breezes blow; Together, friend, let us plan a trip to Paradise.7 Dr. Li had spent his adult life honing and developing the classical education of his youth, and the poet of Poverty Place worked his studies into a copious body of medical and literary work. In the course of his research for the Bencao gangmu, Li composed a treatise on a dappled snake indigenous to his native province as well as monographs on several topics of medical theory.8 Only a few of these short pieces have survived, all of them dealing with pulse diagnosis.9 The study of pulses had been one of his father’s specialties, and Li likely focused on the same topic both as a filial gesture and as a way to start making a name for himself as a learned medical scholar. Among Li’s short works were the Binhu maixue [Binhu’s study of vessels] and the Qijing bamai kao [Studies of the eight irregular vessels].10 Li also wrote the Maijue kaozheng [Rhymed investigation of the vessels], a text of only two or three pages composed in rhymed verse to facilitate memorization. This last text was Li’s addition to a commentary tradition stemming from the Maijue [The rhymed vessels], a collection of poems on the vessels in the body attributed to Six Dynasties (220–589) author Gao Yangsheng but probably first composed some time in the Song period. In his Sizhen faming, Li’s father had corrected what he perceived to be errors in the Maijue text, and Li’s Maijue kaozheng continued and expanded this legacy. 14


Though he traveled widely while compiling the materials for the Bencao gangmu, Li did not forget his home or his friends from Hubei province. The poem above, one of only two extant poems by Li, was dedicated to his close friend Wu Guolun (1524–1593).11 “Wu Mingqing returns home after serving in office in Henan” (Wu Mingqing zi Henan dacan guili) marked Wu’s return to Hubei to retire after a series of official posts that had spanned more than thirty years. Li composed his homage in seven-character lines, one of the poetic forms for which Wu was most renowned. This short poem, full of literary allusions, hints at the erudition that Li would later bring to his collection of materia medica. Li begins the poem by invoking Wu’s time in the civil service. In the imperial palace, locks on the doors to forbidden areas were painted with bluegreen lacquer and were referred to as qingsuo, or blue locks. What I have translated above as “deaths . . . upon the battlefield” is an interpretation of what Li literally rendered as “bugs and sand, gibbons and cranes.” According to a legend recorded in one of Li’s favorite encyclopedias, the Song Taiping yulan [Imperial digest of the Taiping era], during a military campaign in what is now South China, the entire army of King Mu of Zhou (reigned 976–922 bce) was transformed in defeat: the nobles metamorphosed into gibbons and cranes, while commoners changed into bugs and sand.12 Li was fascinated by such stories of transformation in the natural world, and tales like that of King Mu fundamentally shaped Li’s vision of nature and its processes. Li’s extensive reading, which included encyclopedias, medical books, and poems full of stories about transformations of plants, animals, stones, and people, became the foundation for his own encyclopedia. More than just a celebration of his broad learning, poems like “Wu Mingqing returns . . .” also served a more immediate function. These pieces of verse circulated in an economy of literary and social capital and formed the basis on which any work (encyclopedic or otherwise) might find financial backing, a printer, and an audience. In praising Wu Guolun, Li likely had ulterior motives in mind: Wu was a good friend of Wang Shizhen (1526–1590), a heavyweight of Ming letters and Li’s last hope for publishing his life’s work. In publishing as in life, Li soon learned that one should be careful what one wishes for.

The Master of Profound Ease It wasn’t until his twilight years that the poet of Poverty Place was finally granted his wish. At age seventy-two, Li had seen better days. He had 15


hoped to finish navigating a path through the bustling Nanjing print market ten years and several illnesses and grandchildren earlier. It had been almost three years since he had left his Hubei home, laden with a manuscript of several million characters, but still he couldn’t convince a printer to take a chance on publishing it. It was springtime, however, and Li’s luck seemed to be turning, along with the plum blossoms on Three Mountains Street, the publishing hub of late Ming Nanjing.13 He had finally managed to wield one of the most powerful tools a late Ming scholar could have: famous friends. So, in 1590, there Li was again in Taicang, calling on his last resort, scholar-official and friend-of-a-friend Wang Shizhen, hoping to finally convince him to endorse his work.14 When Li had asked Wang for help ten years earlier, in 1580, Wang had done what any man of letters would probably have done when an obscure doctor from the provinces showed up on his doorstep and thrust a massive book of materia medica in his face. Wang entertained his visitor and sent him away with the vague promise of a preface for the immense manuscript. Wang spent almost a decade never quite getting around to writing that preface. He did, however, placate Li by sending him off with a poem written for the occasion: Old Man Li stays at the tree by the pool, Watching immortals surpassing dragons as they go. From his pouch he withdraws a book by Ge Hong, Seeming to beg a preface from the Master of Profound Ease. The Recluse of Huayang desired to be an immortal, Correcting the Bencao for ten slow years. Why not depend on the labors of his son, Whipping up whirlwinds and soaring to the nine heavens?15 The poem, “Playfully presented upon seeking a preface to the revised Bencao” (Jiaoding bencao qiuxu xizeng zhi), is full of classical and medical allusions, beginning with a nod to Song dynasty poet Mei Yaochen (1002–1060), whose verse contained many references to plants and animals. It soars off at the end with an allusion to a famous passage in the Zhuangzi, wherein a roc bird “whips up a whirlwind and soars up ninety thousand li, cutting through the clouds and qi, shouldering the bluegreen sky.”16 The first two lines of both quatrains of Wang’s poem take Li Shizhen and Tao Hongjing, the “Recluse of Huayang,” (456–536), respectively, as their topics, setting up a congruence between the two men. This is exactly the way Li would have wanted himself portrayed, and it 16


was quite a compliment on the part of Wang Shizhen. Tao Hongjing’s “ten slow years” of writing and correcting errors in his own famous bencao work implicitly invoke Li’s long labors on the Bencao gangmu prior to visiting with Wang.17 The tree by the pool was probably a clever allusion to the name Li chose for himself late in life when he lived “by the lake.” The qingnang (literally, blue-green pouch) was a bag into which ancient doctors put their medical books when traveling, holding the pouch under the arm, and represented medical doctors as a stethoscope does today.18 With the phrase Xuanyan xiansheng (roughly, the master of profound ease), Wang likened himself to Jin dynasty (265–420) medical author Huangfu Mi, a famous recluse who withdrew from public office to live in the countryside and write texts on acupuncture and moxibustion, taking on the name Xuanyan xiansheng. Wang went on to compare Li to Tao Hongjing and another famous doctor, Ge Hong (284– 364), who had themselves written about and tasted herbs in their quests for immortality.19 Both of these men were famous for their work on medicinal drugs, and perhaps more pointedly, both were well-known Daoist practitioners and authors. Though Wang’s last years in Nanjing and Taicang were largely spent in the gardens of fellow statesmen, he had become a devout disciple of a friend’s teenage daughter, Tanyangzi, who presented herself as a Daoist immortal. Li’s first visit with Wang occurred in the same year as the death of this ascetic figure, said by some to have visibly ascended to the heavens upon her demise and posthumously accused by others of having practiced witchcraft.20 The Daoist imagery suffusing Wang’s poem speaks not only to Wang’s preoccupation at the time but also to the nature of Li’s work, which as we will see was founded on the work of people he called Daoists and devoted to unmasking the chicanery behind popular Daoist arts.21

The Biography of a Bencao Wang’s home was the last stop in what had been an exhausting decade for the old doctor. After securing Wang’s preface and the promise of printer Hu Chenglong to publish his work, Li returned to Hubei. He died in 1593 knowing that his book had finally found a publisher, though he would not live to see it finished. As Li’s body lay in Poverty Place, Hu was already busy in his Nanjing print shop supervising the cutting of woodblocks for the first edition of the Bencao gangmu.22 The doctor’s death 17


made the surviving manuscript a family affair, as Li’s sons and grandsons rallied around his memory and set to work finishing the massive tome. Various sons proofread and edited the text, made arrangements with the printer, and oversaw production. Jianyuan, who had accompanied his father, Shizhen, on many of his travels, was especially committed to the work. He and his brothers scoured past bencao for illustrations and copied images of rocks, animals, and plants to accompany a text that his father had never planned on illustrating.23 Had he survived to see his work in print, Li might have been somewhat displeased by the result of his sons’ labors. Li worried about illustrations. He paid close attention to the images depicted in classic collections of materia medica and carefully evaluated their quality and effectiveness. Did the image help a reader identify the object it depicted? This was an ideal to strive for. Li praised the images in the Shu bencao [Bencao of the state of Shu] and Jiuhuang bencao [Famine relief bencao] for depicting the form or appearance (xingzhuang) of plants and animals.24 Did the illustration of a plant accord with its textual description? Not always. He complained that there were too few illustrations in the Tujing bencao [Illustrated bencao classic], for example, and those that were included often differed from the textual descriptions they were supposed to accompany.25 Li was concerned with the relationship between text and image in works about natural objects, and there is every reason to think he would have brought the same critical eye and perspicacity to his own text. He was proud of his work and took every opportunity to advertise its many features. Wang Shizhen was careful in the preface he wrote for Li to acknowledge the scope of the massive work and made sure to specifically describe the various parts of the draft that Li had shown him. Nonetheless, no illustrations are mentioned anywhere in Li’s or Wang’s prefaces. It is unlikely that this was an oversight. Li probably had no intention of having his compendium illustrated in the first place, and he left no trace of plans to include images in the final text. The fact that the illustrations in the first edition were separated from the main text in two independent juan further reveals them as the rushed product of an afterthought. Perhaps his sons or the printer thought that pictures would make the book more marketable. Perhaps Jianyuan or one of his brothers saw images in other famous collections of materia medica and wanted to make sure his father’s work would surpass them in every way. Whatever the case may be, the fact that the Bencao gangmu (hereafter Bencao) was 18


ultimately illustrated reminds us that the final compendium was the work of many hands once it was out of Li Shizhen’s. For a text that has become a monument of Chinese science and medicine, celebrated by schoolchildren and scholars alike, Li’s Bencao received little attention when it was initially printed in 1596. After the printing was complete, Jianyuan presented the first complete copy of the Bencao to Emperor Shenzong (r. 1572–1620) and attempted to secure imperial backing for the work.26 The surviving memorial, submitted in the first lunar month (January or February) of 1596, records an attempt by Jianyuan to take advantage of Shenzong’s 1594 edict ordering the presentation of books to the throne in an effort to collect materials for the composition of the dynastic history. Some accounts contend that the emperor admired Li’s work and ordered that it should be printed and circulated throughout the realm for the benefit of all scholars.27 Others claim that the emperor was more dismissive, passing the Bencao off to the Ministry of Rites and storing a copy in the palace.28 Either way, there is no firm evidence of an imperial effort to print, financially sponsor, or widely circulate the text that would go on to become a classic of medicine and natural history. In fact, the first printing of the Bencao was soon perceived as a rather shabby affair. Known as the Jinling edition after an archaic name for Nanjing, it was probably sold in limited quantities to relatively wealthy professionals. Justifying his efforts to reprint the Bencao in a new edition, Xia Liangxin, a printer and government official in Jiangxi,29 claimed to have surveyed local officials for their opinions of the first Jinling volumes. After complaining that the characters were illegible and the illustrations needed to be reengraved, the officials eagerly offered up their household copies to facilitate the reprinting project.30 Together with his fellow official Zhang Dingsi, Xia devoted six months to the carving of the Jiangxi edition of the Bencao, which was finished in 1603.31 Xia and Zhang claimed that they were forced to rely on the officials’ copies of the 1596 Bencao in order to amass enough of the text to print a new edition. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Li’s work was edited, reillustrated, and reprinted several times.32 Qing editions began appending Li’s shorter medical works to the main text of the Bencao, and after its initial publication in 1871, Zhao Xuemin’s (1719–1805) Bencao gangmu shiyi [Correction of omissions in the Bencao gangmu, finished ca. 1800] was added as a further appendix to and a major critique of Li’s text. By 19


the end of the Ming dynasty, the Bencao had also circulated to Japan, where it was studied, translated, and reprinted in several editions.33 After Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) purchased a copy of the Bencao in Nagasaki in 1607 and presented it to Tokugawa Ieyasu in the same year, the text went on to shape the development of natural studies in early modern Japan.34 By the eighteenth century, Li’s compendium was being studied in Korea as well, and portions were translated into French by JeanBaptiste du Halde (1674–1743).35 Even Charles Darwin cited Li’s work as a “Chinese encyclopedia,” from which he culled several examples of the “ancient Chinese” domestication of fowl, fish, and other creatures and plants.36

The Bencao as Natural History The Bencao was a work of unprecedented scope, presented as such from its earliest publication. The preface that Wang Shizhen finally wrote characterized the book as covering “everything from the most ancient records to vernacular stories, with nothing relevant left out.”37 Even taking into account the well-worn idiom of prefaces that lavishly laud the author and his efforts, Wang’s comments seem effusive in their emphasis on the scope and diversity of Li’s work: Like entering the Golden Grain Garden, the varieties and colors dazzle the eyes; like ascending to the Dragon Lord’s Palace, the treasures are all on display; as if facing a (clear) pot of ice or a jade mirror, one can discern the minutest details. Abundant but not superfluous, detailed but essential, comprehensive and thorough, penetrating the deep and vast. How could we see this simply as a medical book? What diligence and grace Master Li has devoted to the intricacies of principle (xingli),38 encyclopedic works of the investigation of things (gewu), the secret esoterica of kings, and the valued knowledge of common people. What earnest labor on the part of Master Li!39 Li’s own prefatory material also reflects both a self-conscious desire to produce a work of magnitude and lasting historical significance and a clear sense of pride in what he was doing. In an annotated bibliography of works on materia medica throughout history, he immodestly made his own compendium the final, crowning step in a march toward ever more complete, less error-riddled, and better-organized texts.40 Li cited himself 20


in the same language he reserved for classical authors and scholars of long and great renown, as he aspired to be considered equally authoritative. So what, exactly, did Li Shizhen think he was doing? We can at least comment on the colors in which he painted his project. This scholar’s palette was a mixture of medicine and natural history, and in the introduction to the massive Bencao, he presented himself as contributing to both: “Thirty-nine41 kinds of drugs not seen in Tang (618–907) or Song bencao works but used by Jin, Yuan (1271–1368), and Ming doctors are included. I, Shizhen, have added a further 374 kinds. Although this is a medical work on drugs, through my research I have also investigated their principle (xingli) and practiced the gewu studies of classical (ru) scholars.42 This work can supplement the inadequacies of the Erya [Approaching refinement] and [commentaries on the] Shijing.”43 The content of the individual sections of the Bencao bears out Li’s claim; while much of the text is devoted to prescriptions and disease, a significant proportion relates the textual history of the plants, animals, and other objects discussed. Li designed his work as a melding of the literatures of medicine and natural history into one monument to his own erudition and to the awesome multivalence of the natural world. A broad survey of all of the texts related to the engagement of humans with plants and animals in China might incorporate cookbooks, veterinary handbooks, texts on animal husbandry and physiognomy, guides to the cultivation of silkworms and goldfish, manuals of pest control, and an enormous scattered corpus of paintings, prints, prose, and verse. The project of late Ming natural history, however, while related to and engaging with some of this material, was a tradition of its own that cohered in its intertextuality, in its citation practices, and in an awareness on the part of many of its authors that they were participating in a dialogue centering on certain key texts. I identify natural history in early modern China as an enterprise (1) devoted to the explication of the objects of the world (for convenience’s sake I frequently refer to these as natural objects, though for Li and others they included man-made things composed of stone, plant material, bone, and the like), and (2) making deliberate use of the historical treatment of these objects in understanding their qualities and potential use in the contemporary world. This endeavor was built on a long tradition of commentary writing.44 What began as an evolving series of glosses on the plant and animal names in classical texts eventually expanded into the kind of detailed accounts of the names, 21


habitat, and qualities of creatures that Li codified in the Bencao. In order to understand how natural history in China developed, we need to understand the two classic texts that formed a foundation of commentary on natural objects: the Erya, one of the earliest dictionaries in China, and the Shijing, an anthology of early poetry that was required reading for any learned person in imperial China.

The Order of Things Most popular Chinese accounts of the life of Li Shizhen include at least one scene in which the young Li pores over an edition of the Erya, studying its lists of plants and animals and providing an early glimpse into the interests that would eventually make him famous.45 This early encyclopedic dictionary was a topically arranged set of glosses on specific words in more ancient texts. Among its longest sections were those devoted to plants (cao), trees (mu), bugs and other small creepy crawlies included in the category of chong, fish and other scaly animals (yu), birds (niao), beasts (shou), and livestock (chu).46 The Erya was critical to the development of natural history not simply for its contents, but also for its emphasis on categories and its particular way of classifying the natural world. This ordering of living things (caomu chongyu niaoshou) persisted in the titles of later natural history works, including commentaries on the Shijing. It was also an important influence on early modern taxonomies.47 Many commentaries on the Erya were written over the centuries, preserving the basic structure of the dictionary while expanding its glosses and adding more entries. Li drew from several of these in composing the Bencao, especially those focused on discussions of natural objects.48 The Guangya [Broadening refinement] by Zhang Yi (fl. 227–233), for example, nearly doubled the number of plant and animal entries in the original text. Guo Pu’s (276–324) Erya zhu [Commentary on Approaching refinement] became the basis for almost all Erya studies of the Song and later, as his emphasis on using personal experience and detailed description to more fully understand the Erya flora and fauna represented a qualitative shift in how the text was studied.49 His glosses on plant and animal names included comments on their habitat, appearance, and categorization, and he occasionally claimed to have seen the creatures or the phenomena for himself.50 A number of Song scholars followed his lead in editions that would prove formative for scholars of natural history in the 22


Ming period. The Erya zhushu [Annotated commentary on Approaching refinement] by Xing Bing (932–1010) substantially expanded the Guo Pu commentary and reshaped the field by making new kinds of texts, including materia medica collections, relevant to understanding the natural world of the Erya, and by including quotations from many authors on the appearance and habits of animals and plants. Guo Pu remained the commentarial force to be reckoned with, so Xing justified the need for his own revision by comparing his efforts to those of the earlier master: “Master Guo was not specific. He gave incomplete accounts without discussion, and was somewhat difficult to understand. [He] cited and consulted classic works and the words of classical scholars and philosophers in order to correct them. Master Guo’s annotations collect many notes from classic works; he is fluent in classical literature and understands it well. Still, he cites chapter titles and nothing more. Sometimes the name of a book is obscure and strange, its meaning and purpose are hidden and unclear. In that case, I provide records from additional works in order to dispel ignorance.”51 Two other Song texts joined the Erya zhushu in further “dispelling ignorance” and forming a corpus of what became very widely cited scholarship on plants and animals in China: the Piya [Added refinement]52 of about 1096 by Lu Dian (1042–1102) and the 1174 Erya yi [Wings of Approaching refinement]53 by Luo Yuan (1136–1184). Both texts chronicled a large body of previous commentary on the objects treated in the Erya and were of enormous natural historical interest. This reinvigoration of Erya scholarship blossomed into wide-ranging scholarship on plants and animals through the Ming and early Qing periods. The commentaries were often cited in discussions of plants and animals in the great eighteenth-century encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng [Compendium of images and texts, ancient and modern] and were frequently invoked in discussions of natural objects in Ming and early Qing scholarly jottings (biji). The Erya and its Song commentaries also were some of the most frequently cited nonmedical texts in the Bencao, with Li Shizhen explicitly quoting the Erya more than 330 times.54 If the Erya and its associated commentaries formed the warp of a natural history tradition, then the Shijing formed the woof. The Shijing was a collection of 305 poems whose compilation was traditionally attributed to Confucius, though the text probably coalesced over time as a result of many hands.55 Confucius, in a famous passage in the Lunyu [Analects], urged students to study the Shijing: “The Master said: Young 23


men, why do none of you study the Poems? These verses elevate the mind, facilitate observation, promote sociability, and keep resentment at bay. They aid one at home in the service of one’s father, and abroad in the service of one’s ruler. They greatly increase one’s knowledge of the names (ming) of birds and beasts, plants and trees.”56 Though ming has been traditionally translated as “name,” as used here it probably means something more like “what one ought to know about X,” or “well-known X.” This injunction helped spur the creation of a tradition of textual commentary to the Shijing that treated animals and plants as exclusive or primary subject matter. The Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu [Commentary on the plants, woods, birds, beasts, bugs, and fish in the Mao Poems] by Lu Ji (261–303) was the most important early commentary written for such a purpose.57 Composed around 245,58 this text worked from what is now the only complete redaction of the Shijing, the Maoshi, or Mao Poems, edited by Mao Heng (fl. 220–150 bce) and continued by his son Mao Chang. Lu Ji’s work presented each verse of the Shijing that contained the name of a plant or an animal, adding for each object a detailed commentary discussing its alternate names, appearance, and habits; its use in food and medicine; and a history of its treatment by other authors. Lu Ji’s text inspired a number of subcommentaries, most prominently the Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu guangyao [Essential points and expansion on the plants, woods, birds, beasts, bugs, and fish of the Mao Poems] by Mao Jin (1599–1659), written ca. 1639 and published in several illustrated editions through the Ming and Qing.59 Though much has been made of the importance of the Shijing as a storehouse for the names of plants and animals, the issue is actually more complicated than it initially might seem. Many names of plants, animals, and rocks in the text included graphic elements that identified the name as a specific kind of natural object: a bird name often contained the element niao, a plant name contained cao (represented by the top four strokes of this character), and the like. Many of the names, however, did not contain these elements and were consequently not readily identifiable as plants or animals to the nonspecialist reader. It was and is still possible for different commentators to identify slightly different sets of plant and animal names in the Shijing and structure their commentaries accordingly. Even modern translations of the Shijing vary in their identifications of plants and animals in the text, with the result depending in part on the commentary edition a translator has relied on in creating his or her own work.60 All told, Lu Ji’s text and its assorted exegeses, the several com24


mentaries on the Shijing that were devoted to the natural objects discussed therein, and the poems themselves provided an important focus of debate for later scholars of natural history. The Erya, Shijing, and associated commentaries were critical in shaping natural history in early modern China, not just as sources of information but as generic models as well. These texts set a precedent for a commentarial style that encouraged disagreement and debate, with the Shijing and its related exegeses serving as a model for commentary on other poetry collections that involved natural objects. The very form of the Erya inspired an ordering of nature (herbs and trees, then birds and beasts, followed by bugs and fish) that persisted in many later natural histories. Both texts explicitly drew scholarly attention to naming nature as a vital aspect of knowing and understanding it. Finally, both texts supported a diachronic community of scholars who gradually added new flesh to the bones of the original classics in the form of a diverse set of sources devoted to more fully understanding, identifying, and differentiating textual flora and fauna. Several of these works provided further sources for discussions of plant and animal history in the Bencao.

Broad Learning and the Investigation of Things In his bibliography of texts consulted in preparing the Bencao, Li listed 932 titles grouped in three categories: important collections of materia medica, medical texts (the bulk of which were formularies), and nonmedical works.61 This wide swatch of nonmedical literature included philosophical and historical texts, notebooks, poetry, encyclopedic works, records of the strange (zhiguai),62 dictionaries, treatises (pulu) on plants and animals,63 and travel accounts. To acknowledge the wide scope of this learning, Wang Shizhen placed Li in a lineage of scholars including Zhang Hua (232–300),64 author of the encyclopedic Bowuzhi [Records of broad learning] and paradigmatic naturalist: Through the epochs it has been said: By gazing at their dragon glow, one can recognize ancient swords; by examining unusual qi one can distinguish precious pearls. Mysteries like the auspicious fruit (pingshi) and the rainmaker bird (shangyang) [both identified by Confucius in the Shuoyuan [Garden of anecdotes]] would not be penetrated without such Heavenly brilliance.65 After this we have Zhang Hua the scholar of broad learning, Ji Kang (223–262) 25


the philologist, and Yi Dun the appraiser of precious stones: such people are as rare as morning stars. One day Li Dongbi [Li Shizhen], a gentleman from Qizhou in Chu, called on me at Yanshan Garden and I invited him to stay with me for several days.66 In beginning his list with the account of the pingshi fruit and the shangyang bird, Wang likened Li to Confucius, as both scholars were adept at identifying unusual animals and understanding their significance. The shangyang was a one-legged bird whose presence in Qi foretold massive rain: Confucius warned the Duke of Qi’s messenger of this, and the realm thus avoided massive flooding. The pingshi fruit was found floating in the Jiang River by the King of Chu: Confucius correctly understood the fruit to be a delicacy and an omen of political victory, instructing the King to cut it open and taste the sweet crablike flesh. Confucius identified both strange natural objects by recalling a song, and Li likewise informed his powers of observation with his deep knowledge of poetry and natural history.67 Along with his early literary association (thanks to Wang Shizhen) with Zhang Hua and other experts who had special insight into natural objects, Li’s identification as a bowu scholar with special access to observations of nature helped establish his reputation as a naturalist and scholar of broad learning as well as a medical doctor. Qing encyclopedists of the eighteenth-century Gujin tushu jicheng reaffirmed Li’s place within a history of bowu scholars, including the sections of the encyclopedia on beasts and plants within a larger category called bowu studies (including plants, animals, various crafts and occupations, spirits, and religion) and often citing the Bencao as a reference work within these subsections. Nineteenth-century translators of works in European languages into Chinese, many of whom took the Bencao gangmu as a comparative touchstone for translating Western works on plants and animals, reappropriated the term bowuxue (bowu studies) as a Chinese translation of “natural history.”68 The term has persisted in modern scholarship to refer to a group of fields that include zoology, botany, petrology, mineralogy, and other modern scientific disciplines devoted to the study of natural objects, placing the emergence of these fields in the Ming, with Li acting as a kind of protoscientist.69 Broad learning and an impressive pedigree were not enough to make a scholar a superior naturalist, however. To be a great scholar of nature, one also had to affirm a commitment to gewu, or the “investigation of 26


things.”70 In his preface to the Bencao, Wang Shizhen lauded Li Shizhen for consulting works of gewu, a claim that Li echoed in his own preface to the work. The phrase derives from the Daxue [Great Learning], originally one chapter of the book Liji [Record of rites] dating from between the fifth and third centuries bce. It was discussed in an influential commentary by neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200), whose work was pivotal to Ming interpretations of classical philosophy.71 The very title of Li’s compendium reflects familiarity and concern with the Song scholar’s work: Zhu’s Zizhi tongjian gangmu [Classified comprehensive mirror for aid in government], a commentary on historian Sima Guang’s (1019–1086) Zizhi tongjian [Comprehensive mirror for aid in government], probably inspired the organization of Li’s work into major categories (gang), with specific entries or contents (mu) listed within each.72 Li’s use of the phrase gewu indicated a project to bring critical textual scholarship to bear on the field of medical inquiry. He occasionally invoked the term in order to tout its benefits: when conducted by a scholar of wide learning (bowu), gewu studies were without limits (wuqiong) and allowed one to probe the secrets of the universe. Li criticized contemporary doctors for not engaging in gewu and hailed ancient scholars for their commitment to the same. Recounting a story from the writings of poet and scholar Su Shi (1037–1101), Li praised the Song doctor Zhang Gong for identifying and successfully treating a patient’s ailment, all as a result of understanding the principle (li) behind the use of zhiju fruit to treat overconsumption of alcohol: “Sigh! Past scholars valued the investigation of things (gewu); [doctors] like Zhang Gong understood this principle. How is it that doctors [today] can say the things they do?”73 This invocation of gewu did not amount to Li self-consciously engaging in a systematic method of scholarship, nor did it express a coherent philosophical position as to the meaning of the term per se. The discourse of gewu represented, for Li, an intellectual ideal according to which even medical scholars ought to consult nonmedical works on the plants and animals in the prescriptions they studied in order to fully understand (zhi) the objects themselves and how they functioned as drugs. Gewu, then, made natural history integral to medicine.

Building the Bencao Tradition Flip through a few sections of the Bencao and you will see ample evidence of Li’s commitment to broad learning and the investigation of things. Our Virgil leads us from the snowy peaks of Mount Kunlun on 27


through the serpent-infested Southern Seas, all the time pointing and prodding at this or that weed or warbler, warning us of poisons and guiding us toward panaceas. The Bencao is a textured empire of natural knowledge, with Li Shizhen acting as both weaver and curator. This text was also, however, designed to contribute to a body of literature from which it took its title. “Bencao” has variously been translated into English as “pharmacopoeia,”74 “materia medica,”75 “pandect of natural history,”76 “pharmaceutical literature,”77 and “encyclopedia,” all of which approximate this quite varied class of medical text that was in each case devoted to explicating the natural objects used in medical prescriptions.78 In contrast to drug formularies, which were collections of recipes intended as guides to the practice of concocting formulas, bencao texts included significant background information on medicinal drugs, including the categorization of substances according to qualities such as flavor (wei), efficacy or toxicity (du), presence of heat, appearance, seasonality, and growth habits. Bencao texts could also include the textual and natural history of each drug, including lists of alternate or vernacular names, and for this reason they are valuable sources for the study of plants, animals, and stones throughout the history of China. Li treated bencao works as a textual genre and grouped together what he considered to be the most important of these works in a special section of his bibliography.79 Appendix 1 provides the contents of this list, Lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages].80 Li clearly worked closely with some of these texts, but he had never seen some of the bencao that he referenced, relying on the prefaces and citations of previous authors for evidence of lost or inaccessible works. In Li’s conception, the bencao tradition began with the Shennong bencao jing (hereafter Bencao jing).81 The bearded Shennong, also known as “the Divine Farmer” or “the Divine Husbandman,” was a legendary figure widely considered to be the ancestor of Chinese drug knowledge as well as the inventor of the plow and of markets.82 The Bencao jing, now believed to be a compilation from the second or first century bce, organized its drugs into three classes.83 The upper class (shang pin), or princes (jun), included 120 drugs that would not cause harm even if taken in large doses for long periods of time, while the middle class (zhong pin), or ministers (chen), included another 120 drugs that could be dangerous depending on dosage and on the other drugs with which they were used. The lower class (xia pin), or assistants and aides (zuoshi), included 125 drugs that were very toxic but could be used 28


with caution to produce striking medicinal effects. Despite its reputed early date of composition, the Bencao jing was known to Li only through a later commentary by Tao Hongjing, the [Shennong] Bencao jing jizhu [Notes to the Divine Husbandman’s bencao]. Tao revised the tripartite structure of the (alleged) original text, organizing each of the three categories into subdivisions based on natural objects: jades and stones (yushi), herbs (cao), trees (mu), fruits (guo), vegetables (cai), grains/staples (mishi), and creatures (chongshou, literally, bugs and beasts). Each of these categories was then further subdivided into princes, ministers, and aides. Following the path laid by Tao Hongjing, many subsequent authors produced annotated and revised editions of the Bencao jing.84 Li was deeply conversant with Tao’s work, and he treated Tao’s edition of the Bencao jing as a major interlocutor in many of his own discussions. He also respected a handful of other bencao writers: Su Jing (fl. 656–660), Chen Zangqi (fl. 8th century), Su Song (1020–1101), Tang Shenwei (fl. 1086–1093), and Kou Zongshi (fl. 1111–1118) appeared again and again as parties with whom Li debated points about the natural world and its use in medicine. The Xinxiu bencao [Newly revised bencao; also known as the Tang bencao], by Su Jing (name later changed to Su Gong) and his collaborators, was the first government-sponsored pharmacopoeia in China.85 The compendium, compiled between the years 657 and 659 and finally published in 659, has survived in its fiftyfour juan entirety. Among its 850 drug descriptions, Su’s text recorded 30 drugs that had been incorporated into Chinese pharmacy from foreign sources, including pepper, benzoin, and oak galls, all of which had been brought into China via the silk routes. Su’s text was one of many medical compendia compiled in a period when the trade of natural and medical objects between China and its neighbors flourished. Tang China saw a new market for drugs, medicines, and spices.86 A burgeoning economy and advances in navigation technology broadened the scope of traded exotics from pre-Tang staples like storax, oak galls, malachite, damask steel, and textiles to include aromatic materials like aloeswood, rosewater, and ambergris, pigments such as indigo, and vitally important spices such as cardamom, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, many of which became regular ingredients in pharmaceutical recipes. Buddhist monks who traveled to China also facilitated a trade in “holy things,” including incense and aromatic woods, ivory, sandalwood stupas and statues, and glass vessels used in rituals.87 Many of these items were used in the medical trade. As a result of this in29


creased trans-Eurasian trade, authors of collectanea, jottings, poetic and lexicographical commentaries, and compendia of strange tales regularly incorporated information about natural objects and materia medica that were from overseas or across the boundaries of the empire, and this literature was mined to create several compendia on foreign drugs.88 Nearly all of these compendia have been lost: some are now known only as titles, others survive in ghostly form as quotations compiled in later bencao. The Hu bencao, now lost, contained seven chapters of drug descriptions from the “Hu” lands collected in the eighth century.89 The Haiyao bencao [Bencao of overseas drugs], compiled by Li Xun (fl. 923), survives only in reconstructions from later texts in which it was cited.90 Li Xun’s compendium was apparently devoted entirely to drugs imported from India and Persia, a focus that is reflected in the few surviving drug descriptions from the text. Li Xun’s Persian ancestry and the fact that his family ran a business selling aromatic drugs probably stirred his interest in foreign materia medica.91 The text itself is notable not simply for its treatments of the medicinal uses of exotica. If the extant portions reflect the text as a whole, the Haiyao bencao was ostensibly meant as a supplement to then-canonical bencao works, with its contents gleaned primarily from accounts in travel journals, gazetteers, and other records of exotic curiosities.92 Gold and silver dust, coral, fossilized crabs, aromatic plants and woods, elephant and rhinoceros tusks, and olives were just a few of the 131 drugs described in the text. Li Shizhen relied heavily on the Hu bencao and Haiyao bencao for his knowledge of foreign materia medica, and his quotations preserve the only extant portions of both. Though Li Shizhen’s originality was substantial, the Bencao most comfortably belongs within a set of Ming bencao works that were essentially revisions and expansions of major Song texts. The model for most of these was Tang Shenwei’s Jingshi zhenglei beiji bencao [Bencao based on classics and histories, organized and classified for speedy use], often abbreviated to Zhenglei bencao and the subject of several imperially sponsored and independent revisions through the Song and Ming.93 The compilation of the Zhenglei bencao signaled a commitment by Song emperors and officials to supporting and regulating the drug industry, stemming in part from their concern with rampant fakery in the expanding drug marketplace and in part from their interest in compiling information about regional differences in medicinal drugs and patients’ bodies.94 The text, which included 31 chapters and 1,558 drugs, drawing mate30


rial from previous bencao works, was innovative in its integration of prescriptions with background on the indications and qualities of each drug.95 By the time Li was writing in the late sixteenth century, Tang’s text was considered the height of the bencao tradition, so it is not surprising that it was the major model for Li’s work in the Bencao gangmu. In addition to these more comprehensive collections, some earlier bencao were devoted to explicating the plant, animal, and stone drugs local to a particular area or associated with a particular region. Works that discussed the qualities and uses of particular drugs, another widespread genre, included titles dealing solely with stalactites (zhongru),96 ginseng (renshen), and cinnamon (gui).97 Famine and drought, which occurred repeatedly during the late Ming, also inspired several bencao works devoted to explicating the uses of those plants easily scavenged in the wild and useful in famine relief. For medicinal uses of such famine plants, Li relied heavily on one of the most famous authorities on the topic, the Jiuhuang bencao [Famine relief bencao] of Zhu Su (d. 1425). This was the list of predecessors Li had in mind when calling his work a bencao, and it was the medical canon at the culmination of which he placed his own compendium. The Bencao was, however, different from the above-mentioned texts in an important way. Most earlier major bencao projects had been imperially commissioned and funded. Several Tang, Song, and Yuan emperors had engaged medical writers to create official compendia intended to update earlier collections of materia medica and codify contemporary knowledge of medical drugs. In contrast, Li had no imperial backing for his writing or research. Li labored in a late Ming context that saw a flourishing of the bencao genre. He had many new texts to work with, including updated commentaries on the Bencao jing98 and several compendia that placed medical prescriptions in broader conceptual schema of cosmological correspondence mediated by the wuxing (Five Phases) and principles of yin and yang.99 The Bencao mengquan [Bencao for trapping ignorance] by Chen Jiamo (1521–1603) and the Bencao shu [A presentation of bencao] by Liu Ruojin (1584–1665) contained unusually careful directions for the preparation of drugs and were heavily influenced by theories of correspondence. Such correspondences were central to the cosmology and ecology of the Bencao, for Li understood them as the basis for all of the transformations and creations in the natural world.100 As we shall see below, this shaped Li’s vision of drug prescription and natural history in 31


fundamental ways, as he attempted to reconcile the properties and applications of material objects with a cosmological system that understood the universe as embodying processes of creation and change.101 In Li’s conception, the peony used in medicine, the peony of Tang poetry, and the peony described in dictionaries and classical texts ought to be understood together. Li was one of several late Ming scholars who used this body of natural history scholarship to probe questions of paramount importance to understanding the universe and their place within it: What are “things” (wu), and what relation do they have with people (ren)? How ought the objects in the natural world be classified? And most strikingly, how ought one make sense of the transformations and metamorphoses of plants and animals in all of their dizzying variety? Any attempt to answer questions such as these involved mobilizing a collection of texts, allies, and senses, and knowing how to arbitrate among the often contradictory facts within them. We turn next to Li’s engagement with these processes.

32

2 GENERATION: ANATOMY OF A NATURALIST

Li Shizhen sat in the tavern with a cup of poison in his hand. Local wisdom was an important ingredient in any collection of medicinal recipes, and it was important to Dr. Li to test folk knowledge when possible before including it in the collection of materia medica he was compiling. The ceramic cup he held was filled with a local delicacy: a thick liquor made with datura blossoms (mantuoluo hua), the fragrant flowers that reportedly rained down from the sky when the Buddha spoke.1 Li was about to use one of the most versatile tools of an early modern scholar of nature: his own body. A naturalist, or a doctor, was expected to rely on his senses to guide him through the gathering and construction of evidence in the marketplace, to annotate texts, and to treat patients. Correctly distinguishing plants, animals, and other drugs from one another was a vitally important skill for a doctor. But what happened when one’s senses deceived one? Varieties of a substance, differentiated by factors such as geographic origin, seasonal harvest, color, or adulteration, could have drastically different effects when used as a drug. While one kind of jade might be beneficial or harmless in medicine, another might kill a patient. Identifying natural objects with the use of one’s senses was crucial to ascertaining their value or toxicity. This was a matter of life and death. This chapter begins to explore the role of experience in discussing, faking, and identifying creatures and the drugs made from them.2 We will pay particular attention to the role played by observation and the terms in which it was discussed, including the relationship between sensation and textual citation in the Bencao. Although it is impossible to access the experience of another person, much less that of a person living five centuries ago, close attention to language as used to describe experience can reveal the attitudes and commitments that governed how Li Shizhen 33


sought out and made sense of the sensory experiences that became sources for his research.

Experience and the Naturalist’s Body Li took another sip from his cup, inhaling the vapors from the nightshade flowers. Though he had not encountered it in earlier pharmacopoeia, datura (a relative of the eggplant and the mandrake) was an important sleep aid, an occasional poison, and one of the earliest anesthetic drugs in Chinese pharmacy.3 The circumstances under which the blossoms were picked reportedly determined the properties of the resulting liquor on the drinker: if the flowers were collected by a dancing person, drinking the nightshade liquor would make one dance; a laughing herb collector likewise would imbue the flowers with giggle-inducing properties.4 This claim excited Li’s experimental tendencies. He resolved to try the wine for himself and record its effects. Though it was not discussed in explicitly visual or sensory language, the knowledge gained through experience was closely related to discussions of autoptic knowledge in several early modern Chinese natural history texts.5 Having experienced a phenomenon or having personally tried a drug was an important means of testing a claim about that phenomenon or remedy. At several points in the Bencao, Li claimed to have personally consumed a remedy to check on particularly questionable qualities attributed to plants and animals, especially when he had gleaned these stories from hearsay or from “ancient texts” (gushu). Li challenged several scholarly claims by carefully looking (xiangjian) inside an object, in one notable case reclassifying insect galls (wubeizi) from a plant to an insect product based on this technique of investigation.6 Several examples of this sort can be found not only in the Bencao but also in many medical texts from as early as the Song period, where claiming to have tested or examined a prescription for oneself was one important way for an author to establish credibility.7 The implication was that a reader had more reason to trust medical knowledge if the author could claim to know about the efficacy of a remedy by having experienced it firsthand. Cutting something open (po, or occasionally jie) to see what was inside was one means of investigating nature and claims about it. Li frequently invoked this kind of dissection as a means of examining the insides of snakes, possibly encouraged by the common practice of pre34

GENERATION: ANATOMY OF A NATURALIST

paring snakes for medicinal use by slicing them open and drying their corpses in the open air: As old fisherman do, use one water snake, remove its head and tail, cut out from the middle [of the snake] a piece as long as a finger, and remove the bones and flesh. Then do the following, but do not let the patient see: use the snakeskin to tightly wrap [the patient’s] finger, covering the outside with paper . . . After several days, cut open [the snakeskin wrapping] and look inside: the finger will have a groove like a small rope, and the inside of the snakeskin will look as if there were a small snake inside, complete with a head and eyes.8 Observation played several roles in this description: seeing was a concern of Li, of his reader, of the possible patient (do not let him see!), and even of the transformed golem serpent formed on the inside of the snakeskin. While previous authors had told stories of the pangolin (lingli or chuanshanjia) playing dead, tricking ants to crawl into spaces beneath its scales and then drowning them, Li claimed to have cut open the creature’s stomach and observed the size and number of ants within. The account has gone on to become a classic marker of Li’s commitment to something resembling empirical science: The lingli is shaped like a Chinese alligator (tuo), but smaller. Its back is like that of a carp (li), but wider. Its head is like that of a mouse, but without teeth. Its stomach has no scales, but is covered in fur. It has a long tongue and a sharp beak with a tail and body of similar length. The scales on its tail are sharp and thick, and it has three horns. The inside of its belly has a complete set of viscera (zangfu), and its stomach is very big. It often extends its tongue and entices ants with it, then eats them. I once cut open its stomach, and counted roughly one sheng of ants inside.9 The composite monster was empirically tamed by observing its insides and quantifying the ants in its stomach. Basing a claim on what one had seen in a particular place also established a naturalist as a reliable source of knowledge. In the Bencao, local knowledge constructed a kind of difference or identity based on having been to a place and experienced its products for oneself. This played out most interestingly in the treatment of foreign nature: when Li discussed a 35


foreign substance that he had not seen for himself, his worry was not that his own claim could not be true, but rather that he was not an accountable authority on the subject (that is, he was not the one to properly judge claims about it). According to Tao Jiucheng [Tao Zongyi, fl. 1360–1368] in his Chuogenglu [Notes made on a rest from plowing]: In Arabia (Tianfangguo) there are men 70 or 80 years old who decide to donate their bodies for the greater good. They completely stop eating and drinking, only washing their bodies and ingesting honey. After enduring this for a month, their urine is entirely made of honey. Upon the death of one of these men, their countrymen place him in a stone coffin, covering him entirely with honey, inscribe the year and date upon his casket, and bury it. After a century they dig it up, at which point the body has become honey-medicine. It is used to treat broken limbs, with only a small amount needed for recovery. This rare material is known as “honey-man.” Master Tao recorded this account, and I don’t know if it is true. I record it here at the end of the chapter (juan) to await another scholar of broad knowledge.10 Li recorded drugs in his work that hailed from distant times as well as foreign lands. In cases where he recorded ancient knowledge, there was also an implicit appeal to potential eyewitness, as Li considered texts from the very distant past to be trustworthy authorities on the customs of their time. The Zhouli [Rites of Zhou] was cited in this way, as the last word on ancient rituals and foodstuffs, such as using cattle (niu) as sacrificial animals or knowing how to prepare seasonal seafood like turtles and clams (che’ao).11 In this case, much as the credibility of scholars was not undermined by their mistaken views of distant products, ancient sages could be excused for errors that resulted from their lack of opportunity to observe modern phenomena or the effectiveness of modern remedies. In the Bencao and many of its Song precursors, living in a certain region and consequently having eyewitness access to its products gave an author a certain epistemic privilege. Likewise, the absence of access to such firsthand knowledge occasionally exempted a scholar from blame for any errors of judgment regarding such products. The authentication of types and grades of honey (fengmi), for example, was widely considered to depend on firsthand observation, and Li chronicled several stages 36


of argument over the stuff that prioritized sight as a means of judgment.12 The Tang bencao scholar Su Jing (referred to throughout the Bencao as Su Gong) excused Tao Hongjing for “misjudging” the quality of a certain kind of honey on the basis of Tao’s lack of access to local knowledge and firsthand observation.13 Su was in turn criticized by Chen Zangqi, author of the Bencao shiyi [Supplement to bencao], for his own misjudgment on similar grounds: “Cliff honey (yanmi) came from the mountain passes in the South and was best for making medicines. . . . Su Gong was from Hubei, where there were no mountain cliffs, so he did not know about the superior value of this honey.”14 After recording Chen’s account, Li proceeded to urge the personal inspection of honey specimens in order to ascertain whether they were genuine or adulterated. Whenever examining honey, Li maintained, one should build a hot fire and place the honey inside the flames. After the honey is removed, it should be inspected: if it smokes, it’s fake.15 When building a marketplace bonfire was not possible, however, a consumer might need to rely on his senses to appraise the quality of a drug, and Li had very particular ways of writing about perceptual processes.

How to Look Stinky drugs, the sounds of birdcalls, and the taste of milk and honey all were vital means of gathering knowledge of the natural environment in which one lived. Insight gained through all of these experiences informed the Bencao and many of the texts in which it was in dialogue. Sight, smell, and sound were crucial for any doctor, naturalist, or consumer of drugs, whether one found the ingredients of a prescription in the hills or in the marketplace. Though early modern scholars included smelling, tasting, hearing, and feeling among the important sensory means of knowing objects, they most frequently wrote of observation. Observation had long been prioritized as the first step of diagnosis in medical practice.16 Bian Que, the legendary bird-man of early Chinese medical lore, had supposedly gained his medical expertise by being able to see through objects and bodies.17 Observation was more than mere sight: different ways of seeing coexisted in Li’s epistemology, and knowing how and when to see in a particular way was an important skill of the naturalist. Recall Wang Shizhen’s enumeration of great naturalists’ ability to recognize, examine, identify, and penetrate material objects with a “Heavenly brilliance”: “By gazing at their dragon glow, one can recog37


nize ancient swords; by examining unusual qi one can distinguish precious pearls. Mysteries like the auspicious fruit (pingshi) and the rainmaker bird (shangyang) . . . would not be penetrated without such Heavenly brilliance. After this we have Zhang Hua the scholar of broad learning, Ji Kang the philologist, and Yi Dun the appraiser of precious stones: [such people] are as rare as morning stars.”18 Notice the importance of the gaze in Wang’s account. Wang’s legend-laced history of great figures was characterized by observation, in which Li was the latest in a long line of scholars who had an unusual talent for focused, observationbased appraisal of texts and material objects. Even the descriptive language was full of light and sight: glowing swords, luminous stones, heavenly brilliance, rare stars. In the late Ming, the ability to observe, identify, and characterize material objects was a precondition for broad learning. Modern historians have described the importance of Ming visualization as it pertained to painting and other pictures, but the process was just as significant for appraisal and knowledge of the physical world by doctors, adepts, and naturalists.19 Li acknowledged many ways to observe a text or an object, but four were the most important in his work: one could jian it, shi it, kan it, or guan it. Just as we commonly use different terms to represent ways of seeing today—a glare versus a peek versus an examination—these varied ways of writing about observation in the Bencao represented somewhat different ways of conceiving the power of sight as a way of knowing about nature. Jian The Bencao followed the practice of the many texts it cited in its use of jian, which meant something like “to see” (as opposed to “look” or “observe”). It was the most commonly used term in the language of sight, and there were several senses in which it was employed. Looking at texts was just as important as looking at objects (the importance of which had been emphasized at least since the Song), and textual evidence was still Li’s primary means of knowing about nature. Li frequently urged his readers to consult (jian) other texts or sections of the Bencao itself as evidence for one of his claims, suggesting, “[for further information or confirmation], see (jian) X text,” or “see (jian) X section.” Another common sense of jian was simple visual experience; to see or have seen for oneself was generally marked as jian, and the state of jian contrasted with that of blindness. If one’s eyes were working correctly they were able to jian 38


things, but one encountered difficulty when attempting to jian in nighttime conditions or to discern very small objects. Special powers of vision could enable one to jian ghosts or demons. In general, jian was what one’s eyes did: it represented the very basic state of seeing itself. Shi The distinction in modern English between the verbs “to see” and “to look” works in much the same way as that between jian and shi in the Bencao. In most cases, shi had the sense of “to look,” often from some spatial perspective (for instance, facing a given direction) or in a particular way or circumstance. When Li urged his readers to cut open an object or an animal and look inside, the verb he used was shi. Examples abounded of drugs that promised superhuman night vision (yeshi) or perception over great distances (yuanshi), both powers enabling a person to look at objects that would otherwise remain hidden. What kinds of things could one shi, given examples in the Bencao? A bone, an object’s weight, a liquid’s level and clarity, a sickness’s signs, a neck’s point of breakage: as long as light was available, one could shi objects in order to discern some sort of visual cue. The importance of light to the practice of observation was echoed in Wang Shizhen’s preface to the Bencao, in which he described the power of special kinds of light (ming and guang) to allow people to view that which might otherwise remain hidden. In the Bencao, Li also invoked the importance of ming and guang in discussing old mirrors that glowed from inside with a magical light, and golden goose feces that glowed in the dark.20 Kan There was a subtle distinction between the general act of looking and the sense of observation embodied in the use of the term kan, which occurs infrequently in the Bencao and is usually embedded within the directions for making particular prescriptions. When engaging in kan, one was to be looking for specific conditions determined in advance, whether turning over a flower to seek certain markings on its underside, taking note of a particular time of year, or looking for a very specific similarity. The use of the phrase kan ru X indicated that, when observing some object, one ought to look at it with an eye to features that resembled X. When used alone, kan is most frequently mentioned in the prescriptions recorded in the Bencao, in the sense of visually marking specific circumstances. 39


Guan Li’s own voice emerges clearly in his use of what may be the most epistemologically interesting of the observation terms in the Bencao. When discussing an object, after citing and relating the debates of other scholars, Li stepped into the fray and attempted to arbitrate these disagreements and inconsistencies. In doing this, he often began with the phrase guanci . . . ze, after which he proceeded to compare the aforementioned claims in order to decide between conflicting stories, to distinguish objects into categories and kinds (shu, zhong, and lei), or to take the preceding claims into account in making a more general conclusion.21 “Examining these claims,” Li began, the reader should come to a particular conclusion. For example, after examining (guan) evidence of the dangers of poisonous elements, it becomes clear that when people depend on the water and the earth to nourish them, they must be cautious in using soil and liquid in medicines.22 Li also used this rubric to situate his discussion of how to distinguish varieties of jade by where they were produced,23 and he urged readers not to assume that jade from distant lands was necessarily the most valuable.24 In the language of observation, guan could be used in two ways. One might be thought of as an informed, concentrated looking, as one would guan a rhino horn to discern its pattern,25 or guan the inside of a petrified heart of a Persian after cutting it open. In this usage, guan resembled a slightly stronger form of shi: “According to Master Cheng in his Yishu zai [Notes on lost books]: There was a Persian person found in an old tomb in Fujian. The inside of the coffin was completely empty, save for a heart that had hardened into stone. When [the petrified heart] was sawed open and examined, there was a beautiful blue-green landscape as in a painting, with a woman at the side.”26 The more common role of guan in the Bencao, however, carried the nuanced sense of a process that incorporated observation and comparison and assessed stories as evidence. To guan was to take a careful look at the evidence and generate a conclusion that often, for Li, involved distinguishing objects into kinds by comparing their qualities (often visual) or negotiating claims by comparing others’ stories (shuo). Engaging in guan, a kind of reasoned, observation-based comparison, was an important means of knowing about the natural world, and Li explicitly discussed it using this language. Li’s particular and repeated use of the term reflected the importance with which he imbued the concept.27 40


Jian, shi, kan, and guan together encompassed a number of practices whereby one combined sight, light, and reason to develop an observation-based knowledge of objects. Surprisingly, humans were not the only beings capable of such purposeful observation. According to Li, several kinds of fowl mated and reproduced by looking (shi) at one another, sometimes accompanying these bedroom eyes with a song: when their voices met on the wind and their gazes met in the middle, the bird couple thus bore offspring. One beast was also capable of observation in terms of guan. The tiger’s eyes were credited with fantastic properties, bestowing the power of night vision upon the beast. In the darkness, one of the tiger’s eyes would emit light, while the other would look for things (kan wu). It was also said, according to Li, that tigers were capable of divination by drawing strange objects on the ground and then scrutinizing them (guan) in order to learn the whereabouts of potential prey.28 Li’s scattered discussion of animals as cognizant perceivers anticipates a fuller discussion of the relationship between humans and animals later in this book. It was common knowledge in the sixteenth century that observation was important in identifying objects. However, merchants frequently created misleading visual cues to take advantage of this wide dependence on visual knowledge in the marketplace where they peddled drug-related goods.29 As a result, authors in the Song and Ming cautioned against a simple reliance on observation as a guarantor of truth.

Building Belief Ming drug peddlers could be a dishonest lot. The Bencao mengquan, composed and published at roughly the same time as the Bencao gangmu, contained an entire section devoted to the importance of sight in distinguishing tricks from treats when buying medicine: “Trade in drugs largely takes place in the market. If your discrimination is not refined, mistakes will be hard to avoid. A proverb states: Those who sell drugs have two eyes, those who work with drugs have one eye, those who ingest drugs are completely sightless. This is not a groundless claim.”30 Naturalists dealt with the difficulty of distinguishing genuine from forged drugs by suggesting various means of discerning the provenance of purchased substances. Nearly every bencao and natural history text that raised this issue suggested trying things for oneself as the best way of distinguishing the true (zhen or zheng) from the fake (wei or jia) 41


when sorting through drugs, valuable natural objects, and foodstuffs in the market. Merchants might adulterate a substance that ought properly to be purchased in its pure form. Alternately, since rare objects were often considered especially valuable or medicinally effective, sellers could always be tempted to manufacture them, be they look-alike three-legged toads or mulberry branches covered in simulated mantis eggs.31 They fobbed these inferior goods off onto unsuspecting consumers, often (given the warnings of Song and Ming bencao authors) with great success.32 Observation was one way of detecting potential fakes. Rhino horn could be inspected for a degree of yellow coloration to test its genuineness.33 Holding stones like glass, crystal (shuijing), and glaze (liuli) up to the light would reveal air bubbles characteristic of a trickster’s manipulation; similarly, holding true bodhisattva stone (pusashi) would show the myriad colors of the Bodhisattva’s halo, which gave the stone its name.34 Naturalists were well aware, however, that the simple appearance of an item could be misleading, for one’s unaided eyes were often no match for the deceptive ingenuity of a master counterfeiter. Metals and stones were some of the most easily faked materials in the medical marketplace and were in exceptionally high demand. A number of manipulation-based methods were advised for judging whether a stone was real, and if it was real, whether it had been produced by natural or artificial processes of transformation. Li’s suggested methods for authentication of gold exercised the sensory repertoire of a potential consumer, incorporating both sight (one should look at its color and at the mark it leaves when struck against a stone) and sound (also pay attention to the sound it makes when struck).35 Many authors gave particular examples of the specific ways in which metals could be counterfeited and instructed readers on how to test for each of the most common substances with which a drug could be adulterated or confused. The buyer was generally urged to seek out materials produced through natural processes of transformation, as these were thought to be more medicinally efficacious. Taking advantage of the use of fire, a catalyst of many transformative processes in nature, was one of the most popular means of doing so. Said Su Song, “Doctors may mistake things for pyrite (zirantong), and such fakes can be found everywhere on the market. Actually it is very easy to tell the difference. You don’t have to tell the real things from the fake by their appearance. Just burn them.”36 If the flame was the wrong color, or if the material was 42


completely consumed in the fire, Su maintained that the pyrite was fake. False three-legged toads with supposedly magical properties, according to Kou Zongshi, could be spotted by soaking a sample in water and observing the results.37 Li followed suit in recommending alteration as a means of authentication. In addition to the honey burning discussed earlier, potential lead (qian) ought to be broken or burned,38 powdered tin (fenxi) should be fried and checked for color change,39 and true carnelian (manao, literally, horse brain) should produce heat when ground up.40 The relative quality of cinnabar (dansha) could be determined by rubbing a piece of the stone across a sheet of paper: while that from older mines (and of superior quality) would not stain the paper, inferior cinnabar from a newer mine would leave a mark.41 Valuable products made of animal skin, such as donkey glue (e jiao), were frequently counterfeited using more common leather products. The best way to spot fake skin, Li advised, was to sniff for its pungent stink.42 Scent was an important part of the experience of identifying, appraising, and knowing about natural objects, and itself had a material component; as Li understood fragrance, it physically occupied a space, and a particular scent might characterize a particular location. Odor was also one of the primary qualities associated with the flowers, plants, and trees that were ubiquitous in the poetic sources on which Li and others based part of their work. Indeed, “fragrant plants” occupy their own botanical category in the Bencao. In the context of identifying medicinal drugs, one ought to be able to discern whether a material was fragrant or foul. Similarly, edible natural objects could be tasted to test for a characteristic aroma or flavor, as taste was intimately linked with scent in the medical and culinary arts of China.43 One could also use the ears to help identify plants and animals and the drugs made from them. Birds were distinguished in part by their calls, and a number of creatures could reportedly speak their own names in order to identify themselves.44 Some insects were known to chant, speak, or sing, with their voices alone harboring the power to conceive young or cause other insects to metamorphose. A person could identify an earthworm living in his or her stomach by listening for the distinctive song that these creatures apparently produced when snug inside a human digestive tract.45 Li marshaled all of these senses in his reports on natural objects in the Bencao, and he urged reader to be similarly sensual when attempting to identify drugs made from them. More than simply relying on observa43


tion, the wary consumer was expected to manipulate, change, and even destroy substances in the marketplace for materia medica in order to sniff out the fakers and quacks who took advantage of the demand produced by wide dissemination of the miraculous claims associated with these substances and flooded the market with inauthentic goods.

The Untrustworthy The kind of person who was generally responsible for such fakery was usually denounced in the Bencao as an adept or a magician: fangshi, shujia, or shushi were the most common epithets to describe the perpetrators of quackery. Though it has been claimed that Li’s use of these terms implied a coherent attitude toward “Daoism” broadly conceived, Li’s attitude toward such artisans and their connection with Daoism has often been misunderstood. Though much scholarship on the Bencao characterizes Li as skeptical of Daoist practitioners, texts, and methods, it is impossible to characterize Li’s attitude toward these arts as purely accepting or simply dismissive.46 It is important to distinguish between two main kinds of phenomena that might fall under the rubric of such a study: the citation of texts or authorities that modern historians understand to be Daoist and the description by Li himself of a text or a source elicited from a daojia (Daoist practitioner) or a fangshi.47 The treatment of Daoism and what we might translate as “magic” can be considered together here because many of the claims attributed to these groups were of a kind: extending life, walking on water, and seeing spirits or immortals. There were, however, some differences in Li’s treatment of claims related to Daoists and to fangshi. As a rule, fangshi was used for naturalists of whom he disapproved. Their claims were usually mistaken (miu), unreliable (buzuxin), or unorthodox (bujing). While Li simply recorded some of their remedies without further comment, the vast majority of the stories or remedies associated with fangshi were looked on with disbelief. Claims that certain animal products would enable one to walk on water, for example, were met with Li’s scorn. Of toads, we read the following story: “The Goulou shenshu [Book of miracles from Goulou Peak]48 records how the toad bezoar (chanbao) is made. One takes a big toad and fixes its four legs down with four long iron nails. The animal is then heated over a charcoal fire from dawn till noon. After this, if one puts a cup of water in front of it, it will vomit something that looks like a big, 44


metallic soap-bean seed. This magic seed will enable those who swallow it to walk over rivers and lakes.”49 Supposing this technique existed, asked Li, who would dare to swallow such a thing? “One must not be too credulous of these crazy claims of the magical arts (fangji). I record this [story] here in order to fully dispel any uncertainty.”50 Though many such claims were associated with metals and stones, such as cinnabar, quicksilver, and quartz, similar statements are sprinkled throughout the Bencao. Li recorded a claim from the Huainan wanbi shu [Huainan’s complete book of myriad arts] that some spiders, when fed on lard and smeared on the feet, would enable one to walk on water. Li paired this with a claim from Ge Hong’s Baopuzi that spiders and leeches could be used to make a pill that allowed a person to live underwater. “These fantastical accounts of the fangshi cannot be believed,” urged Li.51 Li also tried to convince readers not to believe the shushi who claimed that earthworm droppings could soften the strings of bows, or daojia who claimed that looking through certain coiled-up bugs that had eaten words from the Daoist classics would allow one to call down the immortals and ask them for elixirs.52 In short, Li did not treat magicians and adepts as reliable medical authorities. The treatment of daojia in the Bencao was more complicated. More than half of the explicit references to daojia are embedded in citations from Tao Hongjing, who treated Daoist remedies and accounts as he did any other medical claims; a practitioner of Daoist arts himself, Tao was much more critical of Confucius and of classic texts like the Shijing. When Li did independently refer to daojia, his treatment varied: he was often eager to correct the claims of Tao Hongjing, and he occasionally disparaged individual claims of daojia as “unbelievable,” but just as often he listed beliefs about minerals, plants, and animals by daojia without negative comment. In addition, the knowledge of adepts (in a broad sense) could be useful for a chronicler of materia medica interested in clarifying the possible alternative names of a substance. These magicians (shenxian jia) were known to devise secret names for substances, which were made known only to those initiated in the arts of the adept, and Li included these “secret” names whenever possible.53 Li’s relationship to Daoism, then, was complex and difficult to categorize. He freely and liberally cited from Tao Hongjing, the Zhuangzi, Liezi, Baopuzi and other tracts by Ge Hong, the Huainanzi, and innumerable others (many of which he himself referred to as Daoist), frequently quoting one of these texts to disprove the stories from other 45


bencao or natural history classics. However, he joined earlier bencao authors in explicitly denouncing the adept (or occasionally Daoist) practice of making youth- or immortality-conferring elixirs from drugs like quicksilver, cinnabar, and orpiment, ranting at length against adepts who promoted these “ridiculous” ideas and the consequences of following them. When all of this is taken into account, it is difficult to maintain a position that asserts that Li simply rejected Daoist thought as superstition and sought to purge it from Ming medicine.

The Authorities In addition to his own experience and that of people he spoke with, Li relied on texts to get his work done and to provide the thousands of quotations that filled his encyclopedia. Access to books was critical for a scholar who intended to compose a work of such scope and magnitude, and he found an important resource in imperial and local libraries and the collections of friends and family. Along with the collections of the Gu family, who had made their library available to Li’s father as well, Li had other contacts among the gentry of his native Qizhou. After successfully treating a prince who had fallen sick while staying near Li’s hometown, he was granted use of the prince’s extensive library. Li also pored over the imperial medical library during his brief year or so in residence at the capital in Beijing. Some of the works he read while compiling the Bencao were probably consulted in these private and official holdings. Li often cited classics such as the ritual manuals Liji and Zhouli as authoritative sources on the treatment or use of animals in ancient times, especially with regard to ritual or cuisine.54 From Li’s discussion of the honeybee, for example, we learn “the Liji states that the sparrow, quail, cicada, and honeybee (fan) can all be eaten, so we know that bees have been eaten since ancient times.”55 Li also used the Liji to demonstrate the contents of ancient pantries—including edible salt (shiyan), knotweed (liao), pork (shi), venison (lurou), and rabbit (tu)—and the history of prohibitions against eating abalone (baoyu), bustard (bao), duck (wu), and fox meat (hurou). Li often cited the Liji as an authority on the ritualistic importance of food, including the uses of millet (ji) and cherries (yingtao) in ancestral temples, the proper use of peachwood charms (taofu) and peach pegs (taojue), and the use of honeydew melons (tiangua) and thoroughwort (lancao) in imperial tribute. 46


The widespread availability of popular print materials, including daily-use encyclopedias (riyong leishu), had by the late Ming led to the creation of a new hybrid genre in fiction and arguably shaped Li’s scholarly citation practices in important ways.56 These daily-use encyclopedias often included collections of jokes, riddles, recipes for aphrodisiac drugs, handbooks on geomancy and games, and guides to foreign people and creatures. More scholarly encyclopedias were also widely available. When authors did not have access to an entire text, which was often the case for Li, quotations found in a scholarly encyclopedia would do, and encyclopedias were often handier to use.57 Li freely drew from compilations such as the Taiping yulan, one of the major encyclopedic works of the early Song dynasty.58 Because this compendium included quotations from bencao works dating from earlier than the Song period, it provided a ready source from which to cull facts and tidbits about natural objects. Li occasionally admitted to using such compendia, citing his lack of access to the original texts of works like the lost Tang Hu bencao and his consequent need to rely instead on scattered quotations.59 Li’s major structural model, the Song Zhenglei bencao, was another source of quotations in the Bencao.60 Li largely preserved the form of citations as initially used in the Zhenglei bencao, though as we saw earlier, he used a much wider variety and number of references. Throughout the Bencao, an author might be referred to by his full name, a variation of his name, several different abbreviations of his name, or one or more characters used in the title of his work. This inconsistency was common in texts by late Ming literati and probably reflected their reading practices, taking notes as they worked through a text and copying the various citation forms of the texts along with the rest of the quotations.61 Given the number of cross-references that Li incorporated into his work (see, for example, his interweaving of stories about swallows and dragons in their respective sections in the Bencao, discussed below), I find it likely that he took notes and had some sort of classification system into which he organized these jottings. We have, however, no record of the note-taking practices he used. Li himself spoke only in the most general of terms in the prefaces to his extant works. See, for example, the description he provided in the preface to his Binhu maixue: “I [Li Shizhen] gathered the essence, plucked out the best, and assumed editorship of this book [his father’s work on vessels], in order to become familiar with my reading and create a guide to vessels.”62 He also frequently changed the substance or 47


wording of the texts from which he drew quotations, again not unusual for a bencao author.63 Finally, there was often a chronological ordering and historical sensibility to the placement of citations under a given heading, a progression from earliest to latest, and a sense that much of the literature he cited was in dialogue. The Bencao was founded on a heterogeneous source base that included classic works as well as texts known only through fragments in encyclopedias. It is clear that Li did not personally observe all of the texts that he used as evidence, which invites a comparison between the epistemic weight of firsthand observation of texts and of objects in the Bencao. Though he reveled in having brought an unparalleled breadth of sources to his work (recall the impressive length of his bibliography), Li does not seem to have prioritized firsthand experience with original or full editions of a given text over knowledge of scattered quotations. He was not an etymologist, despite his interest in cataloging alternate names of objects. He did not revere philology, despite showing interest in classic texts and championing the principles of gewu learning. As we see later, the closest Li came to self-identifying as a literary scholar might have been in his patchy commentary on the use of plant and animal names in poems and rhapsodies. We might conclude, then, that when he urged readers to consult (jian) a text or section of the Bencao for themselves to confirm one of his claims, he was not being picky about editions. For Li, a book or a poem was a repository of information before it was a physical object, and the vocabulary of observation he brought to the textual realm was much less rich than the visual terminology he used for natural objects. His impulse was encyclopedic rather than philological, which presents a particular way of thinking about the kind of resources a scholar needs when learning about the natural world: texts presented information that then needed to be confirmed or rejected based on bodily perception and knowledge of the laws of nature.

Knowing Nightshade Back in the tavern, Li once again raised the cup of flowery poison to his lips. Several sips later, and being careful to maintain a veneer of composure, the self-described “half-drunk” doctor merrily brought his experiment to an end. This local nightshade recipe, he concluded from his firsthand observations, did in fact induce both laughter and dancing. He added the drug to his Bencao, the first time that this devil’s trumpet of lo48


cal lore had made it onto the pages of a Chinese pharmacopoeia.64 Before diving further into the Bencao collection to explore the context into which the tipsy doctor placed this new drug, we will take a moment to look in detail at an example of how Li mobilized evidence to resolve questions about one of the most famed characters in early modern natural history: the dragon.

49

interlude Here Be Dragons: A Reader’s Guide to the Bencao gangmu

Li Shizhen intended his Bencao gangmu to be a definitive work that would modernize medical literature by melding previous scholarship on drugs, classical works, and natural history into one enormous monument to the power of ru (classicist) scholarship.1 Li’s use of the term ruxue to qualify his project indicated encyclopedic study that extended beyond the confines of traditional literature on medicinal drugs to include classical texts more broadly conceived. The resulting compendium contained fifty-two juan (chapters) and almost two million characters, enormous in scope for a work of materia medica.2 Of the 1,892 drugs included, 374 appeared for the first time in bencao work.3 This brief guide is meant to give the modern reader an opportunity to closely read one section of the text. Among other things, it provides a glimpse into why Li believed that understanding the natural history of a creature might be useful in knowing how to use that creature as a medicinal drug. Blending natural history with medicine was not only good medical sense but also good scholarly practice, as Li mobilized textual and sensory evidence to reconcile disparate claims where the intellectual and medical stakes were surprisingly high.

Prefaces The Bencao begins with a series of prefaces, including a set of illustrations, and then proceeds to the drug monographs themselves. There are in fact two layers of prefatory material: general prefaces that come at the beginning of the Bencao and shorter individual prefaces that introduce each category of drug monographs throughout the text. Each layer of prefaces provides both an important frame within which Li situated his 50

INTERLUDE. A READER’S GUIDE TO THE BENCAO GANGMU

work and a context within which the reader was meant to read the material that followed. Prefaces played a critical role in the printing of texts in the Ming market. As noted above, securing a preface from a well-known official or respected scholar was one means of ascertaining for one’s own work the kind of financial or political backing necessary for publication. A publisher might also use a preface as a form of advertising to convince readers to purchase his particular edition of a text.4 More interestingly for our purposes, prefaces to medical texts followed a pattern. They tended to include a number of well-worn rhetorical tropes with which an author could justify the publication of his work or forward an agenda in a scholarly debate. Rather than taking the statements made in Chinese medical prefaces at face value, reading with an eye to several typical set phrases employed in the rhetoric of prefatory language allows a more nuanced interpretation of these paratexts. Wang Shizhen’s 1590 preface, lauding the achievement of Li and his great masterwork, was included from the very first printing of the Bencao. Wang made liberal use of the tropes that often studded medical prefaces. Any worthy author would have worked until he was sickly, suffering for his craft and for the good of scholarship in general. It was necessary that he “found errors” in the (otherwise brilliant and masterful) work of previous authors, typically resulting from confusion over the identification of plants and animals: giving two different plants the same name, separately discussing three bugs that were actually one, displaying ignorance of certain herbs that the new author had the good fortune of learning about. In his praise of Li, Wang also employed tropes typically used to describe a bowu scholar, or a gentleman of broad learning: Li talked to local people, he found reading books as sweet as eating sugar, he pored over all of the classics and histories as well as less conventional stories. In essence, then, the preface of a medical text was performative. Its purpose as a speech act was to justify the existence of a new work and convince readers of the intellectual and ethical merit of its author. Li’s own short prefatory remarks (fanli, an indication of the principles of organization and plan of the work) provided background on the macrostructure of the text and the logic of its arrangement, from the most elemental to the most complex of natural objects, from the most humble to the most noble of creatures.5 Li also discussed, in general terms, the place of the Bencao with respect to prior works of its kind as well as the reasons behind his inclusion or arrangement of certain entries. 51


The ordering of the prefatory material served to reinforce Li’s interest in becoming a crowning member of the canon of bencao studies and natural history. After a chronicle of the history of bencao literature, a long list of medical (yijia) and nonmedical (jingshi baijia) sources consulted in writing the Bencao showcased Li’s erudition and placed him at the crossroads of medical and classical scholarship. Next, a list of previous bencao and the number of drugs in various categories ends, of course, with the Bencao gangmu itself. Extended descriptions of the contents of two foundational bencao texts (both of which Li attributed to Tao Hongjing, though the authorship of the second is now questioned), the Bencao jing and the Mingyi bielu [Additional records of eminent doctors], are followed by Li’s discussion of medical principles, such as seasonality, systems of organ functionality, and relevance of flavor and yin and yang to the prescription of drugs. The next major introductory section of the Bencao is intended as a tour through Li’s major contributions to medical theory: a section distinguishing different drugs that shared the same name, a section on drug interactions (including the relationships of mutual inhibition or stimulation among various drugs), a section on how food could modify the effects of particular drugs, and several lists of the prescription rules of famous doctors. A table of drugs in the Bencao jing and the major Song dynasty bencao works follow, after which, Li adds a list of particularly effective drugs organized by illness. Several successive editions of the Bencao were published with new prefaces, and editions after 1603 include the new publisher’s prefatory lament over the poor quality of illustrations in the original 1596 Jinling publication, justifying a new printing in part on those grounds.

Illustrations Though Li most likely had no intention of including images in his work, modern readers are often struck by the illustrations in the Bencao.6 There are 1,109 illustrations (tu) in the 1596 edition, compiled and drawn by Li’s sons and collected together in two separate juan.7 Some of the illustrations in the 1603 edition (also printed in two separate juan) were substantially altered from their 1596 predecessors, with many birds and animals being rendered in greater detail.8 Later editions of the Bencao refined many of the original illustrations even further, with major changes in the illustrations being made in 1640. The 1782 Siku quanshu illustra52


tions, based largely on the images in the 1640 edition, are not only much finer (in part as a result of being a manuscript rather than a woodblock edition) but also placed the trees and many of the birds and fish in landscape settings that resembled paintings more than traditional woodblock bencao drawings.9 Another major revision of the illustrations came in the 1885 edition and was based largely on the Ming Jiuhuang bencao and the Zhiwu mingshi tukao [Illustrated investigations into the names and qualities of plants] by Wu Qijun (1789–1847), first published in 1848. These successive changes in the Bencao illustrations reflected the transformations in image-making technologies and conventions rather than a progressive development toward more empirical detail or a path toward increasing scientific accuracy.

Monographs After ample prefatory material situating Li within the pantheon of bencao writers, we come to the heart of the Bencao. The materia medica sections proper begin with Waters and proceed through People. Each section is preceded by its own mini preface, which includes some remarks in which Li framed the discussion of the category itself, a list of works from which he culled drug entries, as well as a partial list of additional texts he consulted for information on the drugs included. (This last list usually includes only a fraction of the titles he actually cites.) The entries and discussions for most natural objects treated in the Bencao were meant to justify the objects’ use in medicine, though some had no medicinal use. When discussing crickets, for example, Li explained his decision to include the creatures, which were not used in prescriptions, by the fact that people kept them for fighting or singing.10 In each drug monograph Li meant for readers to work through the successive discussions of alternate names, natural historical anecdotes, and the like, with the ultimate goal of helping the reader understand the ways in which the object was prepared as a drug. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to explicating a sample entry of the Bencao on dragons. For each individual subsection Li’s text is provided in translation, followed by a brief explanation of the contents.11 In Li’s entry for dragon’s bone, the question of using a semidivine being as a drug permeates each step of the discussion and leads to a somewhat surprising conclusion. 53


Figure I.1. Images of a dragon (long, top right) and dragon’s bone (longgu, bottom right) from the Bencao gangmu (1596). Used with permission of the Asian Division, Library of Congress.


Dragon (Long) Listed as a superior drug in the Shennong bencao jing. The Bencao was perhaps most explicitly in dialogue with the foundational Bencao jing.12 Alongside the primary name of each substance, if the substance had also appeared in the Bencao jing, Li added a note telling readers which class of drugs (upper, middle, lower) it fell into. Here we learn that dragons were considered to be drugs of the upper class in the Bencao jing, a category composed of substances that could be widely employed in medicine due to their very low toxicity or potency. If the substance under discussion was not mentioned in the Bencao jing, then the source from which Li drew the description was instead noted alongside the primary name. In cases where Li was the first medical author to record a particular substance, “gangmu” was used in the place of another title. Explanation of Names (Shiming) Li Shizhen says: According to Xu Shen in the Shuowen jiezi [Explanation of graphs and analysis of characters], the character long [dragon] is a pictograph in seal script. The Shengxiao lun [Treatise on resemblances] states: The dragon is deaf, so it is called “long.” In Sanskrit writing, the name najia is used. The Explanation of Names is a feature of most entries in the Bencao. Here, Li provided a list of alternate terms for the substance being discussed along with the textual sources of those names. Next might be a set of quotations from various authors explaining possible derivations of these names, followed by Li’s own explanations. This subsection is full of Li’s interpretations. In order to identify a name as “alternative,” he first had to make a judgment that the two names in fact referred to the same creature, and such identifications were often a matter of dispute. One of the most argued topics in Chinese natural history was the identity of or distinction between natural objects. Because long was such a conventional name for dragons, there are no alternate Chinese terms provided. Instead, Li relates the genesis of the character long according to the Shuowen jiezi by Xu Shen, the early dictionary that Li often invoked as an authority on the provenance of names and characters. Here, we are told that the character long derives from a pictograph (xiangxing) in seal script (zhuanwen). Li next provides another possible explanation from the Shengxiao lun that instead invokes 55


an etymological root via phonology: dragons are deaf (literally, their ears lack hearing, or cong), so they are called long (the two words are graphically and phonologically similar). Finally, Li adds the alternate name najia, another term for dragons used in Sanskrit texts (Fanshu). Najia was probably a transliteration of nÀgá. Collected Interpretations (Jijie) Li Shizhen says: According to Luo Yuan in the Erya yi: The dragon is the chief of the scaly creatures. Wang Fu described how its shape contains nine similarities. To wit, the head of a camel, the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a rabbit, the ears of an ox, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a fish, the claws of an eagle, and the paws of a tiger. Its back has eighty-one scales, which as nine nines is a yang number. Its sound is like tapping on a copper plate. The sides of its mouth have whiskers. Beneath its chin is a bright pearl. Under its throat are reversed scales. On top of its head is the boshan, also called the chimu.13 Without its chimu, a dragon cannot ascend to the heavens. Its exhalations of qi form clouds and can transform into both water and fire. Lu Dian in the Piya stated: The fire of a dragon will blaze in humidity and will burn in the presence of water. Attacking it with human fire will extinguish the dragon’s fire. The ministerial fire (xianghuo) of men is also like this.14 The dragon is born from an egg that it hatches and conscientiously protects.15 When the male calls upwind and the female calls downwind, through the wind a new dragon is conceived. According to Shidian:16 When dragons mate they change into two small snakes. Furthermore, according to some stories (xiaoshuo) the dragon’s nature is coarse and violent, yet it loves beautiful jade and kongqing stones17 and enjoys eating the flesh of swallows. It is afraid of iron and mangcao herb, centipedes and lianzhi branches, and Five Colored [i.e., multicolored] silk.18 Therefore those who have eaten swallows avoid crossing water, those who pray for rain use swallows,19 those who want waters to subside use iron, those who want to provoke a dragon use mangcao herb, and those who sacrifice to Qu Yuan wrap dumplings in lian leaves and colored silk and throw them in the river. Medical practitioners use dragon bones, so they ought to understand the dragon’s affinities and aversions as they are presented here. 56


Collected Interpretations is the heading under which we find the bulk of the material pertaining to the natural history of objects in the Bencao. Li used this as a repository for most of the background information about a particular plant or animal that was not culled from medical texts. We might find stories and quotations from other bencao here, but just as widely cited were records of the strange (zhiguai), histories, literary classics, poems, dictionaries, notebooks, stories, and varied other materials. Under the Collected Interpretations heading for long, Li dispensed with quoting previous bencao and instead started in immediately with his own statements, always introduced with the tag “Li Shizhen says:” (Shizhen yue). He opened by citing a number of texts that discussed the dragon to contextualize his claims. According to the Erya yi, for example, the dragon was chief among the entire category of scaled creatures. Wang Fu (the second-century author of the Qianfu lun [Comments of a recluse]) described “nine similarities” of the dragon.20 After providing these quotations, Li elaborated on the anatomy of dragons based on his own (unattributed) knowledge. Many texts on animals and things linked dragons to water, often describing ways of summoning rain by calling down dragons from the skies. Li’s discussion of the connection between swallows, iron, water, and dragons is a crucial part of the Collected Interpretations for dragons, as it justifies the contents of some later prescriptions. Qu Yuan (ca. 343– ca. 277 bce), the reputed author of major poems in the Chuci [Songs of Chu],21 including the Lisao [Encountering sorrow], apparently committed suicide by drowning himself. Each year during the Dragon Boat Festival (the fifth day of the fifth lunar month), dumplings of rice wrapped in bamboo leaves (zongzi) are thrown into the water, ostensibly to give the fish (or dragons) something to nosh on in lieu of the body of the poet. The final statement of Collected Interpretations makes a point that we shall see elaborated below: people who use this substance in medicine ought to understand its natural affinities and antipathies, because the qualities of a creature in life help determine its use in death. A doctor who did not understand the natural history of the dragon could not properly comprehend or utilize the dragon as a drug. Dragon’s Bone (Longgu) The Mingyi bielu states: [Dragon bone] is a product of rivers and valleys in the Jin area and the cliffs of Mt. Tai. Dead dragons can 57


be found in riverbanks and caves in the earth and can be collected at any time of the year. Tao Hongjing states: Now many are found in the states of Liang, Yi, and Ba.22 The bone ought to retain the spinal cord and brain and have a white background with brocadelike markings. Those that stick to the tongue when licked are best. The teeth are small and strong and retain their original shape. The horns are strong and solid. This is all [merely] the sloughed-off skin of a dragon that has not actually died. Lei Xiao states: [Dragon bones from] Tanzhou, Cangzhou, and Taiyuan are the best. Slender bones with broad markings are from females, thick bones with fine markings are from males. Those with the Five Colors [i.e., multicolored] are best, white and yellow ones are of middling quality, and black ones are of the lowest quality. That which has already fallen and is unclean, or which has been collected by a woman, ought not to be used. Wu Pu states: Bluegreen and white ones are the best. Su Gong states: Now they are also found in the Jin area. Fresh, hard ones are not good. The best have all of the Five Colors. Its blue-green, yellow, red, white, and black coloring also correspond to the zangfu [viscera or organ functionalities], just like the five fungi,23 the five types of quartz (shiying), and the five shizhi, though the Benjing does not discuss this. Su Song states: These days, the Hedong commandery has a lot of [dragon’s bone]. Li Zhao in the Guoshi bu [Supplement to the history of the Tang dynasty] says: When the season of spring water [i.e., seasonal flooding] arrives, fish climb Dragon’s Gate (longmen) and leave many sloughed-off bones. People collect them for use in medicine, especially the Five Colored ones. Dragon’s Gate is in the Jin area, which corresponds to [what’s written in] the Benjing. How could it be that dragon bones are actually this fish’s bones? Sun Guangxian in the Beimeng suoyan [Trifles from a northern dream]24 says: During the Five Dynasties (907–960) in the state of Zhen, a dragon was killed in a fight. Cao Kuan, a local luminary, removed its two horns. On the front of each horn was an unidentifiable thing that appeared indigo colored with a scattered zigzag pattern. From this story we know that that there are also dead dragons. Kou Zongshi states: All of these stories conflict, and they are all conjecture. Once, [a dragon’s skeleton] emerged after a cliff collapsed, fully equipped with skin, body, head, and bones. It is unclear whether this was a 58


dragon’s effluvium or its corpse. An effluvium and a corpse are both things with shape and material form, invisible when the dragon is alive but observable when it has died. Given the possibility of this transformation [from invisible to visible], why should we assume that its shape cannot also change? Wang Ji states: The Bencao jing says that the bones are from dead dragons. The belief that they are instead from effluvia is mere conjecture. Li Shizhen states: As for dragon’s bone, the Benjing held them to be dead dragons, Tao Hongjing thought they were sloughed-off bones, and Su Song and Kou Zongshi both said that these two claims were doubtful. I think the dragon, being a shen [divine or magical] thing, should not, in principle, die on its own. However, take note of the story cited by Su Song of a dragon killed in battle. In addition, the Zuozhuan [Zuo commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals] says that a dragon groomer once made mincemeat out of dragon and ate it. The Shuyi ji [Collection of strange tales]25 says: In the reign of the Han emperor Hedi (89– 105), during a rainstorm a dragon fell into the palace courtyard. The emperor ordered that it be made into stew and served to his ministers. The Bowuzhi says: Zhang Hua got a piece of preserved dragon meat and said that when vinegar was added the meat was lustrous with the Five Colors. From these stories it is clear that there are dragons that die by themselves, so what the Benjing said must be correct. Entire dragon bodies were not typically prescribed for use in medicine. The larger category of “dragon” is thus filled with several subsections describing the history and use of the dragon’s individual parts. After introducing the topic of dragons, Li listed several mu (subcategories) falling under the general gang (major category) of the dragon: dragon’s bone,26 tooth, horn, brain, fetus (tai), and saliva. Each of these subsections recapitulated the kind of information in the larger category. In the case of dragon’s bone, for example, Li began with the equivalent of Collected Interpretations, though it was not explicitly marked as such. Here we find quotations from previous bencao that discuss the natural history of the substance, as usual ending with Li’s own comments. The entry for dragon’s bone reveals a common phenomenon within natural historical subsections of the Bencao: debate about the provenance or characteristics of an object under discussion, followed by Li’s 59


consideration of available evidence in order to settle the issue. The quotations provided treat many aspects of dragon’s bone, where to find it, how to identify genuine specimens and avoid fakes, how to distinguish the bones of male and female dragons, how to interpret the various colors of the bones, and how to determine the organs each color corresponds to. The information is copious. The detailed description of dragon bone almost obscures the deep philosophical question at stake in this subsection: were these bones from dead dragons, or were they discarded from live ones? By extension, could dragons (or other divine beings) die? According to Tao Hongjing, dragons’ teeth, bones, and horns were shed from live dragons. Su Song, after relating a story of the slaying of a dragon and the removal of its brocaded horns, claimed the story proved the creatures could be killed, so bones might instead be from dead dragons. Several more authors debated the issue before Li judged the evidence. This was a critical problem in that it touched on the materiality of divine or semidivine beings, a live issue in the late Ming. If dragon meat could be consumed, and dragons could be slain, then it followed that bones might indeed be from dead dragons. Hence, Li concluded, dragons could die. Mediating such arguments was one way for Li to display his erudition while allowing the reader a glimpse of the epistemological process through which he weighed evidence and came to his own conclusions about the natural objects he worked on. Many entries also include a heading called Correction of Errors (zhengwu) devoted to rectifying what Li considered to be mistakes in the work of other scholars, another site at which he weighed evidentiary claims and described the reasons for his disagreement with a particular author or text. Preparation of the Drug (Xiuzhi) Lei Xiao states: Whenever using dragon’s bone, first simmer a decoction of fragrant herbs and bathe [the dragon’s bone] with it twice. Grind [the bone] into powder and use it to fill a pouch made of raw silk. Take one swallow, remove its viscera, place the pouch inside it, and hang it at the mouth of a well. Remove it after one evening and pulverize it. When added to medicines for nourishing or repairing the kidney, the effectiveness of the resulting powder is miraculous. Li Shizhen states: According to the method of preparation used today, [dragon’s bone] is instead calcined27 into a red powder. There are also people who use it 60


fresh. The Shilin guangji [Comprehensive compendium of a forest of affairs]28 says: Soak [the dragon’s bone] in wine for one night, bake over a slow fire until dry, and then grind into powder. Refine the powder three times with water. If needed for an emergency, simmer with wine and bake over a slow fire until dry. Alternatively, some say: Whenever using [dragon’s bone] as medicine, refine it with water and then dry it in the sun. For each jin of prepared dragon’s bone, use one dou of black beans and steam the mixture for a full day, then use after drying in the sun. Otherwise [the drug] will adhere to a person’s intestines or stomach and in later years will cause fever. Next we come to the explanation of drug preparations, where Li recorded the indications of a drug. There were often a number of ways one might prepare a substance for use in medicine, and for dragon’s bone Li provided the reader with several options. One of the recorded prescriptions illustrates the intimate connection between an object’s natural history and its potential use in medicinal prescriptions. Li opened the Preparation subsection with a recipe from one of the most widely cited formularies in early modern Chinese medicine, the Lei Gong paozhi lun [Lei Gong’s treatise on the preparation of drugs] by Lei Xiao (fl. 420– 479). Lei’s prescription was based on the resonance among dragons, swallows, and water that could be found in a number of texts. The use of swallow meat was similarly urged in ceremonies held to pray for rain,29 as the delicious morsel would attract the presence of rain-bringing dragons. When discussing swallows elsewhere in the Bencao, Li cited lore that swallows hid or hibernated in drinking wells.30 Afterward, he quoted Tao Hongjing’s injunction against eating swallow meat before entering a body of water for fear of being consumed by a dragon: “Swallow flesh must not be eaten, as it damages human vitality (shenqi) and will cause a person who has entered a body of water to be swallowed up by a flood dragon. One also ought not kill [swallows].”31 This proscription was shared by other texts, such as the Huainanzi, and was often connected with the swallow’s reputed ability to change into a clam when immersed in liquid. The natural history of a substance helped determine its use as a drug. The combination of swallows with wells or water to prepare dragon’s bone has some roots in the lore infusing these objects, just as the anti61


dotes to an animal’s poison were often based on materials from creatures known to be its enemy in life. Special qualities attributed to a substance were likely to determine the illnesses for which it was indicated. For example, consuming the eyes of creatures gifted with miraculous sight might improve a person’s vision. The careful reader of the Bencao could derive this sort of information by moving from the stories provided in the Collected Interpretations to the drug preparations, and when sources were scarce, an animal’s natural history might also help determine its categorization in the following Bencao rubric, Qi and Flavor. Qi and Flavor (Qiwei) Sweet, balanced, nontoxic. The Mingyi bielu states: Slightly cold. Zhen Quan states: Slightly toxic. Avoid fish and iron implements [when using this drug]. [Xu] Zhicai states: Compatible with ginseng and ox bezoar, incompatible with gypsum. Li Shizhen states: Xu Hong said: [In principle] ox bezoar inhibits the effects of dragon’s bone. However, [in practice] if dragon’s bone is used with ox bezoar it is made even more efficacious. This is because [the dragon’s bone] subdues [the effects of the bezoar]. Its qi receives the yin influences within yang and enters the lesser yin of the hand and foot through their yin channels. In addition to the stories or historical background associated with an object, another category of information that helped determine the medicinal use of a substance was its place within a series of systems of correspondence falling under the rubric of Qi and Flavor.32 Drugs in Chinese medical works were usually categorized in terms of qi, a term that has a variety of meanings depending on its context but that can be loosely analogized here to a kind of internal heat. The qi of a medicinal substance could be cold (han), hot (re), warm (wen), cool (liang), or balanced (ping), and the degree of heat denoted by these categorizations did not necessarily correspond to the temperature of the object.33 Different texts might have different ways of organizing the levels of qi, sometimes dividing each heat grade into further degrees or omitting one altogether; Li, for example, preferred to classify drugs as balanced (ping) instead of cool. The significance of these heat factors within the broader system of Chinese medicine was also variously interpreted. Despite its flexibility, however, the system itself was widely employed in early modern bencao. 62


Like the “heat” of qi, the five flavors (wuwei) were at best loosely correlated with the flavors or tastes of modern parlance. The five wei were a standard set within which each drug was characterized: sour (suan), salty (xian), sweet (gan), bitter (ku), or pungent (xin). Authors might disagree over how to characterize a particular plant or animal, and the designation of the object with respect to qi and wei could dramatically affect its use in medicinal prescriptions and recipes. Dragon’s bone is listed as balanced and sweet. Following these two, Li appends a third category: du, which is alternately rendered in English as poison, toxicity, or efficacy.34 Each drug in the Bencao is characterized as having or lacking du. In general the state of having du indicated that a substance must be treated with caution, that it was potent, and that it ought to be used in moderation. Substances with du could be used to induce pronounced effects or for ritual purposes. Dragon’s bone lacked du, according to Li. The meat of the swallow, in contrast, had du and could be used to lure dragons or to kill worms in a patient’s body. Yin and yang were modes of change that governed the differentiation and existence of the vital force, or qi, of all things in the universe. Broadly speaking, yin and yang represented the dual aspects of all of the myriad things, and they were often understood in terms of dichotomous and complementary pairs (each containing the yin element first and the yang second): female and male, dark and light, cold and hot, and so forth. In the literature of medicine and drugs, they were often discussed in terms of their instantiations in the human body and in the materials that one might use to treat it: yin and yang forces should be harmonized in healthy bodies, and when that harmony was challenged, it was the responsibility of the doctor to know how to manipulate the yin and yang aspects of medical treatments and medicinal drugs in order to restore balance. Though most works of materia medica invoked the rubrics discussed above, differences of opinion with regard to how to assign drugs to each category were quite common and are illustrated in the Qi and Flavor subsection for dragon’s bone. While Li listed the substance as having balanced qi, for example, the Mingyi bielu classified dragon’s bone as slightly cold (wei han). While Li thought dragon bone had no du, Zhen Quan35 recorded that it had a bit of du. In cases where such disagreement existed, Li often attempted to resolve the matter in the Explication (faming) subsection, where he elaborated on a drug’s qualities and (sometimes) on the reasons for the attribution of these qualities. 63


Main Indications (Zhuzhi) Shennong bencao jing: [Dragon’s bone can be used to treat] guizhu36 in the heart and belly and possession by goblins or demons. It suppresses coughing that takes the breath away and diarrhea with bloody pus. [It also can be used to treat] hemorrhaging by pregnant women, solid masses and lumps in the body, and hot qi in small children that causes shock and convulsion. Mingyi bielu: [Dragon’s bone can be used to treat] a full and upset heart and belly and angry qi hidden below the heart that is accompanied by breathlessness. [It also treats] intestinal carbuncles and ulcer, “eclipse of the moon” in women,37 paralysis and shriveling of the four limbs, and nightmares with the sweats. [It can be used to treat] difficult or bloody urination. It nourishes vitality, consolidates the hun and po souls, and calms the five organ functionalities. White dragon’s bone controls nocturnal emissions and ejaculation with urination. Zhen Quan: [Dragon’s bone] drives out harmful qi, calms the spirit, and stops nightly dreaming of sex with ghosts and frequent confusing dreams. It stops cold diarrhea with bloody pus and women’s vaginal discharge. Da ming rihua bencao [Abbreviated form of Rihua zhujia bencao [The bencao of Rihua]]: [Dragon’s bone can be used to treat] the hemorrhaging of the fetus (loutai) during pregnancy. It stops bloody wind in the intestine, nasal mucous, and bloody sputum. It stops diarrhea with dehydration. It nourishes the spleen and acts as an astringent to the intestines and stomach. Li Shizhen: [Dragon’s bone] nourishes the kidney and calms fright. It stops yin ague and controls moist qi and prolapse of the anus. It stimulates muscle growth and minimizes wounds. The Main Indications subsection includes a description or explication of the kinds of illness that a substance, when prepared as a drug, might help treat. This usually incorporated quotations from other medical texts along with Li’s own comments. The information provided by different authors could differ and even conflict, and in egregious cases of conflicting indications, Li usually added his own evaluation. The relationship between dragons and water has already been discussed and was mentioned in several stories recorded in the Bencao. Here in Main Indications, dragon’s bone is often indicated for illnesses that involve water of some sort. Specifically, it seems to counteract illnesses brought on by 64


an excess of water. According to the Mingyi bielu, dragon’s bone is particularly suitable for stopping excess perspiration, incontinence, and nocturnal emissions. Li adds that it is also good for eradicating wet qi, a common culprit in the development of disease within early modern medical texts. Explication (Faming) Lei Xiao: When qi enters the kidney of a man, then a drug that nourishes the kidney is suitable for use. Li Shizhen: A drug with astringent properties can stop the dispersal [of qi]. Therefore Master Cheng said: Dragon’s bone can control and reduce qi that is floating too much. It stabilizes the large intestine and calms fright. It also treats illnesses of the dai vessel. The Explication subsection was dedicated to parsing a drug’s properties. This was the place to go to find out why a substance acted on particular organs, vessels, or qi, and the explanations provided usually situated the object within a framework of yin-and-yang correspondence. Systematic correspondence according to yin and yang, kinds of qi, or vessel theory did not necessarily fully explain the indications of a drug or the reasons for associating it with certain illnesses or organ problems. As we have seen, the lore associated with an object could also shape its use in medicine. As we shall see below, analogies derived from a comparison with other drugs could also inform the use of a particular substance in medical practice. The explanations provided in the Explication subsection were not meant to be exhaustive but rather to give an interpretation of an object’s properties in the context of several highly theorized systems of medical correspondence. Appended Prescriptions (Fufang) Eleven old prescriptions and seven new ones. ... To cure forgetfulness: Prolonged use will increase one’s wisdom: use equal parts white dragon bone, tiger bone, and yuanzhi herb38 and grind into powder. Take one small spoonful of the powder with wine after a meal, three times a day. Qianjin yaofang [Essential prescriptions worth a thousand in gold]. For nocturnal emission while dreaming due to overexertion of the heart: grind equal parts dragon’s bone and yuanzhi herb into powder. Mix with honey and form into pills the size of parasol 65


tree seeds. Coat the pills with cinnabar. Take thirty pills per dose in lotus seed soup. Xin tong (Abbreviation for Wu Qiu’s Huoren xintong [A mindful assemblage for the promotion of life]). ... For toxic diarrhea with cold-factor febrile disease: On the eighth, ninth, or tenth day of suffering from a cold-factor febrile disease, the patient will become thirsty and feverish. The sanjiao will be damaged, and the patient will have diarrhea. Sometimes the mouth will gape open and the tongue will protrude, the eyes will become inflamed, the patient will develop sores on his mouth and nose, and he won’t recognize people. Use this prescription for eliminating heat toxins and stopping diarrhea. Simmer one-half jin of dragon’s bone in one dou of water until four sheng are left. Seal and place in the bottom of a well. Take five ge of the cold decoction per dose by mouth, gradually increasing this. Waitai miyao fang [Medical secrets of an official]. ... For spitting blood and nosebleed: When blood comes out of the nine orifices, it is necessary to use dragon’s bone powder blown into the nose. Once there was a person who bled one hu of liquid out of his nose. No prescription could stop it. This [powder] was used and it stopped. Sanyin fang [Prescriptions to treat the three causes of disease]. Appended Prescriptions provides a number of ways of preparing a substance, culled both from prescription books and from Li’s own experience. Li reproduced the recipes and cited the sources he worked from. For dragon’s bone he recorded eleven prescriptions collected from standard medical texts as well as seven from his own experience and from his reading of prescription collections that had not been included in previous bencao. Some of these recipes were meant to prevent seminal emission during sleep, but the range of prescriptions was expansive: amnesia, diarrhea, fever, bleeding, and blood in the urine were just some of the ailments for which various texts prescribed decoctions of dragon’s bone. The drug could also be used to prevent injury to the three regions of the body (sanjiao): the upper region (shangjiao), from the chin to the diaphragm; the middle region (zhongjiao), corresponding roughly to the abdomen; and the lower region (xiajiao), below the navel. Li did not indicate which of these recipes he particularly favored, but he recorded them 66


all for the potential use of his readers. Here I have provided only selections of this long subsection. The translated passages above represent the spectrum of information a reader would be presented with upon consulting the Bencao. The entries for some objects include just one of these subsections, while other object entries span the full range of subsections and continue for several pages. Though many of the same concerns weave through the entire text, each of the sixteen categories of objects in the Bencao features its own set of concerns, sources, and organizing features. In the preface to each individual category, Li provided a brief rationale for his construction of the group. Simply by reading through the prefaces, one can glean a sense of the way Li and his predecessors organized nature, arranging a written mass of petals, feathers, and fur into neat groups. The next four chapters explore in detail the range of objects included in Li’s work, including some of the plants and animals most central to the development of early modern natural history. We will pay particular attention to the importance of change in Chinese natural history, the critters that actually did the transforming, and the means by which Li made sense of it all. These chapters look in sequence at the building blocks of change, such as fire, water, earth, and stone; the plants and demon-bugs that were formed by these building blocks; and the animals, monsters, mummies, and men who embodied the transformative processes of the cosmos and underwent their own metamorphoses. A scholar in early modern China used textual, sensory, and material tools to resolve or contribute to arguments about the plants and animals around him and to make sense of his place in that world. The idea of transformation was central to Li’s own experience of these debates and helped shape the epistemology of the Bencao. These next chapters cut deeply through the marrow of the Bencao text, revealing a complex, living, and conflicted picture of Ming views of the natural world. Each category or set of categories exhibited its own special issues: settling an argument about a wasp was not the same as weighing claims about the morality of using human blood as a drug. Common concerns and premises informed all of these discussions, but common sources, citations, and arguments often did not. The order in which we will explore the categories of the Bencao largely mirrors that of the text itself. Though most modern scholars treat this text as a compilation of reference material meant to be dipped into in no particular order, there is logic to Li’s organization, and the early sections pave the way for 67


what follows. This order conditioned the reader to sequentially explore realms of substance that emphasized different material qualities, building on itself all the while. I hope the reader comes away with a sense of the richness of the Bencao after having met several of its denizens, a better idea of the plurality and vibrant debate that characterized scholarship on plants and animals in the late Ming, and an idea of what was at stake for the scholars, doctors, patients, and readers involved. Li and others’ idealizations of his project often bore little resemblance to the reality of what was going on in the text. This transformation is just what gives the text so much life.

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3 TRANSFORMATION: ELEMENTS OF CHANGE

Once upon a time, in the state of Fulin, there was a massive quicksilver sea forty to fifty li across. Local people had an ingenious means of fetching the mercury from this vast reservoir. First, they dug several dozen pits at a distance of ten li from the shore. Then they dispatched strong riders mounted on fine horses after covering both with a layer of gold foil. When the riders approached the sea, their gold plating shimmered in the sun, causing the quicksilver to roil and advance on the riders as if it wanted to wrap itself around their glittering bodies. The riders turned and galloped swiftly away, the quicksilver following in hot pursuit. Men whose horses were too slow were soon swallowed up by the mercurial liquid, but when the surviving riders passed the pits, the quicksilver poured in and was trapped. The local people then stewed this together with fragrant herbs, producing flower-mercury.1 Though Song Yingxing (b. 1587) would later deride this story in his Tiangong kaiwu [Exploiting the works of the natural artificer] as “limitless exaggeration,” a generation earlier Li Shizhen took it seriously enough to critically examine the account of gold-plated horsemen in his own musings on mercury.2 Li explained that attributing marvelous qualities to quicksilver (shuiyin, literally, liquid-silver) was not without precedent. He described the process by which adepts used what they called “the miraculous fluid” to make candles with whose light they located precious or hidden objects: “Adepts (fangshujia) mix quicksilver with cow, sheep, and pig fat and grind it into a paste. They use a hollow plant for a wick. In the light [of the candle] they can locate gold, and they can identify gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, jade, turtles, serpents, and demons. They call this [paste] ‘spirit soup.’”3 Quicksilver was an exemplary case of a natural object that stimulated a great deal of scholarly debate: because it could bring either instant 69


death or immortality, its qualities needed to be clarified. In order to understand how Li interpreted the story of the golden riders and the mercury sea, we must first grasp the fact that, as a metal, quicksilver was among the physical manifestations of the Five Phases. As the most fundamental forces of the natural world, the phases mediated all change in the cosmos and helped shape the structure of the Bencao and the epistemic decisions of its author.

Change Claims about transformation inspired many of the debates recorded in the Bencao, since it was transformation in the natural world that many previous writers had found notable and often strange enough to be worth explaining and debating. Li was therefore compelled to devise ways of deciding which of these claims were believable. In his struggle to make sense of the rotting, breathing, dying, and otherwise metamorphosing bestiary populating the pages of his masterwork, Li developed his own picture of the myriad things in the cosmos as a collection of entities that was constantly in flux—indeed, the flux created the entities. He ultimately constructed a picture of the natural world, and the processes one could expect to find there, that took change as one of its most basic premises. Li described the most basic elements of nature’s metamorphoses as one might describe a body. Earth was the mother of all things, water the source of their transformations.4 Things were given both life and death by fire,5 and the wonders of cosmic change were exemplified by stone, the “roots of qi and bones of the earth.” The transformations of qi as it was embodied in this elemental flesh (earth, water, fire, stone, and the like) might be from soft to hard (exemplified by the formation of stalactites), from animate to still (typified by the petrifaction of plants), from spirited to insensible (as in the petrifaction of animals and men), or from formless to material (epitomized by the solidification of thunder, earthquakes, and stars).6 This is an evocative statement of the sorts of qualities that wu, material incarnations of qi and the things of the universe, could exhibit: softness or hardness, movement or stillness, spirit or soul, feelings or senses, and shape or form. Li most commonly described the transformations among these qualities in two ways: bian changes and hua changes. Though these terms cannot be easily translated into monosemic English equivalents, a brief dis70

TRANSFORMATION: ELEMENTS OF CHANGE

cussion of their use and by extension their meaning can provide a sense of how they functioned in the Bencao. They combined to form the compound bianhua, a broad term referring to change in general in the natural world but also indicating the dual facets of transformation among the plants, animals, and other materials of the universe. Bian was most widely used to discuss a change in aspect of a natural object: the whitening of hair (bianbai),7 the blackening of lice upon reaching a man’s head (bianhei),8 any change in the color of an object. An observable shift in an illness’s progression was also a kind of bian. A vessel could biantong (become clear or unobstructed), and a bodily fluid or parasite could biandong, or start moving. A bian change was observable and, most importantly, was not necessarily an expected stage in a creature’s life cycle. A bian was often surprising.9 A turtle or mushroom undergoing a transformative process after a millennium of life would be discussed as having bian’ed. Hua too did a great deal of work in medical literature. It was used more than twice as frequently as bian in Li’s text, in part because it meant “to dissolve” in hundreds of prescriptions that required liquefying powders in water, wine, or blood.10 This term also formed half of a phrase describing the creation and creative processes of the universe in general, zaohua. In its widest employ, hua acted as a partner to bian: if bian was a transformation in observable aspect that was somehow surprising, hua represented a more fundamental change that was perhaps best considered a more “natural” part of an object’s life cycle.

Phases The Five Phases were the foundation for these changes in the Bencao. They were the basic modes of being of everything in the universe, but they were fundamentally transitory. The phases were inextricably related in cycles of mutual creation and replacement, usually in a set order (the sequence of production was typically wood → fire → metal → water → earth, which could be reversed into a cycle of destruction). The five constituents of the cycle could also be ordered in different sequences of change according to context. Discussion of the phases was ubiquitous in premodern Chinese scholarship, though their meaning could be more or less explicitly material depending on context. “Wood,” for example, could indicate the stuff trees were made of or refer to a mode of being that was woodlike or that em71


bodied principles associated with wood. Like other late Ming scholars,11 Li alternated between discussing water, fire, earth, metal, and wood in terms of material stuff and treating them more metaphysically. In both their physical and metaphysical instantiations, the phases were embedded within a cosmological framework that associated them with a number of other five-part series. The Five Stones (wushi) were used by Daoists in their manufacture of elixirs (dan).12 The Five Viscera (wuzang) included the liver, heart, spleen, lung, and kidney. These were joined by the Five Colors (wuse), the Five Fungi (wuzhi), and many other schema that linked each phase with a planet, season, taste, emotion, or secretion, to name a few.13 The cycle of mutual transformation was understood as the mode of existence for all of these and, indeed, for all things in the world, determined largely by the actions of yin and yang forces in the material. For a naturalist and doctor of the late sixteenth century, the most important aspect of the Five Phases was precisely this germinal tension between the ubiquity of the phases and the constant flux of their material manifestations. The phases did not just exhibit change: for many scholars, they were change incarnate. They bred change and organisms along with it. Li thus adopted the phases as the most basic level of organization in his structuring of the Bencao. Its classification began with waters and fires (the most fundamental, according to Li), followed by earths, metals (including stone), and then woods (embedded within the juan devoted to plants), before moving on to the sections on implements, animals, and humans. While there was an established tradition of including separate categories for wood and metal in collections of materia medica and natural history texts, Li innovated by including separate categories in the body of the Bencao for waters, fires, and earths. In many ways these last three phases were the fundamental mediators of change and metamorphosis in the Bencao. Water and fire provided the material basis of many of the drugs in the text. For Li, water was the “fount of the myriad metamorphoses,”14 while fire was both killer and creator of the myriad things in the universe.15 He described many different kinds of water, such as rainwater and dew of various types, frost and hail, ice, pond water, water from within bamboo and vegetables, water from wells and springs, water from marshes in which snakes had bathed, water collected in puddles or tombs, water in which assorted objects had been washed or cooked, and 72


bathwater. Their medicinal qualities changed with the evolution of the seasons. In the Earths section, Li chronicled the kinds of earth associated with the “spleen and stomach” (pi wei) of man.16 He walked the reader through a motley assemblage of soils: chalk, soils of various colors and extracted from beneath homes and roads, dirt from the soles of shoes, earth from markets and crematoria, soil from the nests of birds and wasps, dung from various bugs, mud formed by human and animal urine, ceramics and porcelain, tiles and ink, and several kinds of ash and soot. Conceptually, Earths functioned as a boundary category. The group invoked some of the same issues as waters and fires while preparing the reader for the sections of the Bencao yet to come. The Metal and Stone category acted as a bridge between what Li considered to be the more basic of the phases (water, earth, fire) and the plants and animals proper.17 It also showcased some of the most remarkable and basic metamorphic processes at work in the natural world, processes that operated in the air and dust as much as in the bodies of more complex insects and animals. The Five Phases shaped the principle (li) of things, and understanding the metamorphoses they mediated was necessary for understanding what one could reasonably expect of the natural objects in the world. The phases and their associated transformations formed not only the root of the Bencao but also the basis of Li’s decision-making processes when faced with controversial claims about plants, animals, and other natural entities.

The Orthodox and the Unusual The introduction of Fires as a separate section in the Bencao separated Li’s work from its predecessors and set an important precedent.18 Though it occupies the shortest section in the entire Bencao, fire was a special favorite of Li. This was in part due to its unique nature; though it lacked substance, fire nevertheless possessed qualities (youqi er wuzhi). And as the embodiment and creator of light and darkness, the characteristics that fire manifested naturally followed the basic divisions between the bright and the shadowy: sunny, warm, masculine yang or shady, cool, feminine yin. While fires had not been treated as a separate category of drug in texts of materia medica before, a number of Qing bencao fol73


lowed Li’s lead, often citing him as a major authority on the use of fire in medicine.19 Consequently, along with a few ancient sources such as the Yijing [Classic of changes] and some unorthodox sources for particularly extraordinary phenomena, Li functioned as his own primary authority for many of the fiery claims in the Bencao, obviating the need for extended debate or argument. Fires was thus a section in which Li inaugurated most of the discussion himself, not making much room for older sources that might have challenged his authority. In demonstrating claims regarding this most basic matter of the earth, Li relied on texts he considered to be the most foundational as a guide to antiquity, including the Yijing and the Zhouli [Rites of Zhou]. The primacy of the Yijing as a source in this part of the Bencao is unsurprising. Li emphasized the importance of notions of yin and yang when discussing the phases, even including trigrams from the Yijing in his prefaces to the Water and Fire sections of the Bencao.20 The eight trigrams (bagua) were series of three solid or broken lines in rotating combinations, with solid lines representing yang and broken lines representing yin. Each trigram was named and identified with a particular direction and natural force or landform and formed the basis of the sixty-four hexagrams that structured the Yijing. Li also liberally cited from the Huangdi neijing [The Yellow Emperor’s inner classic], a text heavily influenced by yin/ yang theories and considered by Li and his contemporaries as a fundamental treatise of medical theory and practice.21 Li invoked this medical classic when discussing waters and fires (the roots and sources of all things and their changes) and in the Bencao’s introductory sections (xulie) on medical principles and theory.22 These references were largely in the form of citations of Qi Bo, a major character featured in the Huangdi neijing.23 When discussing more extreme claims about fires and waters, however, Li relied on sources relatively unorthodox for a bencao author. Li was fascinated by things that looked like fire but did not burn: a cold fire (hanhuo) in the region of Xiaoqiu, a kind of will o’ the wisp that appeared in marshes, a light he called “devils’ phosphorescence” (guilin), and the essences (jingqi) of gold and silver that flamed but were chilly.24 Li also discussed types of fire local to distant regions, fire eaters, and people who could not be burned: In the remote South there is a tribe of people who detest fire. Their state is close to Heikunlun, where people can eat burning charcoal. 74


There are fire-eating beasts . . . In the Western areas there are fireeating birds . . . Fire-crows and fire-bats can eat flame and smoke. Fire-tortoises and fire-rats live in fire. These are all normal (chang) in terms of the Five Phases and the principle of things. Those who first hear of them and think them weird or strange have therefore not penetrated deeply into this principle.25 These claims about unusual phenomena, in some cases accompanied by Li’s arguments against considering them unnatural, brought with them a set of unorthodox sources such as the Baopuzi and the Yuanhuaji [Records of the origins of change], reference to which was one mark of Li’s distinctiveness as a bencao scholar.26 Metals and Stones in the Bencao brought the citation of a much greater number and variety of sources than those used in the previous three sections. This makes sense given that, unlike water, earth, and fire, many prior natural history and bencao works had featured categories of metal- or stone-based objects and drugs. Li consequently made more liberal use of earlier and contemporary bencao in this section than in previous entries. The sixth-century Dijing tu [Illustrated mirror of the earth],27 a manual of the properties of stones and soil, and the Tang-period Baozang lun [Treatise on treasures]28 were treated as basic authorities on the varieties of stone and metal and their local (and foreign) variations, and their claims formed the backbone of Li’s discussion of the properties of the body and bones of the earth.

The Global and the Local Just as seasonality and location distinguished plants, animals, and men, the different kinds of space in which water and fire existed were likewise crucial to understanding their use to facilitate one’s health and wellbeing. The landscape of the earth in early modern China recapitulated and corresponded to the body of man. Springs and wells were the conduits of the earth, according to Li, functioning like the vessels through which blood and qi flowed through man’s body.29 If geomancy could be understood as a physiognomy of the land, then one could read the hills, valleys, and streams for an indication of the qualities of the earth beneath. Reading this variation in time and space was critical to understanding how to use fire, earth, and water as medicinal drugs. Li distinguished between waters of heaven and waters of earth, the 75


former generally linked with seasonal change, and the latter characterized by geographical differentiation.30 Thus, different sorts of dew were collected at different times of the day or year, each with its own medicinal qualities. Waters were also differentiated by space. According to Li, “Ancient people differentiated between the water and earth of the nine prefectures,31 using this [differentiation] to categorize people as virtuous or loathsome, long-lived or short-lived. This is because water is the source of the ten thousand changes, earth is the mother of the ten thousand things.”32 Fires were also separated into three major space-defined categories: Heaven, Earth, and Man, each with a yang and a yin incarnation.33 The yin–yang dichotomy had commonly been invoked as a means of understanding the regional and temporal variations in bodies of earth and water. However, Li was innovative in extending this basic rationale to a context in which it had not been explored: fire. After all, why ought this basic building block of the universe behave any differently than its more substantial sisters and brothers? Why ought we not expect from fire the kind of variation over time and space that all of the other phases exhibited? And if this were so, must we not understand these cyclical, seasonal, and geographical differences in order to properly understand the role of fire in the natural world and, just as important, to manipulate fire for health and healing? Rather than associating yin and yang with specific, defined qualities that held in all cases and for all scholars, it is more useful and accurate to understand them as both complementary and contradictory aspects of the qualities in question in a particular case. This is particularly true when examining the distinctions Li draws between the yin and the yang aspects of fire, which do not cleanly fit typical notions of proper yin and yang qualities. Yang fires could burn grass and wood, but humidity could curb their spread, and water put them out. Yin fires could melt metals and stones, and when met with humid things, they burned even more fiercely.34 Understanding spatial variation in the physical manifestations of the phases was also a crucial aspect of locating and identifying valuable drug substances by reading signs. This could be a major factor in naming substances, as Li explained in his discussion of local vernacular names, like that of the stone yunmu, or “Cloud-mother.”35 According to the Jingnan zhi [Jingnan gazetteer], the people living on Mount Fangtai would watch the mountain until they saw clouds emerging from part of the rock. They dug into the ground at that place and always found a good crop of the 76


material. Thus, the stone in question was truly the “Cloud-mother,” the root of a cloud.36 Many scholars of rock and stone relied on texts like the sixth-century Dijing tu to provide guidance about locating things below ground by paying attention to signs and colors above. Miners were trained to look for specific kinds of rock that indicated valuable metals and minerals inside.37 According to Li, miners found cinnabar by paying attention to the texture of stone in their mines.38 Withered yellow grass on the ground might indicate that red copper (chitong) horses or figures were buried underground.39 Green grass with red stalks aboveground was a sign of lead ore below.40 Along with the Dijing tu, the Bowuzhi, Liji, Huainanzi, and many bencao described means of locating buried jade or precious stones through colored glows, rainbows, millet, or sharp-edged rocks.41 Truly, an educated naturalist knew how to read the physiognomy of the land through the outward manifestations of its inner character.

The Normal and the Pathological Many metamorphoses happened spontaneously under the surface of this land. There were, however, ways to nudge the natural evolution of a substance and to direct its transformations. Artificial manipulation of the transformative cycles of a material might simply involve taking advantage of a rule that Li and his predecessors often repeated: creatures and their changes are influenced by the things around them. A common folk belief held that a cat could be made pregnant by sweeping at it with a broom, and by a similar logic placing an iron axe sharp side up underneath a pregnant woman’s bed could transform her fetus from female to male.42 The yang (male) nature of the iron, as with other materials similarly yang in tendency, would overwhelm the balancing yin (female) forces in the womb so that male qualities predominated. The sort of transformations that had shaped the production of a thing determined how it could be used in medicine. The efficacy of drugs whose formation resulted from natural processes was widely considered to be superior to that of drugs created by artificial manipulation. Even in the former case, the potency or characteristics of an ingredient could be altered if the thing had spent a long time in an environment that compromised its purity; though Li discussed these in his book, funerary objects, items worn by women, and containers used for holding human waste products were not, typically, advisable for use in medicine. Those objects 77


that had lasted through hundreds of years and experienced natural cycles of change, in contrast, were particularly desirable as materia medica. “Adepts” typically attempted to change the natural evolution of things in order to create elixirs of immortality or to otherwise transform base materials into precious substances.43 Their claims that one could cheat death by ingesting cinnabar, quicksilver, and arsenic were energetically denounced by bencao authors. The Song doctor Kou Zongshi complained that despite the innumerable deaths and illnesses resulting from the consumption of such toxic materials, friends of his persisted in this “pitiable mistake.”44 Because they were conceptually linked with alchemy, stones and metals invited discussion of their potential as life extenders. To preserve the glow of youth, for example, many books of prescriptions in the Song and Ming included recipes for combs of lead to turn grey hair jet black.45 Some recipes suggested refining drugs like cinnabar by placing them in an undeveloped chicken’s egg, returning the egg to the nest, and waiting until the rest of the brood began to hatch before harvesting the drugs, implicitly drawing on cycles of birth, growth, and development in a living animal to process an ostensibly youth-preserving material.46 Many of the metal substances associated with Daoist arts (notably cinnabar) were claimed in texts like the Huainanzi and Baopuzi to confer unending life and youth, and their application to a dead body could reportedly prolong or mimic the rosy, fresh hue of life. For some authors, these powers justified their use on living bodies. When the nine orifices (jiuqiao) of a corpse were filled with gold and quicksilver, according to Ge Hong in the Baopuzi,47 the flesh did not decay. If these were the effects on a dead body, said Ge Hong, imagine the effect on the living!48 Li forcefully opposed this desire to halt the natural processes of putrefaction. The use of jade to preserve a corpse should be avoided, according to Li: while it might preserve a corpse, it certainly did not extend life, and according to the principle of things, one ought to allow bodies to rot naturally.49 Li took issue with advice from the Baopuzi that suggested using yunmu (the “Cloud-mother” stone described above) to make one younger, to enable a person to enslave demons and spirits, or to prevent corpse decay. Corpses that looked alive, he argued, tended to attract grave robbers interested in more than simply pillaging artifacts: “People in the past have said that heaping yunmu on a corpse will prevent the person from decaying. Thieves once happened upon the tomb of the rich Feng family. The corpse looked as if she were alive, and so together the thieves raped her. [In another case] thieves discovered the tomb of a Jin 78


Dynasty minister of the You region and swept through, violating the hundred corpses and their clothing as if [the corpses] were alive.”50

The Safe and the Poisonous A concern with natural and artificial change of drugs and bodies also ran through the many discussions of poison in the Bencao. All stones had a basic essence (jing) that was pluripotent like a stem cell in modern biology. While the pure essence might develop into precious gold or beautiful jade, it also could morph into a powerful poison. A great potential for transformation, whose form depended on local environment, characterized many stones and metals and as a result called for great caution in their handling. Conversely, stones and metals that were harmful in crude form could be transformed into healthful medicaments with proper processing.51 Some degree of argument ensued as to whether this processing should be “artificial” or “natural,” accomplished by adepts rather than occurring spontaneously via the qi of creation and transformation (zaohua zhi qi).52 Some of these products were not rare earths available only to adepts. Arsenic (pishi), for example, was cheap and easily available in the Ming drug market. This powerful substance (which derived its name, according to Li, from that of the fierce, legendary pi beast)53 was used as a fumigant, an insecticide, a medicine, and by firecracker makers to give their explosions an extra loud bang. Arsenic was also mixed with other materials such as blister beetles (banmao, more commonly known as Spanish fly), urine, and feces to make poisonous gunpowder.54 Most processed arsenic in the marketplace was either adulterated or corrupted with impurities, so authors of Song and Ming texts cautioned against purchasing and using this potential toxin. Even the pure material could be dangerous if prepared improperly; many Song bencao authors had agreed that processing raw arsenic with cold water produced a potentially lethal drug, while fire-treated arsenic was safe.55 Li’s belief that natural cycles of change (mediated by the normally occurring properties of the phases in the universe) were preferable to artificial transformations shaped the way he weighed evidence and pronounced his decision in this matter of life and death. According to common practice in the Ming, processed arsenic was preferable. Concerned that the crude form of the drug was poisonous, Ming merchants and farmers burned it to obtain pishuang (arsenic frost), 79


which was more safely used in medicine and agriculture. Unfortunately, many of these people used the simple method of burning arsenic in the open, leaving themselves vulnerable to a poisonous wind that could sicken or kill any plants or people in its path.56 In his Tiangong kaiwu, Song Yingxing cautioned that anyone processing arsenic ought to change jobs after two years lest all their body hair fall out.57 Chen Cheng (fl. 1092), the author of a respected Song edition and commentary on the Bencao jing, had also warned against the fire-aided processing of arsenic.58 Still, according to Chen, people persisted in this practice in order to produce the pishuang that was commonly mixed with rice to kill rats and birds. While this indeed wiped out the pests, it also took care of any dogs or cats unfortunate enough to eat them, or hungry people who ate the dogs and cats. By the late Ming, arsenic was also used to wash rice seedlings or was sown together with grain seeds as a kind of insecticide. Compounding this problem, according to Li, was a popular belief among laypeople that processing crude drugs somehow removed any toxins in the pure material.59 As a result, poison by stone and metal drugs was apparently quite widespread. Li’s concern with the marketplace and his attention to the importance of toxicity met in his bemoaning the “greedy” practices of late Ming wine merchants. These unscrupulous hawkers would clean bottles with arsenic smoke before filling them with wine, a cheap means of keeping the wine from spoiling.60 Their customers would be gradually poisoned, cursing the wine and having no idea that the arsenic-laced bottle was instead to blame. Li took Song bencao authors to task for supporting the assumption that crude drugs were inherently dangerous. Kou Zongshi, for example, had claimed that silver dug from the earth was toxic, being all pent up and filled with poisonous properties, while silver found on the surface was safe, having been exposed to the atmosphere and thus releasing its poisons. Li disagreed, claiming that only impurities added to silver made this otherwise safe substance toxic. After all, according to Li, silver implements were used to test for poison in food and corpses, so how could silver be poisonous?61 By the late Ming, then, toxicity and poison were important topics of debate, especially with respect to the discussion of those stones and metals that were widely available and used in medicine, agriculture, and daily life. Li’s belief in the fundamental transformative force of the Five Phases shaped his belief that naturally formed substances were less likely to be toxic than their artificially manipulated forms. There were exceptions to this rule, however, as individual bodies varied and substances did 80


not always act as expected. Small doses of arsenic could safely be given to hardy farmers, for example, but not to people who indulged in fine wine or food. Cinnabar (dansha) and calomel (shuiyinfen) were lethal to some babies but not to others.62 When faced with a bookshelf full of stories that included such exceptions, how was a late Ming naturalist to know what to believe, especially when these stories helped determine how to use drugs that could kill a patient or save his life?

How to Take Exceptions Just as some stories describing the toxicity of natural objects were striking, accounts of potential remedies could also be extraordinary. Extraordinary did not, however, necessarily mean unbelievable. For an example, we need only to look in the mirror. Qualities of darkness or light were included in the descriptions of many stone and metal drugs. Light was a precondition for proper observation and thus was vital to accessing knowledge about the world. As mirrors (which were commonly made of metal) had a very odd relationship with light and darkness, they were a major source of puzzlement for Ming scholars.63 According to Li, mirrors were externally dark (an) but internally light (ming),64 and they enabled special protection against evil magic. In the Bencao, stories abounded of people looking into mirrors to see things that would ordinarily be hidden.65 Because they contained a special kind of light, old mirrors could be used, much like ancient swords, to identify and repel demons and other evil influences. A Daoist walking in the mountains, according to the Baopuzi, could wear a mirror on his back to frighten away demons with their own reflections. Li thus urged that every family hang a large mirror in the house to prevent invasion by ghosts or goblins.66 By and large, according to Li, these accounts of the unusual power of old mirrors were believable.67 The presence of a multitude of similar examples of magical mirrors (all relating these objects to spirits and demons) helped give credence to the lot. This natural history also shaped the use of mirrors as medicine. In each prescription for old mirrors recorded in the Bencao, grinding up the mirror and consuming it as a drug would protect a patient against poisons, toxic agents, or bugs.68 An intact mirror could also be medically useful: when insects entered the ears or nose, striking the mirror and holding it up to the appropriate orifice would induce them to leave. 81


Not all reports of strange mirrors could be believed, however. Li related the story of a mirror that was reportedly used in the Han dynasty to identify and treat illness: sick people could look inside it to see through their bodies and identify the root of their disease.69 When certain mirrors were gazed into, according to another story, the viewer could see to the bottom of bodies of water. This connection with sight and observation was carried further in several tales of mirrors being used for the purposes of prognostication, both by military generals who sought advance notice of impending attacks and by others who gazed into magic mirrors to see events across time and space.70 There was a “fire mirror,” from which a person could extract fire, and a “water mirror,” which worked in a similar way. As far as Li was concerned, this last crop of tales was ridiculous. These stories, culled from a mix of official histories, jottings, and records of the strange, were probably intended to trick unsuspecting readers. What was the difference between these two sets of claims, each attributing unusual properties of mirrors? While the earlier stories attributed miraculous abilities to spirits and demons, for the most part these later stories attributed superpowers to humans instead. This was too much. Spirits were part of the natural world, and knowing how to live with and (when necessary) protect oneself against them was all part of good medical practice. But Li refused to believe that simply by manipulating mirrors people could enjoy miraculous, spiritlike powers of observation. If visual perception did not reliably operate according to certain rules, then it was unlikely to serve as a reliable source of knowledge. Mirrors could not stretch normal human capabilities of sight to allow vision through bodies, across miles of land, or through fathoms of water. While it was foolish and unenlightened to think the myriad changes of the things in the universe strange or unbelievable, not all imaginable transformations were possible. The phases were crucial to Li’s epistemology, and if he could explain a story in terms of phase-mediated change, especially if there were several similar accounts of the tale, that was often proof enough. But his belief had its limits: while mercury seas might roil with desire, as far as Li was concerned the phases did not confer superhuman abilities on ordinary mortals. He differed from previous naturalists in this regard; even Shen Gua (1031–1095) had attributed miraculous powers of sight to a monk with a magical mirror.71 As Li worked out these basic principles in the individual entries early in his work, he laid the foundation for what was to come.

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4 TRANSFORMATION: SPROUTS OF CHANGE

If the early chapters of the Bencao introduced the elements of transformation in the natural world, those seedlings sprouted in the next several chapters. Plants, trees, clothes, and tools fill most of the pages of Li’s work: plants, which make up twenty-six juan of the Bencao, altogether include over one thousand drug entries.1 Some of these sprouts of change had enjoyed a textual life that stretched back to the very earliest classical works. As stones were the bones of the earth, plants were the sprouts of civilization and provided the architecture of various fivefold systems of correspondence in nutrition and drug prescription. In his prefaces to each of the plant sections in the Bencao, Li invoked both the Huangdi neijing’s discourses on the correspondences of plants with the five viscera, five colors, and other fivefold systems, and the civilizing mission of legendary farmer Shennong, who had taste tested the wild plants and grains in the empire, sorted poisonous from nontoxic, and made possible the cultivation of the staple foodstuffs and medicines. In the tradition of classic collections of materia medica, well over half of the Bencao is devoted to providing histories of and prescriptions for using plants of various kinds. Devising a means of classifying plants was of paramount importance for any naturalist or bencao author, and Li divided plants into five major divisions: herbs (cao), grains (gu), vegetables (cai), fruits (guo), and woods (mu), from smallest to largest.2 These were in turn grouped into subdivisions organized around differences in growth habit (creeping herbs, treelike plants, bushy or parasitic woods, melons), habitat or locale (aquatic, rocky, mountainous, foreign), or fragrance, in addition to special categories for self-contained groups (for example, Five Fruits).3 Several plant sections closed with “Miscellany” or “Appendix” categories that contained plants that did not fit comfortably into another subdivision. In describing the objects in these five major divisions, 83


Li mobilized many of the same sources and dealt with similar epistemological concerns, hence I group them together here as one chapter and refer to them collectively as “plants.” The vast majority of existing scholarship on Li and the Bencao is devoted to plants, so the interested reader has several places to turn for a more exhaustive treatment of this category.4 We focus here on the issues most germane to our larger discussion. Plants also crept throughout one of the most innovative categories of the Bencao, that on Clothing and Tools (fuqi). While it occupies merely a single juan, with just seventy-nine drug entries, Clothing and Tools represented a clear and important break with bencao tradition. As Li stated in the preface to the section, though many of the items described therein had been noted in previous pharmacological works, earlier authors had categorized the objects according to the material out of which they were constructed: jade, wood, bug, stone.5 Li’s naming of this separate category gave voice to a new way of thinking about the objects included, from silken cloth and assorted items of clothing to funerary objects, paper and wooden implements, cookware, and fishing supplies. In these chapters of the Bencao, the author and contents began to speak in new ways, both to the reader and to the history of natural history itself. The text illustrated Li’s effort to assert his own voice in natural history, and he did this through two primary technologies: naming and narrative.

Naming Fabled demon-queller Zhong Kui began life relatively modestly. As popular stories had it, the Tang scholar had studied assiduously in an attempt to pass the imperial examinations,6 but despite his best efforts, he failed to place highly and was so despondent that he killed himself.7 Rather than fading from history, however, the dead Zhong found a new life in the dreams of several Tang and Ming emperors. He would appear in these dreams, locate the evil spirits responsible for making each emperor sick, and proceed to eat the offending dream demons, simultaneously curing the emperors and cementing a place in popular legend. This story inspired a genre of Zhong Kui–themed portraits and illustrations that were popular at least from the Tang period: Zhong’s portrait would be hung over the front door of a house each New Year to keep out evil spirits. The practice became widespread in the Song and was quite common by the time Li was writing in the Ming.8 84

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By the Song period, Zhong Kui the demon eater, vanquisher of illness, was apparently himself eaten as a drug. In a group of entries about paper objects in the Clothing and Tools category of the Bencao, Li recorded two Song prescriptions whose primary component was an image of Zhong Kui rendered on paper, burned to ash, and then made into a pill or taken directly with water to rid a patient of evils and cure fevers.9 Li’s entry in the Bencao marked the first time Zhong Kui had appeared in a major bencao text, and if Li had had his way, it would also have been the last. Li derided the story that spurred the medicinal use of images of Zhong Kui as a mistake propagated by meddlesome fabricators (haoshizhe) unaware of their own ignorance.10 He cited the Erya dictionary and the Kaogong ji zhu [Commentary on the Record of Artisans] as proof that the practice of eating images of Zhong Kui was nothing more than a misunderstanding that stemmed from a confusion of homophones: uninformed doctors had mistakenly equated the similarsounding zhongkui fungus with the legendary demon queller.11 The fungus could be shaped like a zhongkui hammer, the tool commonly featured on illustrations of the similarly named figure, and this likeness in sound and shape inspired a medical error founded on a misreading of names.12 Proper naming was a central goal of any naturalist. Recall that Confucius had urged students to study the Shijing to learn the names of plants and animals, and he was famous for urging scholars to pay heed to the “rectification of names” (zhengming).13 Medical authors before Li regularly used their prefaces to accuse earlier scholars of misnaming drugs, often using this accusation to justify the need for a new text. Each entry of the Bencao includes a major name for the drug being described and is often accompanied by a special discussion under the heading shiming, which provides alternate names for the drug and explains their derivation or source. Li collected these names wherever he could find them: local dialects, oral vernacular and slang, and any of the medical and nonmedical texts in the vast bibliography of his Bencao, including foreign-language texts. The name of the mantuoluo blossoms he had experimentally consumed, for example, was one of roughly fifty transliterations from Sanskrit he referenced, along with terms for dragons, coral, plums, storax, and deer. These sources all provided fodder for his practice of rectifying names and correcting perceived errors in the naming practices of past scholars. In his project to rectify names, Li relied heavily on lexicographical 85


works like the Erya and the Shiming [Explanation of names].14 We have already discussed the importance of the Erya; the Shiming was a later dictionary, now believed to date from about 200. It was one of the most important and often-cited nonmedical sources in Li’s discussions of clothing and utensils and served as a major source of authority for the Clothing and Tools section, second only to that of Li himself. The Shiming was arranged into twenty-seven thematic categories (including clothing and utensils) as well as several other groupings from which Li drew many of the objects in the Clothing and Tools section of his text.15

Poems as Proof Dictionaries did not tell Li everything he needed to know about botanical names, however, and for plants another type of source came to the fore: poetry. Along with most classically educated scholars, Li composed poems as gifts and tributes to his friends. He also included verse passages in many of his works.16 Between two hundred and three hundred references to poems and poets of the shi, fu, and ci genres can be found in the Bencao, most embedded in Li’s discussions of Herbs, Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Woods.17 We have already discussed the role of poetry as a backbone of natural history discourse in early modern China; beyond that, Li wove poems into the fabric of evidence and textual authority that shaped the epistemology of his text. As he moved from the Five Phases to plants, poetry became vital to Li’s understanding of the natural world. Consider, for example, the lily. There was some question among bencao authors as to the properties of this plant, which was classified as a vegetable and whose root, when prepared correctly, could be eaten as a meal or taken as a drug. Li invoked Wang Wei (701–761), one of his favorite poets, to help elucidate the qualities of the lily: “According to Wang Wei’s poem: ‘In the dark I found the lily (baihe), and prepared its flesh to eat. As expected it stopped the shedding of tears. With brightened eyes, I am looking at the river in the distance.’ This is likely a saying taken from a bencao about the tear-stopping power of the drug.”18 Many of Wang’s poems featured plant- and tree-filled scenes from regions in which he lived. Here, Li read Wang’s poem as a versified advertisement for the ability of lily flesh, when prepared as a drug, to improve eyesight and stop the flow of tears. Wang was one of many poets to whom Li turned in order to expand and impart medicinal knowledge of drugs. Li gave no sign that read86


Figure 4.1. A lily (baihe, bottom left) from the Bencao gangmu (1596). Used with permission of the Asian Division, Library of Congress.


ers with an interest in the natural world might find such an approach strange. In his preface to Woods, Li claimed that many people knew the names of types of trees owing to their reading of poems, and they relied on bencao collections for a more complete knowledge than poems alone could provide.19 What was unusual, however, was the extent to which Li depended on poems not simply as a repository of names but also as a source of botanical and medical knowledge to rival that of the bencao tradition itself. Li relied on poems and on commentaries to early collections like the Shijing and the Chuci much more than his medical predecessors or contemporaries.20 The bibliography to his work contained more than fifteen poetry collections, including collected verse of Du Fu (712–770), Su Shi (1037–1101), Wang Wei, and several other Song and Tang writers.21 Such poets could be counted on not just as great illustrators of the variety of plants in the world but also as important sources of medicinal and botanical knowledge.22 Poems about plants and animals were not to be read merely figuratively. In discussing red and black ants, for example, Li cited a poem from the Chuci to describe their relative size, emphatically urging that the account provided in the poem was “not an analogy” (fei yuyan) despite the claims of previous authors.23 Li often chose to read verse as prose for his purposes. Take, for example, the case of the xie onion: Experts speak of [the plant when used as a drug] as “warm and nourishing.” Only Su Song’s Bencao tujing [Illustrated bencao classic] says that it is “cold and nourishing.” According to Du Fu’s xie onion poem: A bunch is the color of greenblack grass, Round as the head of a jade chopstick. In waning years, with cold in the chest, With its warm flavor there is indeed no worry. [Du Fu’s] poem also speaks about the drug being warm and nourishing and is in accordance with classic works. So [what Su Song called] “cold and nourishing” is not in fact the case.24 Several aspects of this passage, which is typical of the use of poems in the Bencao, are noteworthy. At the most basic level, we see a poet (Du Fu) invoked to disprove the claims of a medical author (Su Song). Li treated such poets, especially those like Du Fu and Su Shi who were prolific in their use of plants as poetic subjects, as valid authorities regarding the medicinal qualities of natural objects, in part by choosing to read the 88


verse in a way that spoke to the medical literature with which he was in dialogue. The “warm” (nuan) of Du Fu thus became equated with the “warm” (wen) of Su Song even though the terms were arguably quite different: Li’s commentary transformed Du Fu’s verse into proof of the medicinal qualities of the xie onion. Similarly, in discussing a kind of crab apple, Li cited a Li Bai (701–762) poem to prove that the fruit indeed came from overseas and was not (as some previous authors had argued) a domestic product: “A poem by Li Bai says: ‘Haihong (sea red) is a flower name. Those coming from the country of Xinluo are most abundant.’ Therefore, this is evidence that the haitang originally comes from overseas.”25 Unlike the other sources Li cited (including medical texts and natural histories), the content of poems was generally not challenged. While a Du Fu poem might disprove the claim of a bencao author like Tao Hongjing, Li would not undermine Du Fu himself. At most, Li would serve as a selfappointed explicator of a poem, providing a brief commentary to explain why a poetic claim that may have seemed to contradict his own descriptions actually made perfect sense. Fu, a hybrid genre of partially rhyming prose, provide an excellent case study on this phenomenon. Variously translated as “lyric,” “rhapsody,” “poetical essay,” and “prose poem,” the fu was a common poetic format for discussing medical and natural historical subjects. These poems typically contained long lists of plants and animals in their descriptions of the imperial hunting gardens or other idealized geographies. As they often included rare names, sometimes hapax legomena, the fu served as key sources for the discussion of natural objects. Li listed in his bibliography several fu devoted to individual plants and animals, medical fu, and fu that served as reference works on general topics, and he included at least eighty citations of these prose poems in his text.26 The Wenxuan [Selections of refined literature] collection in particular provided many fu that deeply interested Li.27 He chose to close his entire work with an allusion to Jia Yi’s (200–168 bce) Funiao fu [Owlet rhapsody] and cited profusely from the Wenxuan elsewhere in the Bencao.28 Li occasionally attempted to imitate these poems: in discussing a fu on mosses, for example, he criticized the author for not giving “enough detail” and proceeded to supplement the fu with his own descriptions of different mosses composed in the same style as the original poem itself.29 Many fu extolled the wondrous features of imperial parks, capitals, and other land holdings, enumerating the birds, beasts, and other natural ob89


jects within them. Such poems sometimes posed problems for Li, since their emphasis on providing long, elaborate lists of names meant that some fu authors listed two or three names that he believed referred to one plant. In his Shanglin fu [Rhapsody on the imperial park], Sima Xiangru (ca. 180–117 bce) had done just this when he mentioned two plants, the miwu and the jiangli, each occupying a different area of the park. Li reconciled the differences between the plants by referencing seasonality and growth stages in an explication of Sima Xiangru’s fu, explaining that miwu and jiangli represented two forms of the same individual: The Shanglin fu says: “The ground is covered in jiangli, blanketed in miwu.” It seems [from this fu] that [these plants] are not a single thing. Is that indeed the case? It is likely that at the time at which young, soft shoots have not yet hardened into roots, then the plant is called miwu. After [the shoots] have stiffened into roots, then the plant is called qiongqiong. When its leaves are as large as celery leaves, the plant is called jiangli. When its leaves are tiny like those of the snake bed herb, then the plant is called miwu. When the [stages] are divided like this, then it is self-explanatory.30 Understanding metamorphosis, in particular how a plant changed over time and space, was again crucial to the proper mobilization of poetry in the study of plants. Because variations in names were tied to changes in a plant’s appearance and identifying characteristics, poems provided an ideal site for historical fieldwork. Li gathered up these names, scrutinized them, and regrouped them into the paper herbarium of the Bencao plant sections.

Narrating Plants also crept into sections of the Bencao not explicitly devoted to them. Many of the objects in Clothing and Tools, for example, were made of plant fibers or wood. Li’s innovation in Clothing and Tools was quantitative, for he listed thirty-five drugs not noted in earlier bencao works, but more importantly qualitative: he reconceptualized objects previously classified by their constituent materials as “tools,” defining them primarily on the basis of their human use. To catalog this new class of materia medica, Li had to document the manufacture and use of a wide range of products and explain each as a contingent development situated within historical time. Nothing in the world was useless, according 90


to Li.31 Save those used underpants, he urged: they might well come in handy one day.32 However, this utility was tied to an object’s origins and depended on detailed knowledge of its history. The Clothing and Tools category represented Li as a historian and saw him setting himself up as the foremost authority on the history of everything from the kind of material shoes or fans were made of33 to the varied justifications for using corpses’ pillows34 in medicine. The phenomena he documented ranged from the development of papermaking technology in China to the source of the popular custom of using peachwood to eradicate evil spirits. In many ways, this section of the Bencao is astounding. In one place, the reader could not only find a new category of medicinal drugs but also learn about the history of common articles of clothing. For the first time in a bencao text, for example, Li included the futou headdress and pixue leather boots and described how these common household items might also be used to cure illness. He also elaborated on previous medical accounts of clothing materials by adding his own brief historical accounts of the items. The toujin headscarf was just one of many such cases:35 In ancient times, people used one chi of cloth like a scarf to wrap their heads. In later times yarn, silk gauze, cloth, and poplin were stitched together, either into a square and called a “scarf,” or into a circle and called a “hat.” If some lacquer was added it was called a “cap.” A piece of silk used to bind the hair was called a “ribbon.” Cloth used to cover the hair was called a “headdress.” Netting used to cover the hair was called a “cloth hairnet.” They were similarly produced.36 Li moved in chronological order in his description of the change in customs over time. He did not simply distinguish between “ancient” and “modern” but also frequently distinguished between particular pre-Ming periods.37 Li was the first bencao author to record paper (zhi) as a drug,38 and he composed his discussion of paper as a capsule history of its production in early China: People in ancient times wrote characters on bamboo they had bound together and scorched blue-green. They called this “green sweat.”39 Thus the characters jian [bamboo strip] and ce [bamboo or wooden slip] are derived from the bamboo element. In the Qin (221–206 bce) and Han (206 bce–220 ce) periods, writing was 91


done on silk cloth called “banner sheets” (fanzhi). Thus the character zhi [paper] is derived from the thread element and can also be written with the banner element; it forms a phonetic compound with shi. The Shiming by Liu Xi says: “paper” (zhi) is like “whetstone” (di), since paper is as flat as a whetstone. In the time of Hedi in the Eastern Han, Cai Lun, a native of Leiyang, first collected tree bark, used silk, fishing nets, and pieces of hemp, and boiled these to make paper. Thereafter it was used throughout the realm. The Zhipu [Treatise on paper] by Su Yijian says: In Sichuan, people make paper with hemp, in Fujian they use young bamboo, in the North they use mulberry bark, in Shanxi they use vines, by the sea they use seaweed, in Zhejiang they use wheat and rice stalks, in Wu they use silkworm cocoons, and in Chu they use the paper mulberry tree.40 Li went on to describe several types of paper to which writing or pigment had been added: indigo-dyed (qingzhi), stamped with official seals (yinzhi), and printed with a calendar (liri).41 Not only was Li acting as a historian in his discussion of paper, but he was also demonstrating the importance of history to understanding, manufacturing, and using medicinal drugs. Each kind of paper described above relied on the transformation of nature by human hands for its existence and medicinal efficacy. The things of the world were shaped and changed by time and mankind, and Li’s historicization of tools and raiment is one example of the more general importance of this notion in the Bencao. Three processes in particular were fundamental to understanding the significance of timemediated change in Li’s natural history of clothing and tools: staining, burning, and dying.

Staining Dyed fabric was, in essence, nature changed and made a part of human history. The manipulative act of dyeing silk, cotton, and wool was one of the major ways in which Li integrated the history of man with the natural history of objects. Color was an important identifying characteristic, and the pigmentation of a plant, animal, or mineral product could help both Li and his contemporary materia medica authors determine the product’s proper use in medicine. Each color was understood in terms of its relationship with corresponding organ systems, elements or phases, 92


seasons, and other criteria, and different colors of cloth were consequently prescribed in different drug combinations. The natural color of fabric (before it was dyed) was also integral to understanding how to deploy the fabric as an effective drug in sixteenth-century medical practice. Raw fabrics were prescribed differently than pieces of used or dyed clothing.42 Paper was similarly differentiated by pigment and markings. In short, the history of an object was coextensive with its description and identity. Fabric could be stained by the human body as well as by colored dyes. Even seemingly humble used fabrics could be imbued with new power and importance when used to solve health problems. After urging an attention to simple household materials in the preface to Clothing and Tools, Li went on to include an entire subcategory of twenty-five fabrics, including types of silk (juan, bo, and mian), brocade (jin), cloth, underwear (kundang, including those stained by menstrual blood), upper garments (hanshan), clothing worn by sick and mourning people (xiaozishan worn by mourning children, and bingrenyi worn by ill people), belts (yidai of garment fabric and piyaodai of leather), headdresses (toujin scarves), hats, footwear, and bandages used in foot binding. For medicinal use, Li usually preferred those parts of clothing that had been worn and sweated in by people, thus becoming stained or marked by prolonged contact with the human body. Each prescription included in the Bencao entry for headscarves, for example, specifies that the fabric used as a drug (by steeping the scarf in liquid or burning it into ash) should not be new: it ought to be filthy (duoni), used for three years on the head, or worn-out and shabby (po).43 The rationale for using soiled scarves was fairly simple: that part of the object in contact with the human body was likely to have been imbued with human qi. Thus, the part of a woman’s panties that was in direct contact with the genitals was the most effective part for treating sexual dysfunction.44 Li was not an innovator in this respect: the manuals from which he culled many of the prescriptions listed in Clothing and Tools also called for the underpants used medicinally to be “long-stained.” Aside from some illnesses specifically associated with women, which were to be treated with a man’s underwear, in all of the prescriptions recorded in the Bencao, it was a woman’s panties that could be used medicinally, reflecting Li’s more general tendency to conceptualize women as somehow inherently more unclean than men.45 Illness could also soil a garment in a way that made it medicinally effective. In an entry on the “clothing of a sick person,” Li pre93


scribed steaming a garment worn by the first victim of an epidemic to generate a vapor that would keep the rest of the family from falling ill.46 In general terms, many of the objects in Clothing and Tools were described as old, used, or otherwise changed in some way through exposure to people or to the physical elements. This can be understood as part of a broader dialogue wherein soil, dirt, and age contributed directly to an object’s changeability and thus to its medicinal efficacy.

Burning Earth was by no means the only phase that could bring about change in natural objects. As elsewhere in the Bencao, fire appeared in Clothing and Tools as a major mediator and facilitator of metamorphosis. In this case, fire was both indirectly associated with many of the natural objects listed in the section and, along with water, the most important means of translating these objects from the mundane world into a human patient’s body. Medicinal use of the burnt part of a wooden fire poker had been recorded in earlier works, and Li included prescriptions for it as well.47 Li added a special section for another fire-stoking implement, including some prescriptions collected from his own medical practice: contemporaries blew air through a hollow tube to stoke flames, and a mother’s breath forced through this same tube and into the genitals of her baby could rid the infant of worms and swelling of these sensitive parts.48 Li also noted the use of a lamp and its oil as medicinal drugs: stealing a lamp from a rich family and placing it under a couple’s bed would increase the likelihood of that couple conceiving a child, and ingesting lamp oil could cure a sore throat.49 Along with many types of food steamers and cooking pots, several types of fire-imbued utensils could be processed for use as drugs.50 Fire was also a direct agent of change. Most of the fabrics in Clothing and Tools were prepared by burning and applying the ashes topically (ashes from bu cloth could be rubbed into the teeth daily to keep the teeth hard and beard dark)51 or submerged in liquid and taken orally (as in the case of jin brocade or juan silk, for example). Again, objects in Clothing and Tools were understood as a part of human history. Being soiled, marked, or burned changed the qualities of a natural object and, in turn, impacted the way the object mediated change within the medical body. These concerns with change and with human life played out most strikingly in a third major process that was woven through this category. 94


Dying Zhong Kui is one of many drugs in Clothing and Tools that featured death as an important marker of medicinal efficacy: his demon- and illness-quelling powers emerged after his suicide. A number of other objects grouped in this section were similarly marked by death: the noose used in a hanging suicide, the shoes under the bier of a corpse, and a funereal pillow mat, all processed as medicine, were also prescribed by Li.52 Death was one of the natural stages of transformation for things in the natural world. Even the most fundamental stuff of the universe, the Five Phases, temporarily ended their existence in one form as they were transformed and replaced by another material instantiation of cosmic qi: fire became metal; water was replaced by wood. If not an ultimate end, death was an end of sorts and one that eventually came to all living things. Death rears its head at many points in the Bencao, generating drugs like corpse worms, rotting bones, and the petrified charcoal-like essences of suicides who had hanged themselves.53 The importance of death haunts Clothing and Tools from the very first page. To explain the inclusion of seemingly mundane household objects in his materia medica, Li offered the following justification: “A drowning person might be saved by a floating pot amidst a swift current, or a person dying of cold in a snowy cave might survive if covered by a piece of used felt.”54 The contents of the section bore out these intimations of mortality, as the issue of death, both as threat and tool, crystallized the significance of change and of notions of human history and drew together the clothing and tools discussed in the Bencao. For Li Shizhen, to be a naturalist anl:d a doctor was in many ways inextricable from being a historian. The Clothing and Tools section of the Bencao was Li’s own self-conscious innovation of the bencao tradition. Many of the objects therein (manmade utensils fashioned from naturally occurring materials) were described for the first time in any collection of materia medica and were supplemented by a capsule history composed by Li in the context of his own self-asserted authority. Metamorphic processes shaped each object in this section in some way, whether by staining, burning, or decomposing. The themes of transformation and decomposition went on to generate heated debate in the next category of the text, as Li took on one of the most fundamental groups in all of natural history.

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Early modern Chinese natural history was infested with vermin. Specifically, it was rife with chong, a term roughly equivalent in modern Chinese to “insect” but that historically could mean something more like “creature” or “animal” broadly conceived.1 The Shanhaijing [Classic of mountains and seas], the current text of which dates to the third century, includes chong that look like tigers, and early modern lexicographers and naturalists occasionally used the term chong with various modifiers (feathered chong, furry chong, for example) to indicate the major categories of animate creatures in the universe.2 A scholar sitting at his desk to write about chong in the sixteenth century might have been thinking of bees, worms, spiders, leeches, frogs, slugs, or various sorts of demon. Though most chong (hereafter, bugs) were small and mundane, Li urged his readers to consider their diversity, their importance to the ancient sages, their use in food and medicine, and their importance as dangerous poisons and pests. Most significantly for early modern medical authors, buggy transformations and their relationships to the Five Phases formed the basis for their use as materia medica. The literature consequently contained voluminous debates on the nature of these transformations. According to Li, “Even the movement of the moth breathes life within it. Each means of generation emerges within a particular kind of qi.”3 Bugs in the Bencao were sorted into three overarching categories, depending on how they were born: by egg (luansheng), by change (huasheng), or by means of moisture (shisheng).4 Those born from eggs included bees and wasps, mantids, silkworms, butterflies, dragonflies, spiders, leeches, and lice.5 Change-born bugs included moths, cicadas, mole crickets, fireflies, grasshoppers, and crickets.6 The children of moisture included frogs and toads, centipedes, earthworms, snails, slugs, 96

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roundworms, and various sorts of poisonous and demonlike bugs.7 In reality, however, these categories bled into one another; many of the creatures classified as “egg-born” were in fact described as being born from moisture or via metamorphosis from some other substance, and heat and moisture were factors in the birth of bugs not in the “moisture-born” set. These three general categories are then best considered as indicators of the major ways in which Li considered the generation of bugs to take place, not necessarily as sharply distinguished classes whose contents were systematically ordered or grouped. Li went out of his way to emphasize the importance of these creatures, despite their small size, in the preface to the category: “Bugs are the smallest of living things, and there are many different kinds, so the character for ‘bug’ comes from three individual bugs taken together . . . It is clear that the sages treated even small things with careful attention. How, then, can today’s scholar not probe their natures and investigate their beneficial and harmful qualities?”8 Li’s preface celebrates both the diversity of the category and its historical importance. Bug songs were varied: earthworms and grasshoppers, for example, could apparently interbreed by singing upwind and downwind respectively, and when their songs met on the wind, one of them was instantly impregnated.9 Their appearances were varied, spanning all manner of body coverings and types of armor. Their potential uses were varied as well, and included ritual food offerings and use as medicinal drugs. Classical sages had also acknowledged their importance as pests, and Li listed various bugcentric officers in the Zhouguan [Offices of Zhou]:10 a Worm Officer who exterminated demon bugs, a Terminator in charge of extirpating moths, a Locust Officer who got rid of frogs and turtles, an Officer of Exorcism charged with exterminating deadly hidden bugs, and a Cauldron Beater11 who eliminated bugs that hid in the water.12 Bugs were also important because they were hard to see. Many of the debates that Li included in this section turned on the kinds of evidence necessary to prove phenomena whose visibility was impossible or problematic. In some cases, such as that of the worms and wasps discussed below, although many claimed to have seen metamorphic phenomena personally, the small size of the creatures and the ready access to opportunities to view them created the problem of competing or contradictory observations. This section, therefore, returns to the theme of observability, central to this critical category of the Bencao as well as to Chinese natural history, medicine, and daily life. All of the debates 97


treated in this chapter center on transformations and on how we can know whether unusual or unexpected transformations have taken place. In most of these arguments, and in Li’s attempts to resolve them, personal observation, or the difficulty thereof, formed a major thread.

Vespal Virgins Being a parasitic wasp in early modern China had its ups and downs. There was always time to hang out with the boys, as guoluo wasps were all male.13 However, since finding a female partner was obviously out of the question, those guoluo intent on parenthood had to show some initiative. Stealing off to secluded bamboo stalks or earthen nests, a prospective father searched out a squiggling pile of tiny green mingling worms, hovered over it, and focused his concentration. “Become like me! Become like me!” he shouted until, unable to resist the power of the incantation, the worms transformed into wasps and eagerly flew after their new adoptive parent. Versions of this story appear throughout premodern Chinese writings on the natural world, many of them giving the guoluo humanlike characteristics and attempting to explain their behavior in anthropomorphic terms. In spite of their apparent thievery, these worm-napping wasps became paradigms of parental responsibility. “The mingling have young, the guoluo raise them,” explained one song in the Shijing. “Teach your sons well and they will become as good as you are,” it urged.14 The wasps, like many of the plants and creatures mentioned in the Shijing, helped lay the foundation for natural history in premodern China. The original claim in the Shijing was fairly simple: the mingling worms have offspring, and the guoluo raise them. No magical incantations, no chanting bugs, no speaking creatures. This basic sequence of events, however, went on to exercise nearly every major naturalist in China’s history, as the original narrative was transformed to accommodate different ways of seeing the natural world. Descriptions of the wasps appear in all the major Erya and Shijing commentaries. Some authors embellished the original account as it appeared in the Shijing, crediting the wasps with powers of prayer, speech, and transformation. Many claimed to have personally seen the metamorphosis of worms into wasps, either when spying on the creatures or after breaking open and inspecting the contents of their nests. Such metamorphosis of insects had wellknown precedents; for example, earlier scholars had claimed to have 98



Figure 5.1. Guoluo wasps from the Erya yintu [Illustrated Erya]. Source: Guo Pu, Erya yintu (Taipei: Yiwen Yinshuguan Publishing House, 1988), 209. Used with permission of the publisher.

seen butterflies being formed from flowers and even from ladies’ underpants.15 According to third-century writer Lu Ji, the mingling were small green bugs that lived on mulberry trees or other plants.16 The guoluo absconded with the worms and placed them in tree hollows, where after seven days the mingling transformed into wasp babies.17 Folklore, according to Lu Ji, held that this transformation was additionally effected by the wasp’s chanting, “Be like me! Be like me!” (xiangwo xiangwo).18 This account echoed that of Yang Xiong (53 bce–18 ce) in the Fayan [Aphorisms]. The wormlings died, according to Yang, then the guoluo found them and chanted, “Be like me! Be like me!” as the worms came to resemble the wasp. Yang then proceeded to analogize the wasp and the worms to Confucius and his seventy disciples, invoking the original Shijing lines to justify the comparison of the wasp to the sage: “The min99


gling have young, the guoluo raise them. Teach your sons well and they will become as good as you are.”19 Other writers, including Tao Hongjing, were skeptical of stories of talking and chanting worms. For Tao, the idea that these insects spoke and caused worms to transform was ridiculous. Instead he maintained that the wasps laid their own eggs, a controversial claim when all other commentators considered the insects to be solely male. He conceded that the wasps might occasionally steal spider eggs or small green worms from the surfaces of plants. This, however, was only to enact a kind of sad jest: the lonely wasp would stuff his mouth with the baby worms and pretend they were his own young. The metamorphosis of other creatures’ eggs into wasps had been observed by many people, asserted Li Hanguang (fl. ca. 700) in the Tang Bencao yinyi [Bencao with sounds and meanings],20 so Tao was wrong, and his criticism was unfounded. Not so, countered Han Baosheng (fl. ca. 950).21 Several of his contemporaries had broken open wasp nests and looked (kan) inside, according to Han. They saw (jian) eggs just as Tao had described them, an easy enough task to accomplish, as guoluo wasps were very common and made nests all over. Several authors claimed to have opened the wasp nests themselves and reported various results: one saw spider eggs, proving that the wasp had actually stolen the eggs of lots of bugs, and some saw contents that buttressed Tao’s claims. Li Shizhen, intrigued by the suggestion that such creatures might be capable of chanting, praying, and transforming other insects into clones of themselves, set out to investigate. When it came to the tale of the wasp and the worms, Li claimed to have personally observed both male and female wasps in the nest (without indicating how he sexed them), largely supporting the account of Tao, a figure he admired and emulated. He claimed that prior accounts of these bugs praying, chanting, and transforming were both “strange” and incorrect, a sorry result of past scholars seeing behavioral links where there in fact were none. The saga of the guoluo and the mingling was just one prominent example in Chinese natural history writing of appeals to observation as a critical means of gathering and testing knowledge about the natural world. By the time Li sat down to chronicle these claims and add some of his own, there was ample reason for him to consider his own eyes as one of the many tools available for constructing the edifice that would become the Bencao. However, observation was not much help to a scholar when dealing with vermin that lurked in shadowy territories. 100


A Visible Darkness It must have been simple for specters to appear in a “visible darkness,” where always something seemed to be flickering and shimmering, a darkness that on occasion held greater terrors than darkness out-of-doors. This was the darkness in which ghosts and monsters were active, and indeed was not the woman who lived in it, behind thick curtains, behind layer and layer of screens and doors—was she not of a kind with them? . . . Might not the darkness have emerged from her mouth and those black teeth, from the black of her hair, like the thread from the great earth spider?22 Junichiro Tanizaki’s twentieth-century words could well have been uttered in sixteenth-century China. Dangerous forces and creatures emanated from dark and hidden spaces in both the natural landscape and the female body. Deadly bugs in the Bencao were often linked to the presence of women, whose innate “lasciviousness” (especially if they were nude) could pollute the qi of an area and help generate deadly creatures that lived in the liminal realm of mirrors, mist, and shadow. Death, chaos, and unpredictability were often found amid shadows and reflections (ying), areas of unmanipulable marginality wherein the unseen and the unseeable could pierce, poison, and otherwise attack people or their images without being spotted or spooked. Creatures hiding and operating in areas in which light, the crucial ingredient for perception, was limited or absent created an interesting epistemological case. Visual access to ying-dwelling beings was compromised and partial, complicating the proof of claims involving this marginal realm and creating a dangerous space in which creatures could attack, hide, and escape with relative ease. These “imps of darkness”23 could be found on remote mountains or under the brooms and beds inside one’s home, lived comfortably buried in the obscurity of mirrors and shadows, and were always hidden or invisible. Though attempts at artistic rendering were occasionally attempted and descriptions of the creatures abounded, extremely few scholars claimed to have observed such animals. Few of these creatures were as feared or reviled as the yu (also known as shegong), a frequently discussed denizen of the unseen and a member of the chong category in the Bencao and other texts.24 This gremlin had been cloaked in obscurity since its early appearance in the Shijing, in which lurking ghosts and yu were contrasted with all that was upstanding and visible: 101


Figure 5.2. An imp of darkness (shegong, top left) from the Bencao gangmu (1596). Used with permission of the Asian Division, Library of Congress.


If you were an imp or a yu, You could not be got at, But when one with face and eyes stands opposite to another, The man can be seen through and through. I have made this good song, To probe to the utmost your unpredictability.25 This segment is part of a longer poem about a calamitous man who was full of “dangerous devices,” “unashamed,” and “like a violent wind.”26 Always present but never reachable, he was very much like the yu. These associations with danger, unpredictability, and the half-hidden follow the yu in its skulking journey from the earliest commentaries on the Shijing through the medical texts of the late Ming. This persistent resident of the natural history landscape was the subject of much debate in early modern texts, and a brief chronicle of the treatment of the yu and its ilk sheds light on the efforts of scholars to make and weigh knowledge of creatures who dwelt in shadow and obscurity. Initially compared in the Shijing to a ghost or spirit, the yu was treated by many authors as a kind of demonic being. According to commentators on the Shijing, who emphasized the yu’s poisonous nature, the being would hide in rivers and streams and attack bathers or their watery reflections with a jet of sand, poison, or qi.27 The person whose reflection was attacked soon developed a sore, fell ill, and in some cases died, all without having seen the assailant.28 Crops also suffered from noisome yu infection, indicating another incarnation of this elusive character.29 There was disagreement about the origins of this mysterious being. According to Li’s citation of Wuxing zhuan [Record of the Five Phases], the yu was borne of the “chaotic qi” created when women bathed nude in the river. Other texts claimed that the yu was generated from the qi produced by men and women bathing together, while the Baopuzi cited the warm, moist qi of certain climes as fertile ground for yu. In all, the literature linked the generation of poisonous and reclusive creatures like the yu with sexual desire and conditions of local qi. Regardless of specific definition, two features typified the creature across all of its alternate manifestations: it was dangerous to encounter and difficult to observe. Many authors claimed that its behavior and elusiveness closely linked the yu with the qusou,30 another bug that hid in walls and under household implements and sickened people by shooting poisonous urine at their shadows. One of the more interesting accounts of this creature can 103


be found in a passage from the Qianjin yifang [Extra prescriptions worth a thousand in gold] by Sun Simiao (581–682) and cited in the Bencao. Sun was reportedly sickened by a qusou shadow bite, and after several days his health still hadn’t improved. A man instructed him to draw a picture of the creature on the ground, scrape some dirt from the belly of the image, mix the dirt with spittle, and apply this to his wound. After the second application, Sun recovered completely. Because the creature wounded men by attacking their images, reversing this relationship and using an image of the creature as medicine counteracted the poison.31 Creatures like the yu and the qusou shared several features. The fact that they were known to shoot poison at people or their shadows, and could sicken or kill a person by doing so, meant that in many accounts the gremlins were the objects of fear: fear of death, of the invisible, of hot and humid places, and of the sexual allures of women. Shadows and reflections were often the spaces in which these fears and their objects lived, and in many stories animals, including the xi (rhinoceros), turtles, and other wild beasts, fled (or excreted) in terror after seeing their own shadows or reflections when stopping for a drink.32 Most important, creatures like the yu and qusou shared a kind of compromised observability; they had to be understood from the depths of their shadowy realms. This generated a particular problem for scholars trying to weigh others’ claims about these potentially deadly creatures. What did these things look like? Despite frequent allusions to the invisibility or elusiveness of the yu, descriptions of the creature were nevertheless abundant.33 Many authors referred to the Shuowen jiezi description of a yu as a kind of three-legged soft-shelled turtle (bie). The Baopuzi described it as a flying, cicadalike, drinking-cup-shaped creature with no eyes but remarkable hearing that hid in the water, waiting for the sound of a human voice and shooting nasty qi out of its mouth like an arrow.34 Some authors maintained that the yu resembled the quzao, a kind of toad.35 Though scholars provided ample descriptions of the appearance of both beings, not one of them claimed to have personally seen the yu or the qusou. In this situation, what was a scholar like Li to do? Did the yu look like a turtle, a cicada, or a fox? Li’s solution to this problem was to conclude that it looked like all three. After chronicling the accounts of several previous authors, Li provided a composite description of the yu that incorporated aspects of these accounts without rejecting any one of them out of hand.36 The creature was shaped like a cicada, its back was hard like that of the bie turtle, and 104


its head and eyes were ugly and black like those of a fox or demon. As part of its life cycle (again, note Li’s concern with metamorphosis), it eventually grew wings and started to fly, making a noise that was likely responsible for its “singing cicada” moniker. Without recourse to personal observation, or to others’ claims thereof, Li instead painted a composite picture of the yu that incorporated aspects of prior claims without explicitly rejecting them. A similar operation occurred several times in the Bencao when Li was obliged to talk about appearance without having the benefit of his own personal vision. Not all chong were so elusive, however, and some bugs provided more opportunities for observation than their chroniclers might have wished.

Bugs and Transformation One group of bugs was of special concern to Li and his fellow Ming naturalists: creatures that plagued living and dead bodies. The human body was constantly under attack by creatures like singing earthworms that bit their way into a patient’s stomach and serenaded him from within his viscera, by tiny mites that infested the skin, or by little clouds of qi that spontaneously transformed into oddly shaped parasitic bugs in the guts of a person who submitted to cravings for rich food or immoderate amounts of sex or alcohol. Doctors were regularly called upon to treat maladies brought on by such unwanted pests on a patient’s skin or viscera. Elaborating on notes written in jail at the end of the fourteenth century, scholar and physician Ye Ziqi (fl. 1378) recalled an occasion on which he examined a patient’s chong-infested rash: “[The bugs] were less than half the size of a grain of millet. I examined them carefully. They had a dark mouth, tiny feet, and a bulging back . . . Because the person’s blood and qi were not in harmony, [the blood and qi] transformed and the bugs were born. Since emerging, the bugs had already developed likes and aversions: they could approach and avoid; they could starve or be satiated; they could move or stay still; they could be at leisure or hard at work; they could inhale and exhale.”37 Several scholars of medicine and natural history in early modern China were similarly fascinated by corporeal bug infestations. In his Jinsi xuanxuan [Mysteries within mysteries of the golden-bamboo chest], Zhou Lüjing, a rough contemporary of Li, described all manner of bugs shaped like beetles, clouds, roaches, hairy men, frogs, fish, and bats, according to a prevailing Daoist under105


standing of the “nine worms” (jiuchong) and “three corpse-demons” (sanshi) that inhabited human bodies.38 Ye Ziqi concluded his own discussion of body mites with a rather lofty observation on corporeal bug infestations: “From this, one can examine the principle of fate; from this, one can examine the wondrousness of creation.”39 It might seem odd that a body louse would inspire sweeping meditations on fate and creation, but this association permeated early modern Chinese natural history. These authors shared a tendency to associate the meanest of living creatures with the most exalted and fundamental of processes in the natural world: generation. Chong arguably became the most significant exemplary case through which scholars of the late Ming understood and discussed change and transformation in the world at large. Li worked in part from Ye Ziqi’s book in making his own comments on body parasites: “People and things all have chong, but each kind of chong has a different shape. They originate in changes in qi, and afterwards they give off eggs from which nits emerge. According to the Caomuzi [Master of herbs and trees, by Ye Ziqi], [these chong] have six legs, and when they move they must face north. The Baopuzi states: Lice on the head are black, and when they move to the body they turn white; body lice are white, and when they move to the head turn black. This is because they are subtly influenced as a result of contact.”40 Li described the intimate link between chong and change in a long excursus on roundworms. Each of the Five Phases, according to Li, generated and gave a home to its own bugs: All wood has moths, all fruit has cao bugs, all beans have fang worms, the Five Grains have ming worms, te bugs, blister beetles, and zei bugs.41 When wheat rots, moths take wing; when chestnuts are cracked, chong emerge; when herbs decay, fireflies transform. These all are chong of wood. Blazing fire has rodents and burntout ashes generate flies. They all are chong of fire. Ants in holes, scorpions in walls, mole crickets in the field, and lizards in the rock all are chong of earth. Tadpoles, leeches, fish, soft-shelled turtles, flood serpents, and dragons all are chong of water. In ancient times there was a forger who broke a pot and saw a chong like a rice bug, perfectly red in color, inside the crevice where it had broken. Thus even within metal there are chong.42 If the phases embodied the transformative processes of the natural world, then bugs, in turn, literally embodied the phases. Flies were both born of 106


and belonged to fire. Butterflies metamorphosed directly (according to some accounts) from leaves and flowers: thus, implicitly, from wood. In the work of Li and his interlocutors, chong were the only type of plant or animal linked with the phases of metamorphosis in so explicit a way. Several individual examples illustrate both the importance of phasemediated metamorphosis to descriptions of bugs, the kinds of claims that were taken as “believable” as a result, and the primary role of observation in this process. Wood Fireflies (yinghuo) embodied one of the major ways in which a bug could transform out of the raw materials of the earth.43 The firefly was particularly associated with wood and by the late sixteenth century had become a paradigmatic case of the genesis of chong directly from rotting plants. In his mining of past medical and natural history texts, Li arbitrated among several conflicting descriptions of the firefly and its use in medicine.44 Ultimately, he concluded that there were three kinds of firefly. The first, which emitted rays of light under its belly, emerged from decaying roots of mao grass. The second kind, a flightless firefly, had light behind its tail and was generated from putrefied bamboo roots. This firefly could also, if reports were correct, see in the dark. The third, a particularly anomalous kind, actually lived in the water and also metamorphosed from plants. Only the winged kind, according to Li, ought to be used in medicine. These fireflies were reportedly good at keeping thieves and bandits away and were lauded by several Daoist authors for their striking medicinal effects. Li hailed one such prescription for “Firefly Pills” for “preventing the onset of diseases, attacks by vicious agents, evil, and demons, and attacks of tigers, wolves, snakes, wasps, and scorpions, as well as injury from soldiers’ weapons, thieves, and bandits.”45 The text described a Han dynasty general who was protected from the arrows of a rival force (coincidentally named “the Tigers”) and fooled them into thinking he was guarded by deities simply by hanging a pouch of pills made with crushed firefly on his arm.46 The genesis of bugs directly from rotten plant matter was generally accepted as a matter of fact in Chinese medicine. The often skeptical Li nowhere cited evidence or sources that questioned this premise in his chronicling of accounts of the firefly and other chong in the Bencao, nor have I seen other texts of the period that challenged this assumption. This kind of metamorphosis was often associated with water or humidity, 107


which along with heat was one of the conditions thought to give rise to rot and putrefaction of natural objects. Fire Flies illustrated how sources of heat from raging to smoldering could give rise to creatures. Li privileged flame in his conceptual framework; as yang and yin were generative forces for all of the matter of the universe, their embodiment in incendiary form would naturally have creative force. Flies, according to Li, were active in the heat of summer and dormant in the cold of winter. Though one kind of fly was reported to transform from grass roots, most were formed when a maggot (qu) entered ashes, sloughing off its skin, growing wings, and turning into a fly.47 This transformation was like that of the silkworm and scorpion, according to Li, both of which were believed to transform into moths (e). Again Li emphasized the importance of transformation, and particularly the emergence of wings, to the engagement between bugs and the Five Phases. Like rotting plants, hot ashes (also described as “rotting” by some authors) had the power to generate life. This generative power was remarkably strong: flies that had drowned in water could be resurrected, according to Li, if placed in ashes.48 Earth and Water Ants in holes, scorpions in walls, mole crickets in the field, and lizards in rock were classic cases of chong linked to earth and paradigms of the connection between earth (the master of the Five Phases) and the beasties. A striking aspect of this list is hidden in its smallest element: “in.” As we have seen, metamorphosis in the early modern natural world often occurred in realms of limited visibility: in the water, in hot mud, in rotting masses, or thousands of years in the future.49 Creatures buried in snow, stone, earth, or even inside other animals were prone to metamorphosis.50 The eggs of a snake and pheasant union, for example, generated a jiao (a kind of flood dragon) when buried, as burial in earth formed a water-producing being, in an illustration of the intimate link between these two phases, burial, and transformation. Mole crickets (lougu) lived in the earth and in piles of manure, breathing the wind and eating the soil. Though no record of their actively metamorphosing within their earthly caves was cited in the Bencao, they were classified as chong generated via change or transformation (huasheng) and were reviled in much early modern literature for their demonic asso108


ciations.51 According to one prominent Tang medical author, these nightcreeping bugs consorted with ghosts and demons and helped criminals escape from prison. Because of these evil associations, people would kill them on sight, fearing that the bugs would otherwise be used by the spirits for their dark purposes. Ants, armies of which populated natural history literature, also were born, lived, and died in the earth, reproducing and hatching eggs inside the soil.52 White ants channeled the transformative power of the earth, along with the humidity, to hatch, grow wings, change color, and ultimately die.53 The importance of water to chong, and to metamorphosis in the early modern Chinese world, cannot be overemphasized. Watery burial transformed shrimp into dragonflies and birds into fish.54 The varied nature of the examples cited by Li in the opening quotation attests to the diversity of creatures, bug or not, that were linked with water: tadpoles, leeches, fish, turtles, and dragons all underwent some kind of metamorphosis. For many of these animals, and others like them, the connection with water helped determine how they were used as medicinal drugs as well. Metal While the first four phases were key to the generation of chong, connections between metal (jin) and chong in the Bencao and other natural history literature were very rare. The case of metal is thus essential to understanding the connection Li drew between chong and the phases. Li’s examples for wood, fire, earth, and water suggest that they were common knowledge (flies emerge out of ash, dragons live in water, and the like). No sources were provided as evidence, and no specific cases were detailed. His description of wormlike chong emerging from a cracked metal cauldron stands in stark contrast. Here he gave one example, ostensibly quoted from a specific text, to illustrate the relationship between chong and metal and thereby to demonstrate his broader claim about the interweaving of chong with the Five Phases.55 The relationship Li drew between metal and chong was critical in another respect as well. The figure of the metalsmith and his cauldron was a common trope in Chinese literature for the process of creation.56 A classic example is in the “Owlet Rhapsody” by Jia Yi: “Consider the world a furnace, creation as the forger / All things with their yin and yang are his copper and his coal.” The fact that life, embodied in a worm, was created (unexpectedly) by a smith in Li’s story is not accidental.57 Because of this close association between the metalsmith and the universal Creator, the 109


generation of chong in metal here functions as an exemplary case of the creative powers of the universe as a whole, their embedment within the conceptual and material framework of the Five Phases, and living creatures represented by the elemental chong.

Maggots and Men The bug remained an exemplar of transformative phenomena in the natural world through the natural history and medical literature of the eighteenth century. Bug transformation represented a process that moved away from the notions of universal change embodied in the Five Phases to become more firmly rooted in metamorphosis within the human social world. In his elaboration on human-infesting chong, Qing medical author Zhao Xuemin, the most significant commentator on Li’s work, dispensed with the sort of lengthy excursus on universal creation that recurred in Li’s text in favor of matters of a more mundane sort: “When people die, their blood and flesh decay and transform into chong, sometimes becoming maggots, sometimes becoming aphids (ya). The shape and appearance of these are not the same; sometimes it is said that the two [kinds] are born simultaneously, sometimes it is said that one is born first and transforms into the other. Additionally it is said [corpses of] poor men have many maggots and few aphids, while [corpses of] rich men have many aphids and few maggots. Not having deeply investigated the matter, I have included both theories and I await the judgment of a learned gentleman.”58 By the time Zhao was writing, the transformation of bugs emblematized class and social status rather than correlative systems such as the Five Phases in a way that was rarer in early modern texts such as the Bencao.59 Bugs and metamorphosis would remain intimately linked, while the conceptual fabric within which this relationship was embedded metamorphosed along with broader discourses on the Chinese natural world.

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6 TRANSFORMATION: CREATURES OF CHANGE

The Rather Extensive Travels of a Rather Sedentary Vegetable Lamb Sir Richard Lee (d. 1608), English ambassador to Russia from 1600 to 1601, sent a letter to the Royal Society describing his experience abroad. According to his Russian informants, a novelty grew in nearby Tartaria: “There did some yeres growe out of the ground certaine livinge creatures in the shape of lambes, bearing wooll vppon them, very like to the lambes of England, in this manner; viz., a stalke like the stalke of an hartichocke did growe vp out of the ground, and vppon the toppe thereof a budd, which by degrees did growe into the shape of a lambe, and become a liuinge creature, resting vppon the stalke by the navel . . .”1 This vegetable lamb, straddling the border between animal and plant on its “hartichocke”-like stem, unfortunately measured out an existence limited by the very stalk that gave it life: “And as soone as it did come to life, it would eate of the grasse growinge round about it, and when it had eaten vp the grasse within its reach it would die.”2 For the merchants of Muscovy, however, there was a warm and happy ending: “And then the people of the cuntry as they finde these lambes doe flea of their skins, which they preserue and keepe, esteeminge them to bee of excellent vse and vertue, especially against the plague and other noysome diseases of those cuntries.”3 A decade or so earlier, Li Shizhen had gathered similar stories, collected in a set of jottings and notes on novelties in the “western regions” (xiyu) from his own historical informants: “There is a kind of earthsprouting lamb (dishengyang) in Daqin [a name for the Roman Empire]. The lamb is a product of the earth, and local people make a wall around it. The creature’s umbilicus is connected to the earth, and if it is cut, the lamb will die.”4 This account was similar to that submitted to the Royal 111


Society in more than its focus on the restricted mobility of the earthrooted lamb. In another description provided by Li, the skins of the lamb were put to use to weave beautiful quilts and provide a delicious foodstuff. The situation for the vegetable lamb according to Chinese accounts, however, was not quite as bleak as it was in Sir Richard Lee’s telling: the lamb could actually escape its hartichockey fetters: “The way to release the lamb is to frighten it with a galloping horse or the beating of a drum. The lamb will become frightened and scream, thus breaking its umbilicus. Then it will go in search of water and grass.”5 The similarities between these accounts are striking on several levels. In particular, location (far west from China, far east from Britain) was central to both accounts of this hide-bearing vegetable-creature. This is perhaps unsurprising in the case of the English ambassador’s report of claims made by merchants whose travel was sustained by the interests of an empire looking to expand its territorial and economic reach. Though Chinese merchants were also interested in expanding overseas markets and importing new exotic goods, the focus on location in the Chinese account is also rooted in distinct literary precedents. From at least the Tang period, authors of collectanea, jottings, poetic and lexicographical commentaries, and compendia of strange tales regularly incorporated information about physical habitat and geographical provenance in their descriptions of animals. Fish, fowl, and four-legged beasts were characterized by and identified with the location in which they were found. In bringing together these varied sources, Li built on the importance of habitat and location, highlighting his more pervasive concern with place and space in constructing the natural environment encapsulated in and embodied by the Bencao. The themes and problems stemming from this concern are the focus here, which brings together four major categories of the Bencao into a common discussion of what I collectively refer to as “animals.” The sections devoted to animals (qin [Birds], shou [Beasts], lin [Scaly, including fish], and jie [Armored, including turtles]) preserve a great deal of argumentation as well as some of the most engaging discussions and the most varied use of sources in the entire work.6 Metamorphosis was once again critical, manifesting itself here with a focus on mating, reproduction, and transformations mediated by the materials of the land itself and its inhabitants: water, earth, fire, metal, wood. A new set of sources also heralded a new focus on the denizens of Elsewhere, as foreignness, distance, and the high value associated with objects hailing from these remote regions took explicit form in the epistemology of the Bencao. 112

TRANSFORMATION: CREATURES OF CHANGE

Classification and Location Broadly speaking, the animals in the Bencao were organized into groups defined by visible body covering: scaly, armored, feathered, and furry. Li discussed these classificatory choices in the prefaces to individual sections. Scaly creatures are divided into four groups: dragons (long), snakes (she), fish (yu), and “fish without scales.” Dragons include lizards and the Chinese pangolin (lingli). “Fish without scales” consist of the eel, shark, dolphin (haitunyu), and dugong, as well as the octopus, jellyfish, sea horse, and lobster. Scaleless fish also include a number of entries for edible fish parts, the scales included. Armored creatures comprise two major subdivisions: tortoises and turtles (guibie), which include various crabs and horseshoe crabs, clams, and other freshwater and saltwater shellfish (gebang). Birds are subdivided into four major groups according to habitat: aquatic (such as crane, stork, and goose), grassland-dwelling (various pheasants and sparrows, bats, flying squirrels), forest-dwelling (including doves, crows, and parrots), and mountain-dwelling (including the phoenix and ostrich, eagles and owls, and some deadly demon-birds). The subdivisions into which Beasts are broken represent a rather Borgesian medley: domestic animals (chu, including dairy and leather products and bezoars), wild animals (shou, the “beasts” among beasts), rodents (shu, including weasels and hedgehogs), and a final category that Li divided in two in the preface but effectively treated as a single group: monkeylike creatures that dwelt in the mountains and forests (hence called “dwellers” or yu) and oddities (guai, covering varied monkeys, demons, and Sasquatch-like man-beasts). With the exception of Armored creatures, all of these sections include a discussion of poisonous types somewhere near the conclusion of the category.7 This reveals a more general tendency in the classification within each category of the Bencao, with members often progressing from what Li considered to be the most mundane or prototypical to the most unfamiliar or dangerous. Beasts, then, begins with a group of domestic creatures and ends with the oddities, many of which were potentially deadly. Scaly creatures begins with dragons (epitome and chief of scaly beasts) and ends with fish without scales. These last groups demonstrate two of the fundamental principles governing the order of the contents of the Bencao: the movement from common to odd described above and the importance of relationships of resemblance. Classification in the Bencao was informed by notions of locality but also shaped them. First, classification was a kind of location: it repre113


sented Li’s vision of an object’s textual habitat within the Bencao. Categories were determined at the most basic level by likeness, with creatures described in similar terms occurring next to or close to each other in each individual section. Thus, Li placed the two fishy groups next to each other and included the strangest individual group (strange, here, in that a group of scaleless fish occurred within a category of scaled creatures) last. The place in which an animal lived also helped determine its classification to the extent that geography was integral to the identification and naming of a creature. Examples of this included Li’s differentiation of turtles according to the kind of environment in which they lived and his distinguishing of many of the clams and oysters in the “shellfish” section of the Bencao by their habitats and associated patterns or markings.8 Li described cowry shells included in Xiangbei jing [The classic of seashell appearance], a manual of shell physiognomy, by their appearance and their location in the water: A big shell like a wheel can improve eyesight. Shells from the South Seas like mother of pearl, white and variegated in color, are cold and sweet in quality and flavor and can eliminate watery poison. Shells floating on the water can make a person into a widow, so do not let them near a woman. These are half black and half white. Washed shells can make a person frightened, so do not let them near a child. These have yellow lips and spotted teeth with red variegated coloring . . . Spotless, pure white shells can induce abortions, so do not let them near pregnant women. These have a red band and hollow spine. Bright (literally, intelligent) shells cause amnesia. These are fiery red inside and covered in red netting.9 In this catalog of seashells, location was clearly marked by visible traces on the objects themselves. Another type of trace that marked provenance was aural, and Li included the pronunciation of terms from local dialects or foreign languages as the source of many alternate names for creatures. One of the sources of such names, widely cited in the discussion of animals because many of the shellfish in the Bencao hailed from the “South Seas” and other foreign contexts, was Li Xun, the Chinese-born Persian discussed earlier whose family made a living by selling fragrant herbs. His Haiyao bencao recorded many drugs of foreign origin. These objects were of particular import to Li Shizhen, as drugs from remote regions were considered especially valuable in the Ming medical marketplace. One such exotic drug was turtle sperm (saba’er) that had been vomited out by sharks and subsequently had solidified in the middle of the sea, 114


and which supposedly had tremendous curative properties. The value of this regurgitated sperm was compared to that of precious metals like gold, pearls, and jade. Li agreed that if this substance existed, it would be so valuable that it would “unquestionably be useful,” but he doubted that he’d ever be able to locate a specimen to investigate and confirm claims about it and so left it to his readers to verify the account for themselves.10 To the great consternation of bencao authors, substances that were rare or otherwise difficult to obtain were often presented as especially medicinally efficacious. “Nowadays,” the complaint went, people “value the distant and dismiss the close” (guiyuan jianjin). Li denounced this tendency to scavenge in distant lands for rare drugs that were not as effective as the more common herbs often found in one’s own backyard, like the popular aphrodisiac snake’s bed (shechuang): “These days, people abandon this [drug] and search for drugs in distant regions. Is this not trivializing the eyes and treasuring the ears [that is to say, valuing hearsay over direct observation]?”11 There was a clear connection between an object’s worth and the place where it could be found or the land of the people who found it. Hence an object’s location was an important aspect of almost any discussion of its value, and an especially precious variety of a substance was usually distinguished, in part, by its geographic origin. Locality was also correlated with value in what might be considered a localized value system usually indicated by the term guizhong. Vomited turtle sperm was one of many substances that were supposedly jia (pricey, valuable) or guizhong (precious), and this particular treasure was described in both ways in the Bencao. Most of the uses of the term guizhong in the Bencao, however, were associated with an individual location or group of people. Those in Sichuan particularly valued the foresight vine (yuzhizi), according to Su Song; foreigners (huren)12 treasured the products of the oriental sweet gum (suhexiang), said Chen Zangqi; scaly snakes (linshe) were prized by country folk (turen), while the subjects of a particular Yuan monarch especially valued the leopard (mugou), we learn from Li.13 The term guizhong was used in each of these cases. Stories about animals in the Bencao came from a newly varied set of sources that reflected the importance of singular and rare accounts of drugs and events compared with the previous categories of Li’s work. Records of the strange (zhiguai) were increasingly cited as proof of the efficacy of remedies: 115


According to the Zu Taizhi zhiguai [Zu Taizhi’s records of the strange]: Once, a man and his servant both suffered from a painful illness of the heart and stomach. When the servant died, the man cut open his body and found a white bie turtle with red eyes, still alive. The man stuffed all manner of drugs into the turtle’s mouth, but it still would not die. Another man riding by on a white horse noticed this. His horse urinated on the turtle, and the turtle recoiled and then transformed into water. At this point, the man realized that taking a white horse’s urine would cure his illness. This proves the efficacy of the drug. Some cases of vomiting are also caused by a build-up of chong, so [white horse urine] can cure those as well.14 Here, Li extended the logic derived from examining this case and included the Jin (265–420) Zu Taizhi zhiguai as evidence of the ability of a drug to cure not only the disease described in the story but also all chongrelated illnesses. This was an extremely anomalous use of sources for a bencao author and reflected Li’s innovation in using tales of the strange to inform medical theory and practice. Also anomalous was Li’s reliance on monographs devoted to singular creatures, groups, or plants.15 The descriptions and debates within these monographs often determined the way Li treated the associated natural objects in his Bencao. The widely cited Shi Kuang qinjing [Shi Kuang’s bird classic],16 for example, was full of anthropomorphizing accounts of birds, and Li’s reliance on this text as a major source of evidence thus determined depictions of fowl in the Bencao in anthropomorphic terms: “The Qinjing says: ‘The crane (he) is a willful bird, so tenacious that it doesn’t know death.’ This is indeed the case. It has a vengeful, crude, and violent nature. Everything that it snatches, it handily destroys and kills.”17 Description of birds in the Bencao as “haughty” and “proud,” then, was not the result of some anthropomorphizing project on Li’s part. The focus on bird behavior in the Bencao was rather an artifact of the type of classic authorities on fowl that Li used as sources. The mating habits of birds, in particular, would give the phrase “bedroom eyes” a new twist for the modern reader.

Bedroom Eyes Reproduction was a central problem in early modern discussions of natural history in general, but the primacy of the Five Phases in grounding the 116


transformations of natural objects lent the issue a renewed importance for Li. Cranes were one of several birds that practiced sex that was protected . . . potentially by several feet of space. The birds had simply to look at or sing to each other: when their glances or songs met on the wind, one of the birds conceived.18 Aviary reproduction and metamorphosis was significant to Li, so much so that he devoted much of the preface to the Birds category to describing the “ten thousand varieties” of natural principle embodied in the birds’ transformations: they mated via glances and songs, interbred with snakes, hatched eggs beneath their wings, and metamorphosed from mice or into clams.19 These changes extended to atmospheric phenomena, as some storks (guan) had a close relationship with the phase of water and were thought to bring on drought.20 Some authors claimed that storks created little ponds in their nests in which they raised fish and snakes to feed their young, though Li said he could not verify these stories. Such transformations challenged the very notion of materiality operating in the Bencao and the texts with which it was in dialogue and at the same time reinforced the significance of water, earth, fire, wood, and metal as the fundamental mediators of change in the universe. Many of the birds’ metamorphoses were determined by some interaction with the phases: a swallow changed into a clam when entering water; the offspring of two birds might transform into a snake if it were buried in earth. In this way, environment and location were vital to the transformations of animals, shaping even their birth and death. It is clear that the habitats of many of these animals, which might be suffused alternately with water (for aquatic creatures), earth (for land-based creatures, and this differed based on geography, because the earth itself was different in different places), or fire (for creatures living in very warm areas, with some mice even living in hot ashes), would not only be vital to the way the animal’s materiality was expressed but would also help determine where to classify the animal within Li’s grand scheme.21 Stone (an instantiation of the phase of metal) was similarly central to linking animals into a broader discussion of burial, materiality, and disease in the Bencao.

Bezoars The vegetable lamb was not the only object of shared interest by Western and Chinese naturalists. Though the primacy of bezoars as early modern objects of power and curiosity has been discussed everywhere from histo117


ries of science to the Harry Potter novels, little attention has been paid to their importance in Chinese works on medicine and nature.22 Ox bezoar (niuhuang, literally, ox yellow) had been a staple of Chinese materia medica from at least Tao Hongjing’s commentary to the Bencao jing. Tao provided examples of just how expensive these precious objects were in the context of the sixth-century drug market: “This is a pricey drug, with none more expensive. One bezoar weighing between two and three fen, if good, may sell for five, six, or up to ten thousand in cash.”23 Explanations and descriptions of this substance varied.24 Most agreed with Tao Hongjing’s account: the bezoar looked like an egg yolk, and its formation was unpleasant for the ox involved. Tao cited an early story in which the bezoar was either preternaturally formed inside an ox or phosphoresced and entered the ox through its horn. Bencao authors typically agreed that the process was painful for the animal, as the ox cried when the glowing ball appeared and disappeared inside it.25 After Tao, authors tended to distinguish several types of bezoar by the location in the ox from which they were extracted, the timing of extraction (before or after death), and the ox’s geographic whereabouts while all of this was happening. Kou Zongshi had expanded the range of possible sorts of bezoar by describing calculi from wild oxen in the West and from camels, briefly differentiating them by scent: “Ox bezoar is light and porous and naturally is slightly fragrant. Tribes who live in the West have the yak bezoar, which is hard but not fragrant. There is also a camel bezoar. This is easy to obtain but can also be adulterated [with other substances], so one should make sure to be careful.”26 Li added separate entries for dog bezoars (goubao, literally, dog’s treasure) and a stony, fleshy object taken from the viscera of animals called a zhada. These entries are nestled among descriptions of theriac (diyejia),27 donkey glue (e jiao), and other products made from the bones and skin of creatures in the Beasts section of Li’s text. The petrification process that created these objects, essentially burying them within bodies, was fundamental for Li. However, he doubted whether they represented a single cosmic phenomenon. He cited an account from a miscellany called the Yuesheng suichao that illustrated this point: “Once I [Jia Sidao (1213–1275)] heard that a man suffered from urinary stones so hard they could not even be penetrated with an axe or a knife.28 I also once saw that the marrow in a dragon’s shinbone was made up of white stones. Upon falling to the ground, a tiger’s glance changes to white stone, and starlight falling to the earth changes to stone as well. 118


Pine may become petrified; snakes, crabs, and silkworms all may change into stone. Though the transformations of all things under heaven are like this, they can’t all be lumped together as the same thing.”29 Elaborating on Jia’s point, Li went on to describe the ironic conceptual transformation that made such products of illness into objects of great curative value: I [Li Shizhen] have meditated on this and have concluded that the ox’s bezoar, the dog’s treasure, the horse’s ink (mo), the deer’s jade (yu), the rhino’s tongtian, and the beasts’ zhada are all the products of disease. People, however, treat them as treasures. Humans are more soulful than other beings yet still cannot avoid such sickness. How, then, would animals be spared? A person with urinary stones, is this not [the same as] a beast’s zhada? A person with a hardened heart like metal or stone, is this not [the same as] a dog’s treasure? These are all [the results of] things being pent up so that they cannot transform [normally]. Birds, likewise, may lay eggs as hard as stone.30 While the concretized starlight and tiger’s glance represented one sort of transformation, stones within men and beasts were quite another, resulting from some sort of pathology. Disease fundamentally altered the materiality of beings. It distorted the very creative and transformative processes that gave life to man and to the animals and plants he lived among. Li continued to demonstrate this with stories of a petrified human heart inside which an image of a landscape had formed and a monk’s heart whose center was found to contain a miniature statue of the Buddha.31 The results of such pathological metamorphoses could not reasonably be expected to cure illness, and Li scoffed at the popular tendency to “treasure” them.

Sex and Death Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), a scholar who cited Li in his Wuzazu [Fivefold miscellany], was convinced that the obsession with value and rarity that Li described extended even to the estimation of men themselves. Famous physiognomists tended to extol the extraordinary qualities of people who resembled animals, Xie lamented. This was especially true of men who looked like dragons and phoenixes, but even people who looked like turtles, monkeys, or horses were singled out for special treat119


ment. “Although man is the most spirited among the myriad things,” Xie complained, “those who most resemble [common] things are most prized! This reasoning must be faulty.”32 Xie’s emphasis on physiognomy highlights another critical feature of the discussion of value in the late Ming: its resonance with observation and visually emergent characteristics. Valuable and worthless objects were largely differentiated based on shape, surface markings, or color.33 The subtlety of the connection between observable characteristics and value resembled the relationship between value and location: characteristics like color were not responsible for an object’s value but were rather one of the major ways of distinguishing a singularly valuable variety of a plant or animal. Xie proceeded from comparing people to dragons to describing dragons in terms of mankind. His likening of dragons to men revealed a pervasive tendency shared by late Ming scholars of plants and animals: naturalizing the landscape and bringing wonders and marvels back down to earth. Sex and death were the two key issues infusing discussions of naturalization in the late Ming. Xie dwelt on the former: “The dragon is by nature the most licentious [of creatures]. Accordingly, it mates with a cow and sires a lin;34 it mates with a pig and sires an elephant; it mates with a horse and sires a dragon-horse. Even women, when they come upon a dragon, are polluted by the dragon’s filthy nature.”35 The dragon was so licentious, in fact, that people could exploit its drives for their own benefit. Xie described a rain-invoking ceremony in Lingnan (literally, south of the Five Ridges; an area covering Guangdong and nearby provinces in the south today) in which a young girl was covered with a canopy and left in the middle of a field. When a dragon flew overhead, the sight of the girl aroused him so much that he circled around her, hovering over the field while trying to figure out how to mate with her. The local people used special techniques to imprison the dragon before he could successfully mount the girl, and the ejaculate of the frustrated dragon (the rain) soaked the field in no time.36 Later in the text, Xie described a charioteer of dragons, a dragon tamer, and a butcher of the beasts. The latter represented a particular concern of scholars at the end of the sixteenth century. If all living things died, what about those semidivine members of their pharmacopoeia and natural histories that stood beside the snakes and the birds but were somehow apart from them: the phoenixes, the great tortoises, the qilin, the dragons? Li shared this concern, and like Xie he explored the problem through its instantiation in 120


dragons. Rather than examining the dragon through its behavior, Li focused on its place in the broader scheme of life-cycle transformations, asking the question, can dragons die? As we saw in the Interlude, this concern stemmed from an interest in the use of dragons in medicine and the issues that such a practice raised.37 Li’s detailed description of the natural history of dragon bone and prescription for its use in medicine was also a space for working out the thorny issue of whether dragons and similar beings could die natural deaths. Though the dragon and the vegetable lamb differed in many respects, they were similar in ways relevant to most of the animals treated in the Bencao. Their parts were edible or wearable, the stories associated with them were crucial to understanding how to use them in medicine, and the locations in which each could be found formed a key aspect of their description, value, and classification. In the final category of the Bencao, the reader met with a very different kind of “lamb”: one with two legs and the taste of human flesh. Before we come to the two-legged lamb, however, one major question bears asking: what exactly was an “animal” in late Ming China, and what was its relationship to mankind?

Seeing Things A person is not simply a person; what person is not also a thing? A thing is not simply a thing; what thing is not also a person? . . . I am a special thing, imbued with spirit. Things are in some small sense imbued with me and are combined with me. Familiarity has made us forgetful, and we don’t understand the relationship between things and people.38 —Lü Kun (1536–1618), 1580 preface to Jian Wu [Seeing things]

The mountains and forests of the South were thick with wild women. These hairy she-beasts were lewd, dangerous, and ravenous. Many people who had seen wild women (yenü) compared them with naked, barefoot apes clad only in the barest strip of leather to cover their loins. They stalked the forests looking for human men, dragging away unlucky captives and forcing them to mate. Just once, according to a popular report, one of these men fought back. After killing his captor, the man cut her open and was astonished by what he found: the wild woman’s heart 121


looked just like a lustrous piece of jade and was apparently covered in some sort of writing. What, exactly, had this man just cut into? A fierce woman run wild, or a beast with inhuman lusts? Early Chinese writings had been permeated with reflections on the relationship of heaven, earth, and man, the great conceptual triumvirate.39 Men were like “lice within clothes and ants in crevices,” living in the realm bounded by heaven and earth.40 However, though he was ultimately a thing (wu) like the other creatures in the universe, man was the ultimate perfected form of a thing, embodying and reflecting the structure of heaven itself.41 Even so, scholars debated just what kind of a “thing” man was. In the early modern period, a trend toward naturalization of the exalted gave this debate a new cast, especially within texts of medicine and natural history. Lü Kun was one of many late Ming scholars whose writings sought to ground an understanding of man’s qualities and nature within a more general notion of material objects in the universe: “The Maker’s single bellows fires the creation of ten-thousand kinds, breathing into each an aspect of person and of thing. Can these aspects then be separated in two? Man himself built the fences and walls between them . . .”42 This question of naturalizing man was taken up quite explicitly in materia medica and natural history texts in the late sixteenth century: Were people things? Were they beasts? In either case, how ought one to understand and draw the boundaries of humanity? Naturalists like Li turned to wild women, Bigfoot-like beings, and monsters to address these questions.

Human Oddities Starting from some of the same premises as his contemporary Lü, Li came to a very different conclusion. People and things were indeed different, according to Li. However, when something went wrong with the universal qi, the vital organizing life force that permeated the entire cosmos, boundaries became more fluid. Li enumerated several cases of oddly shaped humans that he felt could be understood within the context of the transformative processes of the universe at large. “At the beginning of the creation of the world,” he said, “men and women were formed and just like plants and trees they mated to produce offspring.”43 The changes of men, however, sometimes fell outside what was typical or reasonable. Any scholar of broad learning or doctor charged with protecting another’s life was obligated to know about such changes, Li urged, and he 122


thus justified his inclusion of a section on “human oddities” (rengui) at the end of his text.44 There were women who were sterile or androgynous, men who were likewise ambiguously gendered, and people who split the month between acting like a man and acting like a woman: these were all people (ren), but they were strange. They had a form but no reproductive function.45 Women in some tribal communities gave birth after anywhere from six months to three years. Some people were born from a mother’s rib, from her head, or from her back if the normal channels of qi in the womb were disturbed.46 Kings had been born in extraordinary circumstances, from pustulent sores or swollen ribs. Histories included tales of women conceiving by stepping in the footprints of a giant or by swallowing birds’ eggs as well as accounts of men becoming pregnant, producing milk, and nursing their young.47 Spontaneous sex changes were not unheard-of. A common thread ran through all these cases: though odd and thus worthy of noting in historical records, the subjects discussed were nonetheless all people, in fact some were kings, and they were formed from unusual configurations of the normal forces and material of the universe. They were preternatural, not supernatural, phenomena. After recounting these records of people giving birth to worms and hatching from eggs or lumps of meat, Li made a telling statement. In remote, wild, and border areas,48 people were born in an environment with such unusual qi that they might have three heads, tails, or the faces of birds.49 These odd folk were included in the People category of the Bencao’s textual landscape. As people, however, they were more like “birds and beasts” than Li would have liked: so unlike his fellows of common descent (tongbao zhi min),50 in fact, that Li placed them at the very end of the category of People and in effect at the end of the entire Bencao itself. On closer examination this seemingly straightforward classification looks quite a bit more complicated. The boundary group that closes the Beast section and immediately precedes People reveals the tensions underlying both categories.51 The yulei or guailei, the “strange and unusual” beasts, include monkeys, monkey-men, corpse eaters, Bigfootlike creatures, and voracious wild women.

Wild Men Semianthropoid figures had appeared in Chinese literature for most of China’s history, and authors frequently attributed humanlike characteris123


tics to creatures that would now be classified as nonhuman primates.52 Much as the contemplation of wild men and Bigfoot in contemporary American society provides a medium for working out social and cultural anxieties, the study of humanoid creatures was also a study of the idea of humanity itself.53 Wild men and humanoid animals destabilized the categories of man and beast and shaped the conception of mankind for sixteenth-century thinkers like Li. They were at the same time human and utterly nonhuman. The effort to decide which way to understand them came from a need to know where to place them in his categorization of nature. Li described many of the most famous examples of the borderline beasts in his collection of materia medica. The mihou was one of many “unusual” beasts in the Bencao that were believed to dwell in the mountains or forests of southern China. According to the Shuowen jiezi, the mihou54 beast looked like a person of hu ethnicity and even had a special name (maliuyun) in the hu language.55 Li went on to add that the mihou’s eyes were like that of a worried hu person. This similarity to humans was further detailed: The mihou’s appearance, hands and feet, walk, gestation, and sounds were all humanoid. It washed its face and could be tamed. According to the Majing [Horse classic], people kept these creatures in stables to prevent horses from getting sick: the menstrual blood of the mihou was spread over the horse fodder each month and kept disease away.56 This is an important example of the role of gender in Li’s drug descriptions. The mihou was one of the only beasts whose menstrual blood was prescribed as a drug in the Bencao, further underscoring its place as a boundary being between animals and men. People in the South and in the Yue and Bajiao regions reportedly liked to eat mihou meat and heads as a delicacy. The mihou underwent several transformations over the course of its potentially lengthy life: after eight hundred years it metamorphosed into a yuan monkey; after one thousand years it became a toad. Before these changes, when the mihou was only five hundred years old, it became a different kind of creature known as a jue.57 The jue was another southern humanoid: though this Sichuan native looked like a yuan, it walked like a person and had a habit of taking human consorts.58 Known from several texts to live in strictly segregated communities of males or females, the jue frequently stole into houses to kidnap girls or men, took them home, and forced them to mate. People living in the South ate the heads of these beasts, according to Li. 124


Figure 6.1. Beasts from the Bencao gangmu (1596): a mihou (top right) and a guoran (bottom left). Used with permission of the Asian Division, Library of Congress.


The guoran liked to hang itself in trees with its tail up its nose. This behavior became an identifying trait of the creature, and illustrators typically depicted the guoran with its tail stuffed in a nostril.59 The texts that Li cited (an assortment of poems, classical works, and tales) largely concurred in their claims that guoran traveled together (with the aged in front and the young in the rear) and demonstrated qualities of kindness, filiality, respect, and wisdom. They were generous with food, lived peacefully, and could be counted on to rescue one another if attacked. Some early authors claimed that the guoran could call out his own name.60 According to the Bencao discussion, the term guoran was often used as a nickname for suspicious people due to the reportedly suspicious nature of the beast. A rhapsody on the guoran by Zhong Yu61 and the early encyclopedic work Lüshi chunqiu [Annals of Lü Buwei]62 provided accounts of the delectability of the flesh of these southern mountain dwellers and their kin. The xingxing could predict the future.63 This beast, mentioned in several classical texts, generated no small amount of debate: though its hair and ears resembled those of a monkey and a pig, respectively, its face and legs were quite human-looking, and it cried like a human baby.64 Local people in Fenxi (an area that today is just north of Vietnam) would catch the beasts by placing wine and straw sandals on the roadside. The xingxing would come to the spot, call out the names of the ancestors of the people who placed the things on the road, drink the wine, and try on the sandals. While the beasts were thus distracted, the locals caged them and kept them for meat. The fattest ones were chosen first and reportedly wept just before being killed. They were bled to dye fabric, in a rather cruel procedure that involved flogging them while asking them how many times they’d like to be beaten. Several texts claimed the xingxing could speak, though this was debated among the authors Li cited.65 So what kind of thing was this xingxing? Li claimed it had the shape of a person but perhaps ought to be grouped with the beasts like the mihou, above. According to the Erya yi, the creatures traveled in groups and looked like naked, barefoot women with long hair and no knees.66 Many people called them “wild people” (yeren). According to this account, said Li, it seemed that this might be the same thing as the “wild woman” (yenü or yepo), which was described next in the Bencao. Li was fascinated by the apparent language of the wild woman’s viscera (the inscribed heart mentioned above); he knew that Chinese characters in seal script were also found on the eggs of male mice and on a 126



Figure 6.2. A xingxing beast from the Gujin tushu jicheng [Compendium of images and texts, ancient and modern], early eighteenth century. Source: Gujin tushu jicheng (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1934), 522:22a.

mirrorlike image under the wing of a certain zhiniao bird.67 Since these two other cases existed, Li surmised that the case of the wild woman was not strange (feiyi), and he classified the wild woman as a subcategory of xingxing. By analogizing this to cases of seal characters being found in birds and mice and by extension comparing the wild woman to an animal, Li classified her as subhuman and grouped her along with beasts. Conceiving the wild woman as an animal was itself an innovation: the wild woman or yenü was typically treated alongside foreign and tribal peoples in scholarly texts. To help prove all of this, Li reminded readers of the long anecdote about catching, killing, and eating this beast. Li went on to cite at least three other texts that described how delicious the 127



Figure 6.3. A feifei beast from the Bencao gangmu (1778). Source: Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu (Zhengzhou: Henan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), 6:311.

meat of the xingxing or wild woman was, how it made one more intelligent, live a longer life, and walk more surely. Her lips were particularly tasty. The feifei beast also skulked throughout early texts and other natural histories that Li cited. Alternate names for this creature included “manbear” (renxiong) and “wild man.”68 It lived in the Southwest and both resembled and had a habit of eating people. Immediately before it attacked, it started to laugh so hard that its upper lip covered its eyes. The varied qualities of the beast included the ability to predict the future and to speak somewhat like humans and the tendency to launch into hysterics 128


and flap its lower lip around before eating a person. The last bit reportedly made it easier to catch the feifei: while the beast was laughing, hunters would take advantage of its lip-waggling distraction and nail its lip to its forehead. After it was captured, its hair was used to make wigs, its blood made an excellent dye, and its consumed flesh allowed a person to see spirits.69 In his description of the feifei, Li provided several accounts of people eating its paws and hide. Finally, before the corpse eaters, which ate the brains and livers of dead people, Li listed a number of mountain-dwelling monsters.70 Previous and later works grouped these with spirits and demons or described them in completely different terms from plants and animals, but Li decided instead to categorize them with beasts (as a subcategory of feifei) and place the group almost immediately prior to People. (Recall that Li’s classification system for the Bencao to a large extent was determined by likeness, so if he placed two animals near each other in his classification, it usually indicated some kind of relationship.) These mountain monsters all were described as being or looking like people, though many had one leg, reversed feet, or very short stature. A number of them spoke like people, some buried their dead like people, and some even traded in special ghost markets with people: “Their head, face, and language are not entirely different from those of a human, but their hands and feet have claws as sharp as steel hooks. They live among cliffs, and when they die they place their dead in coffins and bury them in graves. They can do business with people, but people cannot see their form. Today there is a ghost market in the South, and it is this type of thing.”71 They used stones to catch shellfish, roasted them over a fire, and ate them. The “mountain husband” and “mountain auntie,” a southern set of beasts with only one (backward-facing) foot apiece, were known to knock on doors at night to beg for things.72 These creatures might sneak into houses at night and have sex with women, causing and spreading disease. They could be banished from houses by calling out their names, by finding a thousand-yearold toad to munch them to death, or simply by behaving virtuously.73 Similar to the previous monkeylike creatures, many of these monsters were said to live in the South, and their flesh could be cooked and eaten. (Li provided a recipe.) The creatures described above were understood through analogy. They were like humans both in their ethical behavior and in their appearance and habits. They cooked, traded in human markets, and acted like people. Many of these man-beasts mated with humans, and monkeys 129


and Sasquatch-like beings were some of the only animals in the Bencao whose menstruation was discussed and whose menstrual blood was prescribed for its medicinal and magical effects. These creatures were also bound together, finally, in that they both ate and could be eaten by humans.

Eating the “Two-Legged Sheep” Li was particularly concerned with eating.74 He used culinary preferences to differentiate communities, to determine what was normal, and to distinguish between more and less civilized people and beasts. Evidence about eating habits supported many claims that, on the surface, had little to do with food or consumption.75 The wild women and other beasts discussed above all looked and acted like people and, according to some authors, were nearly indistinguishable from foreign peoples or people born with deformities. According to Li, however, these boundary beasts were not properly human. Li’s decision stemmed in part from the fact that they ate human flesh but also in part from the claims of authors in several genres that men ate the flesh of these creatures and that there were medical and gustatory benefits to doing so. While most accounts of cannibalism acting as a boundary-making device between proper men and some “other” emphasize the importance of eating human flesh as an act that makes one less human,76 that logic is reversed here. For Li, it was instead being eaten that, by analogy with animal flesh, made one into a beast. The People section of the Bencao was the critical stage on which Li worked out this issue.77 If both eating human flesh and being eaten proved that one was somehow less than human, then was it permissible to consume human body parts that might confer significant health benefits? Modern accounts of Chinese cannibalism tend to generalize the practice of eating human body parts as somehow typical of “traditional” Chinese medicine, but the practice was a heated source of debate among naturalists and medical scholars in early modernity.78 Anthropophagy was commonly portrayed in late Ming culture. Many Ming novels contained accounts of cannibalism, famously epitomized by an inn that served human meat dumplings in the novel Shuihu zhuan [Water Margin]. The dumplings are prominent in four sections of the novel, but the real action starts in section 27. In this scene, the hero Wu Song argues with the inn’s proprietress over the meat-filled buns she serves, he inquiring about the contents of their 130


filling and her slyly answering that they are made with high-grade beef (huangniu). The truth eventually outs, of course. (It’s people! The buns are made of people!)79 The issue of consuming human flesh also played an increasingly important role in the medical literature of the late Ming.80 A plethora of late imperial Confucian and Buddhist texts extolled the benefits of stewing up one’s flesh or internal organs to serve up as medicine to sick parents, touting the miraculous healing that resulted. Such acts of filiality were rewarded by merciful goddesses like Guanyin.81 Despite this popularization, the only human-derived drug that had been included in the earliest known materia medica as of Li’s time, the Bencao jing, was human hair. In his preface to the People category of the Bencao, Li cited this paucity of human-derived drugs as evidence of an important difference between people and the rest of the things of the world.82 He claimed to record in detail only those human parts the use of which did not violate (hai) his sense of justice and propriety (yi). Li noted that adepts justified their use of all manner of human parts (including bones, flesh, gallbladder, and blood) by calling them “medicine” (yao), and he found this practice to be utterly inhumane (buren). The arrangement of the objects listed in the People category reveals Li’s apprehension about its contents: Li placed human flesh almost at the end of the entire section, followed only by “human mummy confection” (munaiyi), a general description of geographic differences among people, and “human oddities.” Despite his misgivings, however, the preceding few hundred years of bencao work demanded that Li expand on the Bencao jing and add his own commentary. The use of human body parts as medicine had been recorded and advised by doctor and military official Chen Zangqi (fl. 8th century), perhaps the first author to have included so many human drugs in a medical text. Categorizing them within the “beasts and birds,” Chen suggested the medicinal use of such materials as human saliva, blood, flesh, organs, facial hair, and corpse parts.83 Though he did not provide much description or commentary to supplement his indication of the illness each drug cured, Chen’s innovation and his work were cited in many later Song and Ming compendia of materia medica; so Li seems to have felt compelled to comment on the matter. In contrast to Chen, Li repeatedly denounced the use of certain human body parts in medicine and had harsh words for the doctors who advocated their use. Indeed, eating some human parts was definitely not permissible. But where to draw the line? 131


Some body parts were borderline and depended on context. Chen Zangqi had recommended the use of human skeletal remains, but Li was skeptical: after all, he urged, even dogs did not eat the bones of other dogs.84 Human skulls were typically not eaten by a gentleman. However, in cases where it was the only thing available, Li judged it permissible to use a skull in medicine, but only if it had been buried for a very long time.85 (Note again the significance of burial in transforming objects.) Human placenta had not been frequently used until the Ming, when a famous doctor incorporated it into a life-prolonging pill that reportedly enjoyed wide distribution.86 According to the Suishu [History of the Sui dynasty], women from Liuqiu ate the placenta after a baby was born.87 Ferocious people from the Bagui region served up the placenta of newborn male children with Chinese five-spice, an act that was more animallike than human: “This is like beasts giving birth and then eating their own placenta, not like humankind.”88 This practice raised a question that Li left open in the Bencao: even if this drug invigorated people, was it right for people to eat parts of others, or did it offend morality? Li seems to have had no problem with using placental fluid in medicine. The umbilical cord, as well, was fine: Li compared its drying and falling off to that of a “ripe melon falling off a vine,” an act of botanical analogizing that rhetorically made the consumption of placenta permissible.89 Human gallbladders presented an interesting case. Li described the use of human bile by soldiers on the northern borders to heal wounds during battle as a remedy that should only be used in emergencies, and he completely denounced the behavior of bandits who killed a person, ripped out his gallbladder, and ate it with wine.90 However, gallbladders that were gathered up and dried made a perfectly good drug that did not run counter to ritual or morality. Blood too might be used, depending on how it was harvested. Chen Zangqi had recommended a method for extracting human blood by piercing the skin and drinking the stuff while it was fresh and hot. Li did not endorse this vampirish technique: “Those who began this practice of prescribing [fresh blood] are inhumane. Will this not have consequences? Brutal soldiers and savage evildoers also drink human blood with wine. These people should be slain by Heaven, so that evil is rewarded with evil.”91 Li did, however, permit the use of human blood that had been collected in a humane manner. He went on to encourage the use of underwear stained with menstrual blood, an excellent remedy for bloody wounds and poisons because it was so foul and filthy that it killed evil spirits. The use of other body parts was less debatable, and human flesh was 132


a particularly troublesome topic for Li. Chen Zangqi had written that eating human flesh could help cure wasting disease, and apparently this, along with widespread anecdotes about the miraculous effects of serving one’s own cooked flesh to one’s parents, had spurred the consumption of human meat, livers, gallbladders, and the like to treat illness. Li protested that this practice was extremely unfilial, supporting his position with an anecdote about the first Ming emperor criticizing such behavior as improper, against morality and ritual, and worthy of being banned.92 He then copied part of a lengthy and graphic account from the jottings of the fourteenth-century author Tao Zongyi. Tao recounted explicit and squishy details about soldiers and people in dire circumstances preparing human flesh in various ways, including a sort of people-jerky. The flesh of young children was supposedly tastiest. The above examples (blood, bone, placenta, gallbladder, flesh) provoked varying degrees of moral questioning for Li. At the same time, however, there were some parts of people the medicinal use of which Li treated as unproblematic and for which he provided long and detailed prescriptions in the Bencao. Human dandruff, earwax, toenails, and teeth all made acceptable drugs. In no small part because of the locus classicus of its discussion in the Shennong bencao jing, hair became an important topic of discussion in bencao literature. Li went on at length about the distinction between two types of hair, fabi (wig of human hair) and luanfa (hair in disarray). Many authors had credited this seemingly mundane material with powers of miraculous transformation, and its importance to medical theory was underlined by the widespread claim in medical texts that hair was one form of human blood.93 The use of excrement was fine: a newborn’s feces could be used to remove tattoos from a criminal’s face, and Li provided more than forty ways to use urine (especially that of young boys) to quench thirst, treat headaches, and maintain a youthful appearance. As a surefire cure for sudden cramps in the abdomen, Li recommended that a patient have someone sit on him and urinate into his navel. (This was also a good way to wake a traveler suffering from heatstroke.)94 Li also described how eating pishi (obsession stone), a concretion said to form in a person’s body when he or she was extremely devoted to something, could dissolve hard masses.95 Taken together, these examples indicate that there was nothing taboo about a body part just because it came from a human. Rather, the parts whose use Li most vociferously denounced were those that were regularly removed from animals and used in medicine: flesh, gallbladders, organs. The act of eating human flesh, by analogizing men to animals, 133


destabilized the very humanity, the very uniqueness, of human beings. In contrast to some of his contemporaries, Li did want to make men into something special, both a part of nature and somehow above it. More than a century later, Zhao Xuemin went even further and denounced Li Shizhen for including a human drug section at all, a move which Zhao deemed “unethical.” Zhao’s commentary on the Bencao recapitulated the structure of Li’s work except that he left out the People section altogether.

Ugly Custard: Steps toward a History of Euphemism The issue of consuming human flesh is particularly interesting, not simply because the act was rationalized by analogy to animals but also because it lent itself to the prolific use of euphemism. The source of the terms for human meat that appeared in many Ming texts was a twelfth-century collection, the Jilebian [Chicken-rib stories]. It included several general terms as well as several ways of referring to the meat from specific groups. The meat of pretty teenage girls was “ugly custard” (bumeigeng) or “won’t miss mutton” (buciyang), depending on which edition of the text the reader had at hand.96 The meat of children was called “cooked with bones” (hegulan), ostensibly because it was so tender that bones were added to the pot to keep the flesh from melting away. The flesh of old, emaciated men who had died of hunger or cold was dubbed something roughly translatable as “intense fire” (raobahuo), indicating the extra-hot cooking conditions under which the tough meat was stewed.97 Human flesh in general could be referred to as “two-legged sheep” (liangjiaoyang). Tao Zongyi included all of these in the Chuogenglu [Notes made on a rest from plowing] and supplemented them with his own contribution, a term used by soldiers for all kinds of human flesh: “thinking meat” (xiangrou).98 By the time Li used the Chuogenglu in the People section of his own work, he further transformed this parade of euphemisms. Omitting all of the specific terms from the Jilebian that Tao had cited, Li included only two expressions for human flesh: “thinking meat” and “two-legged sheep,” attributing both to evildoers.99 This was a significant deviation from the Chuogenglu itself and was consistent with Li’s interest in demonizing the consumption of human meat and his general tendency to denigrate soldiers and bandits. Eating human flesh was a practice Li attributed largely to military men and rascals: “This is done by thieves and 134


evildoers devoid of human nature. Putting them to death would not be punishment enough!”100 At the same time, Li did not attribute cannibalistic behavior to foreigners, as had many Song and Ming accounts of people living outside or on the boundaries of the empire. These earlier texts provided occasionally graphic descriptions of foreigners or ethnic minorities consuming human meat. The Taiping yulan, for example, had included discussions of human meat used in yearly sacrifices to gods in the land of Zhenla (Kampuchea), hu people and hermits using human flesh from corpses to make medicine, soldiers in the land of Jianguo cutting off the heads of people, eating their flesh, and drinking their blood, and a city in Chengdu where human meat was sold in street markets.101 Li’s choice to attribute this practice to bandits and soldiers, and not to mention it in his description of foreigners or of fangmin, is a fascinating deviation from the prevailing norm of his time. The euphemisms chronicled here made human flesh ethically palatable by likening it to permissible foodstuffs, especially animal products. Analogy-making, as we have seen, was a recurring epistemic strategy in the Bencao, but here Li resisted it. Other authors seem to have preferred using euphemisms for cannibalism that likened men to animals. Ming and later editions of the Jilebian used different forms of the euphemism for the meat of pretty young girls that almost all included “sheep” (yang) in the name. In a further analogy, the human flesh was often compared to dog and pig meat, as were some of the slaughtering techniques used to prepare it. If the comparison was supposed to make a cannibal seem inhuman, however, the continual juxtaposition of man flesh and animal vocabulary did the opposite. Man became more of an animal through a kind of naturalization via analogy. What was it to be human in the late Ming? The answer for Li, as we have seen, was rooted in an understanding of man’s place in nature that made humans and drugs made from them both part of the natural world, ruled by the same natural processes, and above it. Though a gentleman and fellow countryman was not an animal, once he consumed part of a human that could be analogized to that of an animal, he compromised his ethics and humanity. The act dropped both the eater and the eaten (city man or wild man) down into the realm of the boundary creatures and subhuman. Later authors such as Zhao drew this line at any human part whatsoever, but in the sixteenth century the boundary was still being drawn.

135

CONCLUSION ROT AND REBIRTH: THE AFTERLIFE AND REINCARNATION OF A NATURALIST

Joseph’s Pangolin The Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England, houses a room dense with offprints, photographs snipped from magazines, and mimeographed and typewritten letters kept by Joseph Needham, the polymathic pioneer of the history of Chinese science and medicine who conceived and penned much of the Science and Civilisation in China series. Inside one of the many boxes in this room is a tiny comic book written in simple Chinese, easily read even by a child. The pages are filled with images of what has by now become a standard narrative of the life of the Prince of Pharmacologists, the Shakespeare of Medicine. Look on page 7: young Li Shizhen educates other neighborhood tots about local produce, leading them on an herbalizing romp through the village outskirts. Flip to page 33: by now robe-deep in research for his magisterial Bencao, an older Li gets a quick lesson in the uses of local wildlife from some hunter friends. This scene epitomizes Li’s reputation as a doctor of and for the common people. Finally, take a look at page 60: Li enacts a classic scene from the Bencao, showing disciples the fruits of his long thinking about the chuanshanjia or pangolin. Notice the scalpels, scissors, and tweezers neatly arranged nearby, illustrating Li’s prescience in dissecting animals and championing an ideal of empirical science. Here, he prepares to cut open the pangolin’s abdomen to see if there really are ants inside. Later on he will weigh the ants, converting his efforts into quantifiable knowledge. The most striking aspect of this last image is not the illustration itself. The notes by Joseph Needham filling the margins of the page (the only one so marked) provide a window on the modern fate of Li and his work.1 After underlining the characters chuanshanjia in the text accom136


Figure C.1. Little Li Shizhen gives a botany lesson. From Li Shizhen: Weida de yaowu xuejia [Li Shizhen: Great scholar of medical drugs] (Tianjin: Zhongsheng shudian, 1955), 7. Used with permission of the Needham Research Institute.


Figure C.2. Li Shizhen gets a lesson from the hunters. From Li Shizhen: Weida de yaowu xuejia [Li Shizhen: Great scholar of medical drugs] (Tianjin: Zhongsheng shudian, 1955), 33. Used with permission of the Needham Research Institute.



Figure C.3. Probing the belly of the beast. From Li Shizhen: Weida de yaowu xuejia [Li Shizhen: Great scholar of medical drugs] (Tianjin: Zhongsheng shudian, 1955), 60. Used with permission of the Needham Research Institute.

panying the cartoon, Needham scribbled some alternate names for the eponymous creature: lingli, Lung Li, pangolin (scaly anteater), Manis dalmanni. This specific case was one instance of a classic move undertaken by nearly all modern commentators on Li’s work: First, find a modern equivalent for the plant and animal names mentioned in the Bencao, ideally a Latin binomial compound. Next, see if Li’s description matched (more or less) modern scientific knowledge about the object. Finally, if some bits and pieces match up, pat the sixteenth-century naturalist on the back and chalk one up for Chinese science.2 By the twentieth century, Li had been cast as one of the founders of modern scientific thinking in China and a kind of patron saint of Chinese medicine, the latest in a series of rebirths that made Li and his Bencao the objects of a metamorphosis, just the sort of phenomenon that most fascinated the naturalist.3

Li’s Owlet Transformation of the universe goes on without respite. Cycles of ebb and flow—now advancing, now retreating. 138

CONCLUSION. ROT AND REBIRTH: THE AFTERLIFE OF A NATURALIST

Image and essence evolve, a transforming magicicad. Boundlessly subtle, beyond language’s pale. Ruin, Fortune’s mistress; Fortune, Ruin’s flame. Misery and joy crowd the gate, blessing and disaster seed the soil. ... Disaster and fortune, woven as threads of a single rope; Fate can’t be foretold—who can know its bounds? Agitate water and it roils, excite an arrow and it soars. All that there is cycles and circles, a constant rhythm of ebbs and flows. As clouds rise their rains fall, rights and wrongs braided together. The Great Potter fashions things with clay endlessly rich. Heaven cannot be divined, the Path cannot be mapped. Late or soon, all is fated. Who knows when his time will come? Consider the world a forge, creation as its craftsman; All things with their yin and yang are his copper and his coal. Merging and sundering, melting and hardening, where is there a mold? The changes and chances of this mortal life have never met their end. If by chance a man is made, why is that worth grappling? And if instead another creature, in what sense is that crippling? The ignorant man, self-centered, sees others as worthless and himself as gold. The man of understanding, broad in his wisdom, sees that anything is possible.4 Li brought his entire work to a close with an open question to his readers: “How is it that men of superficial learning rely on what they view in one small corner to judge the limitless changing affairs of past and present and things in the cosmos to be ‘strange’?”5 This question was a fitting motto for Li’s work, and it recalled a moment from one of the literary sources most exalted in the Bencao, Jia Yi’s “Owlet Rhapsody”: “The changes and chances of this mortal life have never met their end . . . The man of understanding, broad in his wisdom, sees that anything is possible.” In choosing to close with this allusion, Li foregrounded the importance of metamorphosis, the infinite creativity of nature, and the foolishness of the man who thought he fully understood it. If we take one lesson from a close reading of Li’s work, this ought to be it. Over and over again, we are foiled in any attempt to bring a clean 139


systematicity to understanding the epistemology of the Bencao. It was not clean: it was anything but. Li’s wonder was palpable as he tried to make sense of the phenomena within and beyond the boundaries of his native Qizhou and the empire of which it was a part. The bezoars and human mummy confections, the aromatic woods, and the one-legged ants rooted to tree trunks: these and more like them prevented Li from fitting a world whose “creations were truly remarkable” into a neat, logical system of strict correspondences. Indeed, one of the most fundamental principles informing Li’s treatment of evidence was a respect for plurality: there were often a multitude of possible ways to name a drug, to prepare it, to prescribe it, and to understand its history. Still, we can see the hazy outline of a kind of naturalist’s common sense emerging from Li’s decades of negotiation with a disparate mass of travels, texts, and anecdotes. One Heraclitean constant informed the Bencao: nothing was constant. Transformation and processes of change were ubiquitous. At the root of Li’s decision-making processes was the belief that the universe and all within it underwent metamorphoses mediated by the Five Phases, whose patterns made certain types of claims believable and others not. Humans, ruled by a special type of qi, were not subject to the same plasticity of transformation that characterized other natural objects, though unusual metamorphoses were possible during human reproduction and gestation. An understanding of the phases and their primacy in facilitating metamorphoses in the natural world thus provided the scaffolding for Li’s discussions and his weighing of evidence. Exceptions to these rules might be proven through eyewitness: by oneself, or by a recognized authority with privileged local access (geographic or temporal) to a phenomenon. Observation was a primary and reliable way of knowing about the natural world and confirming textual claims. Because the eyes could be fooled, however, other means of sensing (by smell, taste, or sound) and altering objects (by soaking, burning, or otherwise changing) were vital for sniffing out deception and making finer distinctions. When all else failed and only limited information about an object or event was available, Li turned to analogy. He often decided whether to believe an odd-sounding case by analogizing it to other cases of which he was more certain. That certainty was not necessarily inherent in the type of textual authority from which a claim derived: no single author, text, or epistemological tool was universally supported. A poem might disprove a 140


medical work, and a “tale of the strange” might suggest the logic of how to use a drug. Both plurality and uncertainty were embraced, and Li often provided multiple possibilities and left it to the reader to choose among them. Finally, understanding an object’s use in medicine depended on situating it in time and space. Burial of one substance within another, for example, frequently triggered metamorphosis, but the precise effect depended on the combination of phases that dominated the object and its substrate. Location (within the earth or sea, within or outside the body or the empire, atop a mountain, in a classification system) likewise determined the properties and significance of an item. This spatial dimension became increasingly important in later interpretation of and amendment to Li’s work: as the empire expanded, so did the texts describing the new territories and the materia medica that grew within them.

Zhao’s Caterpillar Qing China was a transformative space. Qing territory doubled in size between 1660 and 1760 under the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, incorporating hundreds of what are now known as “ethnic minority” peoples within its borders.6 This expansion also brought new plants, animals, and medicines into the Chinese material and textual tradition, along with texts about them in languages as varied as Tibetan, Persian, and Mongolian.7 This new human and natural geography brought a new set of problems to the study and reconstruction of the Bencao, hybridizing materia medica in a way that may properly be understood as a part of Qing colonial medicine. As armies and bureaucrats expanded the boundaries of the empire, medical scholars expanded and transformed Li’s text along with them. The annexation and exploration of new territory by the Qing had profound repercussions for bencao studies. Naturalists struggled to cope with a pharmacy’s worth of new and unfamiliar substances, texts, and terms, as plants, animals, and the drugs made from them traveled into China across land and sea. Imperial cartographic projects mapped the new territory, and new gazetteers listed and described its local products and customs. Medical books and daily-use encyclopedias, both of which often included recipes for and lists of newly obtainable drugs, were printed in greater numbers to meet increased demand. Works of medical natural history (including collections of materia medica and books on the 141


plants, animals, and stones used in medicinal recipes) also changed, moving toward a greater emphasis on local contexts and products and making greater use of gazetteers and other texts that emphasized the importance of locality and local identity. Despite this influx of new words and objects, the Bencao did not become an outdated relic; instead, it provided a framework for the incorporation and integration of novelties. The Bencao was incorporated into Qing encyclopedic works like the Gujin tushu jicheng as a canonical source on stones, plants, and animals, cementing the reputation of Li as an authority on both medicine and natural history. In addition, Li’s text was treated as a model for natural histories across East Asia, as Japanese, Korean, and Qing scholars revised and amended it to account for local and newly discovered flora and fauna. When Zhao Xuemin sat down in 1800 to collect his amendments to the Bencao into his own Bencao gangmu shiyi [Correction of omissions in the Bencao gangmu],8 he lived in this greatly expanded empire. Zhao, an itinerant doctor, wove many new texts describing these territorial conquests into a work meant to make up for perceived omissions and errors in Li’s text.9 Zhao culled much of his information from travel accounts and local gazetteers from distant reaches of the empire, including the first detailed instructions for smoking opium in a Chinese text and a nowfamous account of cinchona bark (jinjilei).10 Among his several emendations was a set of notes on one part of the dragon that Li had missed: the dragon’s “secretion” (longxie) that solidified into chunks patterned like elephants’ ivory. As Li had done for many other drugs, Zhao noted ways to tell the real secretion from the fake in the marketplace, and like Li he encouraged the reader to decide whether the account was true or false.11 Among the many new objects Zhao appended to Li’s text was the dongchong xiacao (winter worm, summer grass, shortened hereafter to chongcao). This creature had appeared in Chinese texts only in the middle of the eighteenth century, as an expensive exotic object associated with imperial borderlands, difficult to obtain and prized by connoisseurs.12 A brief account in the Sichuan tongzhi [Sichuan provincial gazetteer] of 1731 is likely the first recorded instance of the term in Chinese.13 Wu Jingzi mentioned the drug briefly in his novel Rulin waishi [The Scholars], completed in 1750: The following day Wan Xuezhai invited Niu Yufu to another meal, and he was carried there by sedan-chair. At Wan’s house he found 142


two salt merchants . . . They drank tea and talked about the salt trade, after which a feast was spread with two tables each laid for two. Wine was served and the first dish was dongchong xiacao. “Try this dish,” Wan invited them. “It’s not a local thing; yet we can find plenty of it in Yangchow city. But when it comes to a hibernating toad, there’s none to be had for love or money!”14 As in the earlier gazetteer, Rulin waishi depicted the rare and exotic chongcao as a local product from the frontiers of the empire. A year later chongcao made its first appearance in a Chinese-language medical text, the Bencao congxin [New compilation of materia medica], whose brief account was elaborated in subsequent pharmacological texts: Dongchong xiacao is cold and level, protects the lungs, improves the kidneys, stops bleeding, breaks up phlegm and ends persistent cough. That produced in Sichuan’s Jiading region is of the highest quality, with Yunnan and Guizhou producing the second-best quality. In the winter it lives within the earth, its body alive like that of an old silkworm, covered in hairs and able to move. When the summer arrives, it sheds its hair and emerges from the surface of the soil, rotates its body and transforms into a plant. If it is not harvested, it returns to the earth in winter and transforms back into an insect.15 “Winter worm, summer grass” was thus named after the strange transformations that it underwent. Neither strictly animal nor entirely vegetable, the chongcao was both: it took the form of a worm and lived under the earth in the cold winter months, but when the weather warmed up, it metamorphosed into a plant and burst from the ground. Though this shape-shifter was a plant for only half of its life, it tended to be classified with plants in collections of materia medica.16 From its earliest instantiations in pharmacopoeia, chongcao was associated not only with metamorphosis but also with notions of locality. The particular place varied, but in each case chongcao was discussed as a product of some particular location. According to Zhao Xuemin and many of the texts he cited, the chongcao was found in such remote regions as Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangdong.17 In his account of the drug, Zhao appended to the original passage from the Bencao congxin several interesting tidbits of information culled from local gazetteers and travel accounts: Chongcao was found on snowy mountains in 143


central Asia; in Guangdong it was mixed with ginseng and opium and formed into balls; when mixed with flowers it could keep away mosquitoes; stewed in a male duck’s head it could prolong life; and finally, it could be used as an abortifacient. Zhao’s text was published in 1871, long after his death in 1803. At roughly the same time that Zhao was at work, a separate set of scholars was revising medicine and natural history in China to accord with Western botanical and zoological classifications. Portions of the Bencao were translated into several Western languages, and selections from the text were incorporated into many Jesuit works as representations of “Chinese” natural knowledge. Among the most famous of these, the 1736 Description de la Chine (General History of China) by Jean-Baptiste du Halde had included several partial translations from the Bencao that were frequently studied and cited by Western scholars well into the nineteenth century. Du Halde also described chongcao (as “Hia Tsao Tong Tchong”): a great rarity that was seldom seen in the capital of Beijing, the drug apparently hailed from the far reaches of the empire (in Tibet or Sichuan) and was so rare that it was prescribed only by the emperor’s physicians at court.18 In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British mycologist Miles Joseph Berkeley relied in part on du Halde’s account to redefine chongcao as a fungus, giving it a new name to place it within a Linnaean taxonomy, and chongcao became Sphaeria sinensis.19 Soon after, the fungus was renamed Cordyceps sinensis, a species of the ascomycete fungus Cordyceps that parasitizes insect and other arthropod larvae. Spores of the fungus infect the larvae, growing and filling their host with hyphae. When the host dies, the fungus produces a fruiting body that emerges from the insect or arthropod body and sends off more spores. Cordyceps sinensis (also called “vegetable caterpillar” or “caterpillar fungus”) has since become the most famous species in the genus, with the fruit of the fungus growing into one of the most popular and sought-after herbal drugs throughout the world: a far cry from the exotic shape-shifter recorded by Zhao Xuemin.20 Though chongcao was not mentioned in the Bencao gangmu, its subsequent status as one of the prototypically “Chinese” drugs transmitted via Jesuit translations into Western naturalist accounts mirrors the fate of Li’s work in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial medicine. The Bencao was pivotal to nineteenth-century British naturalists in China, with some colonial botanists attempting to learn Chinese in order to translate the famous text and identify drugs of potential use for missionary doctors in China or specimens of interest to the history of 144


botany.21 Though many of these European translators bemoaned the low levels of illustration, precision, and description in the Bencao and other Chinese texts on materia medica, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sinologist-naturalists took the Bencao seriously as a source of evidence for the history of botany and plant cultivation, and their philological and comparative engagement with it produced scholarship and partial translations that continue to shape scholarly and popular knowledge of Li’s text today. The most important English-language translations of parts of the Bencao were done by Bernard Emms Read (1887–1949), whose biography illustrates the complex relationship among Western medical practice, natural history, and the history of medicine in early twentieth-century China. After studying pharmacy in London in 1908–9, Read spent several years lecturing at the Peking Union Medical College. He then left China to study at Yale, earning a PhD for a dissertation on a traditional Asian leprosy remedy introduced into Western medicine in the midnineteenth century, but returned in 1925 to become a founding member of the Peking Society of Natural History established that year.22 His translations from the Bencao first appeared in the society’s Bulletin in the early 1930s.23 Penned in the context of Western exploration of the natural resources of North China, they are still the basis of most scholarship on the Bencao by readers not familiar with Chinese (and even by some Sinologists), and his identification of Bencao drugs with Englishlanguage counterparts is still used as the basis for drug identification by many modern scholars. With his series of Bencao translations (by far the best-selling publications of the society), Read continues to shape modern use of the Bencao in the Anglophone world perhaps more than any other Sinologist.24 Colonial interest in China’s flora and fauna was matched by the Chinese empire’s own colonial exploration in its borderland regions. While naturalists such as Read began translation of the Bencao’s contents into bioscientific terms, the colonial interests of China itself also expanded the Bencao. Translation from Chinese into European languages was accompanied by translation of several borderland languages into Chinese. Zhao’s supplement to the Bencao (reprinted as an addendum to later editions of the Bencao gangmu after its initial publication in 1871) included many materials known and described from China’s imperial exploits and translation projects. Chongcao, for example, may originally have been a Tibetan name imported into China as part of the Manchu imperial project: Xiacao dongchong may be a translation from the Tibetan dbyar rtsa 145


dgun ‘bu (yartsa gunbu), or “summer grass, winter worm.”25 Both the Tibetan and Chinese names appear in a description in the later Mengyao zhengdian, a nineteenth-century Tibetan-language text on Mongolian medicine.26 In part because the expensive dbyar rtsa dgun ‘bu is not widely employed in modern Tibetan medical practice, its history as an object of exchange among Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian contexts has largely been erased from its natural history in Chinese medicine. As new texts entered the Chinese materia medica tradition and drug names and descriptions were newly translated, the approaches that Li had pioneered in writing the Bencao were accommodated to a newly varied and multilingual context of colonial natural history. As Li had once embraced variant and vernacular names for and knowledge about natural objects, students of his work, such as Zhao, strove to bring new, local medical knowledge into the bencao corpus. Many of the indigenous medicinal drugs and traditions that were incorporated into supplements and emendations to the Bencao have since been redefined as “ethnic minority” medicines in Chinese-language medical historiography.27 The histories of the early modern Chinese empire as a colonial force and of medicine in China as a result of the intermingling of local traditions has receded behind a Han-centric picture of Chinese medicine as a coherent whole. By providing a framework for the incorporation of such novelties, the Bencao helped shape this process.

Mao’s Barefoot Doctor After it served the purposes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial naturalists (both Chinese and European), the Bencao continued to be reimagined through mid-twentieth century China. The man who struggled for so long to research, write, and secure a publisher for his life’s work (ultimately not living to see it in print) might have been shocked to know what was made of his image three centuries later. In the People’s Republic of China, the figure of Li Shizhen was reinvented as a precursor to barefoot doctors (chijiao yisheng), ordinary people with varying levels of education who were briefly trained in basic medicine and sent off to rural areas to deliver medical care in the 1950s through the early 1980s. The debates and uncertainty in the Bencao were swept aside as Communist depictions of Li emphasized his efforts to gather information from local people and recast him as a grassroots activist for medicine of the people and for the people. Images of Li from the 1950s and 1960s depicted him with the same visual vocabulary as propaganda posters of 146


barefoot doctors. Li essentially was reinvented as a father of “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” a concept developed and promoted by the Chinese Communist Party as a way to legitimate and support its rule.28 The preface to a 1976 hygiene manual for barefoot doctors working in the Anhui region begins, like many of its kind, with assorted “Quotations from Chairman Mao.” In the quotations in the Anhui manual, only two doctors are mentioned by name, embedded in one selection from a speech Mao Zedong gave to health care professionals in Beijing in 1965: Medical education needs to be reformed. It is completely unnecessary to study so many books. How many years of formal education did Hua Tuo (d. 208) have? How many years did Li Shizhen of the Ming Dynasty have? Medical education need not be restricted to those with high school diplomas; middle school and elementary school students studying for three years is enough. What is important is that learning is improved with experience. If this type of doctor is then sent to the countryside, though his ability is not great he will always be able to do a better job than the charlatan witch doctors. In addition, the peasants will be able to afford such care. The more one studies books, the stupider one becomes.29 Mao both placed Li in the pantheon of great traditional doctors and recast him as an anti-intellectual doctor of the common people. In Mao’s view, Li was not burdened by years of book learning but had acquired his medical skill mostly from experience. This was a dramatic break from the classic biographical account that had young Li studying for years on end until he was sick from the effort and represented a Communist reimagining of Li as a hero of the countryside. The film Li Shizhen (1956), which starred the popular actor Zhao Dan (1915–1980) as Li, supported the account of Li’s life that became popular under Mao by depicting him as a doctor of the people fighting against oppression by the upper classes. The film was released only a year after the aforemetioned comic book that similarly celebrated Li’s life as a doctor who used the knowledge of the common folk to correct the medical books of the past. This notion of Li as a hero of the people and a patriarch of Chinese medicine has persisted throughout modern media, with a slight twist. Contemporary artists have used Li and his work as a metonym of an idealized traditional China. Taiwanese pop musician Jay Chou’s song “Bencao gangmu,” for example, treats Li’s masterwork as a lens through which to critique the perceived modernization and globalization of Chi147


nese culture and is sprinkled with the names of popular Chinese medicinal drugs (some of which, such as dongchong xiacao, do not appear in Li’s book).30 The Hong Kong television series Bencao yaowang (literally, Lord of Drugs of the Bencao, but popularly translated as “The Herbalist’s Manual”) starred popular Hong Kong actor Frankie Lam as a bumbling young Li who championed the people’s medicine and found romance along the way.31 In these modern media Li and his Bencao have been reduced to mere characters invoked to embody the idea of China as a whole or of Chinese medicine as its most representative part.

Borges’s Monkey In writing his epic work Li was everywhere concerned with naming and with the role of textual and experiential evidence in understanding and classifying the natural world. Borges’s ink-drinking monkey stands for the potency of the connection between language and nature in early modern Chinese studies of the natural world and in the afterlife of this textual tradition. As the monkey consumes the very means of writing about and understanding it, so the Bencao absorbed a textual tradition into its own body. As a result, Li’s book became iconic: the pulsing debate within its pages was quieted with time, and the author and his text were themselves seen as voices of an idealized tradition. Borges helped shape the later history of this reinvention. Though he did not comment on the Bencao in particular, Borges’s work inspired a literary thread that fed back into the reassessment of Li’s masterwork. In a now famous account, he puzzled over the notion of classification in “Chinese encyclopedias”: These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies [of John Wilkins’ analytical language] recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that the animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.32 148


Borges went on to characterize the authorship of this Chinese encyclopedia as unknown or “false,” further imbuing the notion of Chinese classification of the natural world with a flavor of the curious and exotic. Though Borges intended his essay to illuminate the ultimate arbitrariness of all classification systems, his literary equation of “China” and its natural classifications with chaos was immortalized and reinterpreted in the preface to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. For Foucault, the Chinese encyclopedia represented “the exotic charm of another system of thought,” filling the reader with “wonderment” in the face of such a strange and “monstrous” juxtaposition of categories.33 In the space of a few pages, Foucault invoked the notion of a “heterotopia” to bring the apparent oddity of a classification system such as that embodied by the Chinese encyclopedia into relief. In effect, Foucault’s reading of Borges’s reading of Franz Kuhn’s reading of an apocryphal Chinese text ultimately exoticized the notion of “Chinese” classification into a realm beyond the rational.34 China became the encyclopedia itself: a collection of elements put together in a way that modernity can’t quite make sense of. It is precisely this tension between ideas of China-as-encyclopedia and the idea of rationality that threatens a tripartite misunderstanding: the essentialization of the notion of “China” and “Chineseness”; the generalization of a Chinese “system of thought”; and the characterization of that system as somehow irrational. The Bencao gangmu, intended in part as a canonical encyclopedia of the natural world, undermines each of these notions. Li was fascinated by the “limitless changing affairs” of mankind and the other living and transforming entities that made up his universe. He built his work on the premise that any knowledge of the natural world was necessarily as plural and manifold as the metamorphoses of its inhabitants. This knowledge was not simply important for its own sake but was also vital to understanding how to nurture and heal the human body. There was not for Li, nor is there now, a single “Chinese” way of knowing about nature. Accepting that plurality as a basis for further studies of the history of science and medicine, and of the materials that ostensibly come from Chinese materia medica in particular, can help us be more responsible historians and citizens of a world in which global medicine and pharmaceutics are transforming the way we understand and use natural materials in our own bodies.

149

appendix a Li Shizhen, Lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages] Text

Author

Date

Shennong bencao jing [Divine Husbandman’s bencao]

N/A1

Eastern Han (25–220)

Mingyi bielu [Additional records of eminent doctors]

Tao Hongjing (425– 536)2

Liang (502–557)

Tongjun caiyaolu [Master Tong’s notes on collecting drugs]

Gentleman Tong (Tong jun)

N/A

Lei Gong yaodui [Lei Gong’s comparison of drugs]

Minister Lei (Lei Gong)

Han (206 bce–220)

Lishi yaolu [Master Li’s notes on drugs]

Li Dangzhi

Wei (220–265)

Wushi bencao [Master Wu’s bencao]

Wu Pu

Wei

Lei Gong paozhi lun [Lei Gong’s treatise on the preparation of drugs]

Minister Lei

Song period of the Southern and Northern dynasties (420–479)

Tang bencao [Bencao of the Tang dynasty]

Su Gong (fl. 656–660) et al.

Xianqing (656–660) period of the Tang (618– 907) 3

Yao zongjue [Complete drugs in rhyme]

Tao Hongjing4

Liang

Yaoxing bencao [Bencao of drug qualities]

Zhen Quan

Tang

151

APPENDIX A

Qianjin shizhi [Dietetic cures worth a thousand in gold]

Sun Simiao (581–682)

Tang

Shiliao bencao [Bencao of dietetic remedies]

Meng Shen (621–713)

Tang5

Bencao shiyi [Supplement to bencao]

Chen Zangqi (fl. 8th century)

Kaiyuan (713–741) period of the Tang

Haiyao bencao [Bencao of overseas drugs]

Li Xun (fl. 756–779)6

Tang

Sisheng bencao [Bencao in four tones]

Xiao Bing

Tang

Shanfan bencao [Simplified bencao]

Yang Sunzhi

Kaiyuan period

Bencao yinyi [Bencao with pronunciations and meanings]

Li Hanguang

Tang

Bencao xing shilei [Bencao with classified remarks on drug qualities]

Du Shanfang7

N/A

Shixing bencao [Bencao on dietetic qualities]

Chen Shiliang8

Southern Tang period (937–975) of the Five Dynasties (907–960)

Shu bencao [Bencao of the state of Shu]

Han Baosheng et al.9

Reign of Meng Chang, leader of the Later Shu State (919–965) during the Five Dynasties

Kaibao bencao [Bencao of the Kaibao reign period]

Liu Han and Ma Zhi

Kaibao reign period (968–976) of the Song (960–1279)

Jiayou buzhu bencao [Annotated and supplemented bencao of the Jiayou period]

Zhang Yuxi and Lin Yi

Jiayou reign period (1056–1063) of the Song

Tujing bencao [Illustrated bencao10 classic]

Su Song (1020–1101)

Jiayou period

152

LI SHIZHEN, LIDAI ZHUJIA BENCAO [BENCAO WORKS THROUGH THE AGES]

Zhenglei bencao [Organized and classified bencao]

Tang Shenwei (fl. 1086– 1093) and Cao Xiaozhong (fl. 1116)

Daguan (1107–1111)11 and Zhenghe (1111– 1118)12 reign periods of the Song

Bencao bieshuo [Bencao with additional comments]

Chen Cheng (fl. 1086– 1094) and Wang Jixian (fl. 1131–1163)

Song

Rihua zhujia bencao [The bencao of Rihua]

author unclear

Kaibao period

Bencao yanyi [Bencao of elucidated meanings]

Kou Zongshi (fl. 1111– 1118)

Zhenghe reign period of Emperor Huizong of the Song

Jiegu zhenzhu nang [Jiegu’s bag of pearls]

Zhang Yuansu

Jürchen Jin (1115–1234)

Yongyao faxiang [Phenomena of drug use]

Li Gao (1180–1251)

Yuan (1206–1368)

Tangye bencao [Bencao of decoctions]

Wang Haogu (fl. 1298– 1308)

Yuan

Riyong bencao [Bencao for daily use]

Wu Rui

Reign of Emperor Wenzong (1328–1329) of the Yuan

Bencao gekuo [A summary of bencao in verse] 13

Hu Shike

Yuan

Bencao yanyi buyi [Supplement to the Bencao of elucidated meanings]

Zhu Zhenheng (1281– 1358)

Yuan

Bencao fahui [Probing the inner meaning of bencao]

Xu Yanchun

Hongwu (1368–1398) reign period of the Ming (1368–1644)

Jiuhuang bencao [Famine relief bencao]

Prince Xian of Zhou (Zhou Xian wang)14

Hongwu period

Gengxin yuce [Gengxin book of jade]

Prince Xian of Ning (Ning Xian wang)15

Xuande (1426–1436) reign period of the Ming

Bencao jiyao [Collected bencao essentials]

Wang Lun (jinshi 1484)

Hongzhi (1488–1506) reign period of the Ming

153

APPENDIX A

Shiwu bencao [Bencao of foodstuffs]

Wang Ying

Zhengde (1506–1522) reign period of the Ming

Shijian bencao [Bencao mirror of dietetics]

Ning Yuan

Jiajing (1522–1567) reign period of the Ming

Bencao huibian [Collected bencao works]

Wang Ji

Jiajing period

Bencao mengquan [Bencao for trapping ignorance]

Chen Jiamo

End of the Jiajing period

Bencao gangmu [Systematic materia medica]

Li Shizhen

Composed in 1552 and finished in 1578; revised three times

154

appendix b Contents of the Bencao gangmu [Systematic materia medica] Prefatory Material

Wang Shizhen preface (xu) Appended Illustrations (futu) List of Contents (zongmu) Author’s Preface (fanli)

Juan 1: Introductory Materials (xulie) A

Bencao through the Ages (lidai zhujia bencao) Medical Bibliography (yinju gujin yijia shumu) Nonmedical Bibliography (yinju gujin jingshi baijia shumu) Collected List of Drug Products Included in Previous Bencao (caiji zhujia bencao yaopin zongshu) Introduction to the Shennong bencao jing (Shennong benjing minglie) Measurement and Preparation of Drugs from Tao Hongjing’s Mingyi bielu (Tao Yinju Mingyi bielu geyao fenji faze) Timing of Drug Collection According to Qi and Wu (caiyao fen liuqi suiwu) Seven Prescriptions (qifang) Ten Functions (shiji) Qi, Flavor, Yin, and Yang (qiwei yinyang) Recommendations and Taboos Concerning the Five Flavors (wuwei yiji) Dominating and Submissive Relationships of the Five Flavors (wuwei piansheng) Symptoms and Root Causes of Yin and Yang (biaoben yinyang) Rising, Falling, Floating, and Sinking (shengjiang fuchen) Instructions for Seasonal Drug Use (sishi yong yaoli)

155

APPENDIX B

Principles of Using Drugs According to Five Evolutions and Six Excesses (wuyun liuyin yongyaoshi) Using Drugs to Nourish and Purge the Viscera (liufu liuzang yongyao qiwei buxie) Nourishing and Purging According to the Five Zang and Five Flavors (wuzang wuwei buxie) Principles of Using Drugs According to Emptiness and Fullness of the Viscera (zangfu xushi biaoben yongyao shi) Guiding Principles (yinjing baoshi) Juan 2: Introductory Materials (xulie) B

Differentiation of Drug Names (yaoming tongyi) Drug Relationships of Mutual Affinity, Enhancement, Rejection, and Inhibition (xiangxu xiangshi xiangwei xiang’e zhuyao) Incompatible Drugs (xiangfan zhuyao) Food Taboos when Taking Drugs (fuyao shiji) Taboos During Pregnancy (renshen jinji) Taboos of Food and Drink (yinshi jinji) Li Dongyuan’s Preface to Suizheng yongyao (Li Dongyuan Suizheng yongyao fanli) Chen Zangqi’s Preface to Zhuxu yongyao (Chen Zangqi Zhuxu yongyao fanli) Zhang Zihe’s Hantu xia sanfa The Eight Imperatives, Six Losses, and Six Incurables of Illness (bing you bayao liushi liubuzhi) Relationships between Drugs and the Seasons, According to Lei Gong yaodui (Yaodui suiwu yaopin) Table of Contents of the Shennong bencao jing (Shennong bencao jing mulu) Table of Contents of Song Dynasty bencao (Song bencao jiu mulu)

Juan 3–4: Main Indications of Drugs for One Hundred Illnesses (baibing zhuzhiyao)

114 illnesses listed

Juan 5: Waters (shui)

43 drugs: Heaven (tian, 13) Earth (di, 30)

Juan 6: Fires (huo)

11 drugs

Juan 7: Earths (tu)

61 drugs

156

CONTENTS OF THE BENCAO GANGMU [SYSTEMATIC MATERIA MEDICA]

Juan 8–11: Metal and Stone (jinshi)

161 drugs: Metals (jin, 28) Precious Stones (yu, 14) Stones (shi, 72) Salts (lu, 20 + 27 appended)

Juan 12–21: Herbs (cao)

611 drugs: Mountain (shancao, 70) Fragrant (fangcao, 56) Marshy (xicao, 126) Toxic (ducao, 47) Creeping (mancao, 73 + 19 appended) Aquatic (shuicao, 23) Rocky (shicao, 19) Mosses (taicao, 16) Miscellaneous (zacao, 9) With a Name but No Use (youming wuyong, 153)

Juan 22–25: Grains (gu)

73 drugs: Sesame, Wheat, and Rice (mamaidao, 12) Millet (jisu, 18) Beans (shudou, 14) Fermented and Prepared (zaoniang, 29)

Juan 26–28: Vegetables (cai)

105 drugs: Pungent (huncai, 32) Slippery (rouhua, 41) Melons (luocai, 11) Aquatic (shuicai, 6) Fungi (zhi’er, 15)

Juan 29–33: Fruits (guo)

149 drugs: Five Fruits (wuguo, 11) Mountain (shanguo, 34) Exotic (yiguo, 31) Flavorful (wei, 13) Melons (luo, 9) Aquatic (shui, 6 + 23 appended) Appended Miscellaneous (fulu zhuguo, 21 + 1)

Juan 34–37: Woods (mu)

180 drugs: Fragrant (xiangmu, 35) Tall (qiaomu, 52) Watery (guanmu, 51) Parasitic, “Dwellers” (yumu, 12) Luxuriant, Bamboos (baomu, 4) Miscellaneous (zamu, 7 + 19 appended)

157

APPENDIX B

Juan 38: Clothing and Tools (fuqi)

79 drugs: Clothing (fubo, 25) Tools (qiwu, 54)

Juan 39–42: Bugs (chong)

106 drugs: Egg-Born (luansheng, 45) Change-Born (huasheng, 31) Moisture-Born (shisheng, 23 + 7 appended)

Juan 43–44: Scaly (lin)

94 drugs: Dragons (long, 9) Snakes (she, 17) Fish (yu, 31) Scaleless Fish (wulin yu, 28 + 9 appended)

Juan 45–46: Armored (jie)

46 drugs: Turtles and Tortoises (guibie, 17) Shellfish (bangge, 29)

Juan 47–49: Birds (qin)

77 drugs: Aquatic (shui, 23) Grassland (yuan, 23) Forest (lin, 17) Mountain (shan, 13 + 1 appended)

Juan 50–51: Beasts (shou)

86 drugs: Domestic (chu, 28) Beasts (shou, 38) Rodents (shu, 12) “Dwellers” (yu, 8)

Juan 52: People (ren)

37 drugs

Source: This list was compiled on the basis of the Liu Hengru and Liu Shanyong, eds., 2002 edition, which in turn was based on the 1596 Jinling and 1603 Jiangxi printings of the Bencao. The Jiangxi edition also included prefaces from Xia Liangxin and Zhang Dingsi, along with Li Jianyuan’s memorial.

158

NOTES

INDEXING SYSTEM FOR BENCAO GANGMU CITATIONS

Citations from the Bencao gangmu include the following elements: 1. BC (Bencao gangmu) 2. Juan (1–52) 3. Entry name (I have used pinyin Romanization and provided a translation where appropriate) 4. Subheading in pinyin with English translation, with recurring subheading categories indicated according to the following codes: ff : fufang [Appended Prescriptions] fl : fulu [Appended Notes] fm : faming [Explication] jj : jijie [Collected Interpretations] sm : shiming [Explanation of Names] qw : qiwei [Qi and Flavor] xz : xiuzhi [Preparation of the Drug] zw : zhengwu [Correction of Errors] zz : zhuzhi [Main Indications] A citation to a Bencao gangmu recipe for insect repellent made from camel dung would thus look like: BC 50.tuo [Camel].shi [Dung].zz For text of citations I relied on Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu, ed. Liu Hengru and Liu Shanyong. 2 vols. (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2002). Liu and Liu based their work on the 1596 Jinling edition, with amendments and notes based on the 1603 Jiangxi Bencao gangmu and nine other Ming and Qing editions. The editing and annotations are excellent but should be treated with a critical eye: the editors have altered the main text in places where they found “mistakes,” though they indicate where they have done so. The reader must therefore read the text with an active eye on the embedded footnotes.


1. See Jorge Luis Borges (with Margarita Guerrero), The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (London: Vintage, 2002 [1969]). 159

NOTES TO PAGES 2–5

2. The monkey can be found in ibid., 101. 3. Foucault and the Chinese encyclopedia are described in more detail later in this book. The idea of China as a mythic utopia in Western works, including those of Borges and Foucault, has motivated a growing body of recent work. See, for example, Zhang Longxi, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry 15.1 (Autumn 1988): 108–131; Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002); and Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, eds., Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 4. On Huang Yong Ping’s engagement with the Borgesian idea of the Chinese encyclopedia and its manifestation in Foucault’s work, see Doryun Chong, “Huang Yong Ping: A Lexicon,” in Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong, eds., House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 102–103. 5. See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 17– 31, for a wonderful account of the appearance of a dragon in the sixteenth-century Italian countryside and its resonance in the work of Ulisse Aldrovandi. 6. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Though Shapin focused on early modern Britain, his conclusions might (as he suggests in the book) be extended more broadly to scholarly networks across early modern Europe. 7. On Cassiano dal Pozzo’s paper museum, see David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Several volumes composing a catalogue raisonné of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s collection have been published to date by Harvey Miller publishers, with further volumes to come. 8. On the role of artists in making early modern natural knowledge, see Sachiko Kusukawa, “The Uses of Pictures in the Formation of Learned Knowledge: The Cases of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius,” in S. Kusukawa and I. Maclean, eds., Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–96. 9. On late Ming publishing, see Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002); Lucille Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street: The Commercial Publishers of Ming Nanjing,” in Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 107–151; and Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). The Matteo Ricci quotation is taken from Louis Gallagher, ed. and trans., China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci, 1583–1610 (New York: Random House, 1967), 21. Ricci also describes the natural resources of the Chinese empire (Gallagher, China in the Sixteenth Century, 10–18), often mentioning the relative cost of local plant and animal products. 160


10. On the social connections of Li’s family, see Kenneth J. Hammond, “Li Shizhen: Early Modern Scientist,” in Kenneth J. Hammond and Kristin Stapleton, eds., The Human Tradition in Modern China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 8. For a biographical sketch of the Li family penned by the grandson of one of Li’s friends from the well-connected Gu family, see Gu Jingxing, Baimao tang ji [Works from White Sprout Hall] (Princeton University East Asian Library Collection, 1685 preface), juan 45. 11. On the importance of medical texts to the business of late Ming publishers in Nanjing, see Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street,” 135–136. 12. On late Ming connoisseurship, collection, and literature of objects, see Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). 13. For a comparative perspective on the connection between medicine and natural history in early modern Europe, see Harold J. Cook, “Physicians and Natural History,” in Nicholas Jardine, James Secord, and Emma Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–105. On the emergence of natural history as a discipline in early modern Europe, see Paula Findlen, “The Formation of a Scientific Community: Natural History in SixteenthCentury Italy,” in Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, eds., Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 369–400, and Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 14. Compare the discussion of curiosity and the preternatural in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 120–122. 15. Following a path laid by Joseph Needham, some literature has done this explicitly by positing a “Chinese” mode of logic or scientific reasoning. The first half of Robert Wardy, Aristotle in China: Language, Categories, and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chronicles the seeming scores of historians, anthropologists, and linguists who have tried (and in some cases are still trying) to sketch a picture of something they call “Chinese logic” or “Chinese thought” by analyzing features of some idealized “Chinese language.” The shaping of science by “ancient Chinese ways of thinking” (p. 2) as they manifest in logic and language is explored in detail by Christoph Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7.1, Language and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), was devoted to explicating the principles of Chinese scientific thought as developed by “indigenous naturalists” (p. 216). I am suggesting here that there is an alternative path to reinforcing binaries between Chinese/Western, irrational/scientific, and indigenous/colonial knowledge systems. 16. See, for example, Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 90, and footnotes throughout, and David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan, or, Selections of Refined Literature, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982–1996). 17. See Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and 161


Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), and Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), for examples of a growing body of comparative studies of early Greek and Chinese ways of knowing the world and the body. Roger Hart, “Beyond Science and Civilization: A PostNeedham Critique,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 16 (1999): 88– 114, summarizes the dangers of a comparative study of civilizations, including the reification of binaries that assume static units (civilizations, languages, cultures) on either side of the comparison. Reading Hart’s article alongside the introduction to Lloyd and Sivin, The Way and the Word, provides a helpful introduction to the potential pitfalls and benefits of comparative scholarship. 18. Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), uses examples from Yoruba mathematical education to challenge the idea that number expresses some kind of universal logic and, implicitly, the very coherence of the idea of “universal logic” itself. 19. I provide here only the briefest gesturing toward a set of philosophical problems with a deep literature and wide-ranging connections to several other scholarly fields. For a concise introduction to the philosophical literature on relativism, the interested reader might begin with Chris Swoyer, “Relativism,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/relativism/ (accessed December 12, 2008). For classic exploration and refutation of the idea that knowledge can unproblematically represent the natural world, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For several stimulating articles on ideas of relativism, see Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On the notion of styles of reason, including some historiographical background, see “‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers,” and “Language, Truth, and Reason,” both reprinted in Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). On the relevance of philosophical debates over relativism for the history and philosophy of science, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). A number of philosophers have recently weighed in on this longstanding debate. With his notion of “cosmopolitanism,” Kwame Anthony Appiah has attempted to create a medial space between extreme positions of relativism and universalism. Paul Boghossian’s recent work is another insightful and carefully argued intervention, rejecting the strong relativism that has become so popular among historians and anthropologists of science in the wake of postcolonial efforts to recenter or decenter the histories of science and medicine. See K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), and Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

1. CONCEPTION: BIRTH OF A NATURALIST

1. BC 32.hujiao.fm. 2. This training, typical of Ming medical scholars, played a significant role 162


in providing the foundation of classical scholarship that Li brought to his later treatises. See Robert Hymes, “Not Quite Gentlemen? Doctors in Sung and Yuan,” Chinese Science 8 (January 1987): 9–76, on ru physicians in the Song period. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), provides a comprehensive survey of the training involved in preparing for the civil examinations in Ming and Qing China. 3. See Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen pingzhuan [Critical biography of Li Shizhen] (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 1991), 341. 4. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 30. 5. See Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen, 46, and Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 145–146. For a brief biography of Li Yanwen (zi Ziyu, hao Yuechi), see Gu Jingxing, Baimao tang ji [Works from White Sprout Hall], 1685, juan 45. Part of Sizhen faming has been preserved within Li Shizhen’s own work on pulse diagnosis, Binhu maixue [Binhu’s study of vessels]. 6. The line is from poem 56, “Kaopan.” I base my translation loosely on that of James Legge. Arthur Waley’s translation renders the line quite differently: “Drumming and dancing along the bank, how high-spirited was that tall man!” Arthur Waley and Joseph Allen, trans., The Book of Songs (New York: Grove, 1996), 47. Waley reads kaopan (literally, bending the legs) as the name of a dance characterized by such movements, while Legge understands the phrase to mean “rearing a hut.” Given the context, Li’s reading of the poem most likely resembled Legge’s interpretation. 7. See Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen, 109–118, for the text of this and the other extant poem by Li Shizhen. 8. Fragments of Li’s Huashe zhuan [Account of the dappled snake] have been preserved as quotations in the Bencao gangmu. 9. See Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen, 74, for a brief account of Li’s text and its place in this tradition. See Xia Kuizhou et al., eds., Li Shizhen yixue quanshu [Complete medical works of Li Shizhen] (Beijing: Zhongguo zhongyiyao chubanshe, 1996), 1241–1272, for reprints of Binhu maixue (1241–1250), Qijing bamai kao (1253–1268), and Maijue kaozheng (1271–1272). See Ma Jixing and Hu Naichang, “Bencao gangmu banben de kaocha [Investigation into the printed editions of the Bencao gangmu],” in Li Shizhen yanjiu lunwen ji [Collected essays on Li Shizhen research] (Wuhan: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1985), 115. For a list of publication dates of these three works, see Qian Yuanming, ed., Li Shizhen yanjiu [Research on Li Shizhen] (Guangzhou: Guangdong keji chubanshe, 1984), 13–15. 10. The Binhu maixue and Qijing bamai kao were included in the 1603 edition of the Bencao gangmu, the second major printing, which was widely considered to be superior to the first edition. Because of their inclusion in the successful 1603 edition of the Bencao, these two texts were fairly widely accessible. 11. After retiring to Poverty Place, Li collected his poems in a work called Kesuoguan shiji [Collected poems from Poverty Place]. Only two of these poems are extant. Li’s other extant poem was also dedicated to a local friend and featured 163


botanical imagery: a tribute to Liu Xuehu, artist and author of a work called Meipu [Treatise on plums]. The entire poem reads: “Xuehu’s embellishment is of remarkable power, / His criticism and his literary taste move even the Emperor. / I yearn to write a note on flowered paper and send it to him near Yao and Zhe, / His drawings of plums and his poems are the best in Jiangdong.” 12. Chongsha yuanhe is a set phrase standing for the death of soldiers on the battlefield. See Taiping yulan [Imperial digest of the Taiping era] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), vol. 4, juan 916, 4060. The Taiping yulan cited Baopuzi as the source for this story. 13. On the Nanjing print market in the late Ming, see Lucille Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street: The Commercial Publishers of Ming Nanjing,” in Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 107–151. 14. See Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen, 355, and Wu Zuoxin, “Li Shizhen shengping nianbiao [Chronological table of events in the life of Li Shizhen],” in Li Shizhen yanjiu lunwen ji [Collected essays on Li Shizhen research] (Wuhan: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1985), 21–37. For a brief discussion of the meeting between Li and Wang, see Kenneth J. Hammond, “Li Shizhen: Early Modern Scientist.” According to Hammond, Wang sent Li the preface in 1590 rather than Li visiting to pick it up. Most other scholars of Li Shizhen’s life agree that Li actually visited Taicang twice. 15. For the text of this poem, see Wu Zuoxin, “Li Shizhen,” 32. The poem is collected in Wang Shizhen, Yanzhou sibu gao [Drafts in the four categories from Yanzhou]. 16. Translation based on Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 31. 17. An alternate reading of “ten slow years” is also possible. Wang could be comparing Li’s ten-year “revision” of the Bencao between Li and Wang’s first and second meetings to the efforts of Tao Hongjing, who spent roughly ten years on Maoshan working on the famous bencao that had helped inspire Li’s own work. This would place the composition of Wang’s poem in 1590, the year of Li’s second visit to Taicang, rather than in 1580, the year of his first visit and the year to which the poem has been traditionally assigned. In that case, Wang also may be poking fun at himself for his ten-year delinquency in composing the Bencao gangmu preface. 18. Ge Hong (284–364) composed a book called the Fuhou beiji fang [Prescriptions from under the shoulder]. In the Bencao gangmu, this phrase recurred in the titles of two works Li cited, as a component of prescriptions (in which plants or seeds would be placed into the pouch as part of the preparation of a drug) and as a symbol of medical doctors. 19. Tao is believed to have authored the stone inscription Yihe ming. The inscription bears the note, “written by Huayang zhenyi,” an alternate name for Tao Hongjing. 20. For an account of the relationship between Wang and Tanyangzi, see Ann Waltner, “T’an-yang-tzu and Wang Shih-chen: Visionary and Bureaucrat in the Late Ming,” Late Imperial China 8:1 (June 1987): 105–133. Kenneth James Hammond, “History and Literati Culture: Towards an Intellectual Biography of 164


Wang Shizhen (1526–1590)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1994), also briefly discusses this relationship. 21. This connection is explored more fully in Chapter 2. 22. Hu’s decision to publish the Bencao in the context of late Ming commercial medical publishing is briefly discussed in Lucille Chia, “Of Three Mountains Street,” 135–136. On the history of printed editions of the Bencao, see Ma Jixing and Hu Naichang, “Bencao gangmu,” 113–144. A list of printed editions of the Bencao is given in Qian Yuanming, ed., Li Shizhen yanjiu [Research on Li Shizhen] (Guangdong: Guangdong keji chubanshe, 1984), 11–13, though caution must be used in understanding these dates: Qian uses the date a preface was written as the date of the edition. 23. According to Xie Zongwan, 98 of the 1109 illustrations in the first edition of the Bencao seem to have been copied from the Zhenglei bencao. See Xie Zongwan, “Bencao gangmu tuban de kaocha [Investigation into the published illustrations of the Bencao gangmu],” in Li Shizhen yanjiu lunwen ji [Collected essays on Li Shizhen research] (Wuhan: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1985), 191– 193. 24. BC 1.Shu bencao, and BC 1.Jiuhuang bencao. 25. BC 1.Tujing bencao. 26. For a complete reprint of Li Jianyuan’s memorial, see Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen, 332–334. 27. This information is included in a brief biography of Li Shizhen in the Ming shi [Ming history], first published in 1739. The biography appears in juan 299, in the 187 entry of the biography (lie zhuan) section. See Ming shi [Ming history], 28 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), 25:7653. 28. Joseph Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.1, Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 312 fn. b. 29. Xia Liangxin (jinshi 1572) was honorary Grand Coordinator (xunfu) and governor of Jiangxi. 30. Surviving copies attest to the rather uneven quality of the first printing. In the 1596 edition of the Bencao gangmu held by the Asian Medicine Division of the Library of Congress, for example, many of the illustrations are unevenly inked, and in one case, the intended image is entirely blacked out. 31. BC.Chongke bencao gangmu xu [Preface for the recarving of the Bencao gangmu, by Xia Liangxin]. Zhang Dingsi (1543–1603) was Surveillance Commissioner (anchashi) in Jiangxi. 32. For an account of the Jinling (1596), Jiangxi (1603), Wulin qianya (1640), Weiguzhai (1855), and other editions of the Bencao, see Ma Jixing and Hu Naichang, “Bencao gangmu,” 113–144. 33. There is substantial and growing literature on natural history and bencao studies (Japanese: honzÃgaku) in Japan. On Japanese and other East Asian editions of the Bencao gangmu, see Pan Jixing, “Bencao gangmu zhi dongbo ji xijian,” in Qian Chaochen and Wen Changlu, eds., Li Shizhen yanjiu jicheng (Beijing: Zhongyi guji chubanshe, 2003), 46–71. Many Japanese revisions of and commentaries to the Bencao gangmu (Japanese reading: HonzÃ kÃmoku) are extant, and several of them are conveniently collected in Zhongguo bencao quanshu (Beijing: Huaxia chu ban she, 1999), vols. 308–356. On the reception of the Bencao 165


gangmu and its founding role in the development of honzÃgaku in Tokugawa Japan, see Federico Marcon, “The Names of Nature: The Development of Natural History in Japan, 1600–1900” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2007), 13–76. Marcon, “The Names of Nature,” 46–51, provides a brief overview of the transmission of major Chinese bencao texts to Japan prior to the Bencao gangmu, while 64–65 list the major Japanese editions of Li’s text. The articles collected in W. F. Vande Walle, ed. Dodonaeus in Japan: Translation and the Scientific Mind in the Tokugawa Period (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), contain much information of interest to the development of honzÃgaku and to translators of Chinese and Dutch herbals. The most well-developed literature on this topic is in Japanese. An exhaustive chronicle of Chinese (in pt. 1) and Japanese (in pt. 2) bencao works can be found in Tameto Okanishi, HonzÃ gaisetsu (Osaka: Sogensha, 1977). Okanishi includes an annotated list of major Chinese editions (pp. 220–229) and Japanese editions (pp. 229–233) of the Bencao gangmu. On the foundational role of the Bencao gangmu in the development of natural history and natural studies in Japan, see Tsutomu Sugimoto, Edo no hakubutsu gakushatachi (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1985). On the role of Ono Ranzan in developing natural history in Japan, with extensive discussion of his work on the Bencao gangmu, see ShÃji EndÃ, HonzÃgaku to yÃgaku: Ono Ranzan gakutÃ no kenkyÄ (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2005). For an explicitly comparative overview of natural history traditions in the East and West, including early Japanese scholarship on the Bencao gangmu, see Saburo Nishimura, Bunmei no naka no hakubutsugaku: SeiÃ to Nihon (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1999). 34. See Marcon, “The Names of Nature,” 17–18 and 21. According to Marcon, the Bencao gangmu was likely circulating in Japan prior to its official introduction in 1607, and Razan claimed to have read the text as of 1604. 35. On Korean scholarship on the Bencao gangmu, see Pan Jixing, “Bencao gangmu,” 56–57. On the study of Chinese bencao texts in Korea, see Soyoung Suh, “Korean Medicine Between the Local and the Universal: 1600–1945” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2006), 36–90. 36. The “ancient Japanese encyclopedia” that Darwin cited was also heavily based on the Bencao gangmu. See Pan Jixing, “Charles Darwin’s Chinese Sources,” Isis 75.3 (September 1984): 530–534. 37. BC.xu [Preface]. From “sanfen wudian,” the records of the sanhuang [Three wise kings: Fuxi, Suiren, and Shennong, or kings of heaven, earth, and man] and the wudi [Five august emperors: Huangdi, Zhuanxu, Diku, Yao, and Shun], the most ancient Chinese records. 38. Translations of the term xingli vary. Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany, 320, call it “organic principles of natural things”; Georges Métailié, “The Bencao gangmu of Li Shizhen,” in Elisabeth Hsu, ed., Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 223, calls it “nature and principle.” 39. BC.xu [Preface]. 40. See BC 1.lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages]. 41. According to calculations made by the editors of the 2002 Huaxia edition of the Bencao gangmu, the proper number here should be 43, though the 1596 edition of Li’s text records the number as 39. 166


42. The significance of gewu and ru studies to Li’s project are explained below. 43. BC.fanli [Li Shizhen’s preface to the Bencao gangmu]. 44. On the significance of the commentary tradition in Chinese literature, see John Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 45. Though its authorship and dating are uncertain, the Erya was probably a composite text that took shape over time and was known in some form at least since the compilation of the Hanshu [History of the Han dynasty] in the first and second centuries. For an introduction to the Erya, see W. South Coblin, “Erh ya,” in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographic Guide (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993). On the importance of the Erya and its associated commentaries to natural studies, see Elman, On Their Own Terms, 38– 41. 46. On terms for animals in the Erya, see Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 30–32. 47. On collections and classification in the Ming, see Elman, On Their Own Terms, 24–60. 48. For a useful collection of the Erya plus four works of commentary, see Lang Kuijin, compiler, Wuya [Fivefold refinement] (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1973). 49. See Coblin, “Erh ya,” 96–97. 50. The importance of claims to observation as an epistemic device are addressed more fully below. See Erya zhushu [Erya annotated and expanded], annotated by Guo Pu, expanded by Xing Bing (Taipei: Taiwan zhonghua shuju, 1965). 51. See Erya zhushu, juan 1, shigu [Explanation of archaic meanings], pt. 1, 6. On textual exegesis and zhushu (notes and commentaries) glossing of the Classics in the Song, see Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2001), 75–76. 52. See Lu Dian, Piya [Further refinement], in Ren Jiyu, ed., Zhongguo kexue jishu dianji tonghui [Collected classic works of Chinese science and technology] (Zhengzhou: Henan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993–1995), vol. 3, pt. 1, 171–329. 53. See Luo Yuan, Erya yi [Wings of Approaching refinement], in Ren Jiyu, ed., Zhongguo kexue jishu dianji tonghui, vol. 3, pt. 1, 345–614. 54. This number is according to my own count. In contrast, Shijing commentaries by Kong Yingda and Mao Chang are cited a total of seven times, Liezi is cited twelve times, Zhuangzi twenty-seven times, Xunzi nine times, Huainanzi fifty times, Ge Hong about seventy-five times, Soushen ji by Gan Bao about ten times. These are just formal citations, and Li frequently alluded to literature without directly citing it, as did many of these authors. The Erya texts that Li listed in the bibliography of the Bencao were Zhang Yi’s Guangya, Kong Fu’s Xiao Erya, Cao Xian’s Boya, Luo Yuan’s Erya yi, Lu Dian’s Piya, and the Piya guangyi. 55. The shi in the title of this work is often translated as “poems,” “odes,” or “songs.” For a concise introduction, see Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), ch. 2. Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Steven Jay Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and 167

NOTES TO PAGE 24

Hermeneutics in Traditional China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), also provide interesting theoretical readings of the work. 56. Lunyu [Analects], 17.9. See Yang Bojun, ed., Lunyu yizhu [Translation and annotation of the Analects] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 185. 57. See Lu Ji, Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu [Commentary on the plants, woods, birds, beasts, bugs, and fish in the Mao Poems] in Ren Jiyu, ed., Zhongguo kexue jishu dianji tonghui, vol. 3, pt. 1, 25–46. 58. According to Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany. See also Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon, 23–24 and fn. 39. 59. See Mao Jin, Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu guangyao [Essential points and expansion of the plants, woods, birds, beasts, bugs, and fish of the Mao Poems], in Congshu jicheng xinbian (Taipei: Xinwenfeng, 1985), 43:612–658. 60. The identification of animal and plant names in James Legge’s translation of the Shijing, for example, was partially shaped by his reading of Cai Bian’s (1058–1117) Maoshi mingwu jie [Explication of the names of things in the Mao Poems], written about 1080. The texts consulted by Arthur Waley in rendering his translation are listed in Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (New York: Grove, 1996), 324–325, and do not include the Maoshi mingwu jie. At some level, differences in plant and animal identification among modern commentators is expected. A comparison of the Shijing translations of Bernhard Karlgren (Stockholm: The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950), James Legge (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corporation, 1967), and Arthur Waley, for example, reveals many variations in the ways each author chooses to translate the plants and creatures he identifies in the Shijing text. The chart below compares the authors’ translations from the first eleven poems, providing the page number of the relevant translated phrase in each case: Poem 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

Term

Karlgren

Legge

Waley

jujiu xingcai ge huangniao juan’er xi gelei

fish hawk (1) duckweed (1) dolichos (2) orioles (2) mouse-ears (4) rhinoceros’ horn (4) dolichos’ creepers (5)

Osprey (5) water mallow (5) cloth-plant (6) oriole (6) cocklebur (7) horn (7) cloth-creeper (7)

zhongsi tao tu fouyi qiaoqiao cuoxin, anyi qichu

ts’ü—kiu bird (2) hing waterplant (2) ko creeper (3) yellow birds (3) küan—er plant (3) rhinoceros (horn) (3) ko creepers and lei creepers (4) locusts (4) peach-tree (4) hare (5) plantain (5) Tall-rising is that mixed firewood, we cut the (leaves of) the wildthorn (6)

locusts (6) peach tree (6) rabbit (7) plantains (8) Many the fagots bound and piled; the thorns I’d hew still more to make (9)

fangyu lin

bream (7) lin (7)

bream (10) lin (10)

locusts (8) peach-tree (8) rabbit (9) plantain (9) Tall grows that tangle of brushwood; let us lop the wildthorn (10) bream (11) unicorn (11)

168


This sort of variance in identification of plants and creatures recurs throughout a comparison of the three translations. However, the issue is compounded when we realize that the translators sometimes differ in whether they identify a set of characters as a plant or an animal at all. This was an issue not merely for modern translators of the Shijing, but also for medieval and early modern Chinese commentators on the text. 61. See BC.yinju gujin yijia shumu [Titles of old and new works by medical authors, cited and consulted], and BC.yinju gujin jingshi baijia shumu [Titles of old and new classics, histories, and assorted works, cited and consulted]. These two lists came directly after the annotated list of previous bencao that we see more of below. Taken together, these three lists formed Li’s bibliography. 62. On the zhiguai genre, see Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). 63. This category has been translated as “scientific treatises,” an anachronistic characterization that is perhaps better understood as “treatises on natural objects,” including plants (the Luoyang mudan ji [Treatise on Luoyang tree peonies] by Ouyang Xiu, the Zhupu [Treatise on bamboo] by Dai Kaizhi), animals (the Xiepu [Crab treatise] by Fu Gong (transliterated as Fu Hong in some sources), the Qinjing [Bird classic] by Shi Kuang), implements (the Mojing [Ink classic] by Zhao Guanzhi, the Xiangpu [Treatise on incense] by Hong Chu), and foodstuffs (the Chajing [Tea classic] by Lu Yu), to name but a few examples. Many of these have been collected and published in modern collectanea. See, for example, Ren Jiyu, ed., Zhongguo kexue jishu dianji tonghui, vol. 3, and Congshu jicheng xinbian, vol. 44. For an extensive treatment of pulu literature, see Martina Siebert, Pulu: “Abhandlungen und Auflistungen” zu Materieller Kultur und Naturkunde im Traditionellen China (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). 64. The Bowuzhi was often invoked in Song and Ming works on plants and animals, and, in fact, Li cited the text over seventy times. Another frequently cited text was an associated commentary, the Xu Bowuzhi [Extending the Records of broad learning], a Song text by Li Shi (b. 1108), expanded and emended in the Ming by Wu Guan (fl. 1585–1586). For a punctuated edition of the Bowuzhi with a Kangxi-era preface, see Congshu jicheng xinbian (Taipei: Xinwenfeng, 1985), 43:536–556. The Xu Bowuzhi is in the same volume, 557–574. 65. Both the auspicious fruit (pingshi) and the rainmaker bird (shangyang) were discussed in the same passage in Liu Xiang’s (8th–7th century bce) Shuoyuan [Garden of anecdotes], in the section on “differentiating things” (bianwu). 66. BC.xu [Preface]. Dongbi was the zi, or style name, of Li Shizhen. 67. On Confucius’s identification of these omens by recalling songs, see David Schaberg, “Song and the Historical Imagination in Early China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59.2 (December 1999): 342–343. 68. Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 105. 69. On Li Shizhen as a founding figure of modern bencaoxue and bowuxue in China and Japan, see Tsutomu Sugimoto, Edo no hakubutsu gakushatachi, 31–54. For a broadly comparative history of natural history in East Asia and Europe that explicitly compares the Bowuzhi to the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, see 169


Saburo Nishimura, Bunmei no naka no hakubutsugaku. Since bowu is currently used in the name for “museums” in modern Chinese (bowuguan or bowuyuan), the phrase has also become associated with natural objects and with the particularity of artifacts, with bowuxue now commonly translated in scholarly and popular works as “natural history.” 70. See Métailié, “The Bencao gangmu,” 223. Willard Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in Dennis Twitchett and Frederick Mote, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644, pt.2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 710, translates it as “investigating things.” Daniel K. Gardner renders the phrase as “apprehending the principle in things,” in Daniel K. Gardner, Learning to be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Bruce Rusk, “Not Written in Stone: Ming Readers of the Great Learning and the Impact of Forgery,” HJAS 66.1 (June 2006): 189–231, translates the phrase as “approaching things.” Elman, On Their Own Terms, 3–9, is also an excellent account of the issue of gewu in a broader context of Song and Ming scholarship. 71. On Zhu Xi’s importance to the discourse of gewu among Ming literati, see Elman, On Their Own Terms, 5–9. 72. On the probability that Li derived his title and concept from the Zizhi Tongjian gangmu, see Zheng Jinsheng, “Shilun Bencao gangmu bianji zhong de jige wenti [Discussion of some questions of editing within the Bencao gangmu],” in Li Shizhen yanjiu lunwen ji [Collected essays on Li Shizhen research] (Hubei: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1985), 81–82. 73. BC 31.zhiju [Raisin tree].shi [Fruit]. 74. For a discussion of the possible problems in using this term, see Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 4–5. In Unschuld’s view, the term “pharmacopoeia” should be reserved for describing official drug codes, the first of which was not published in China until 1936. 75. See Bernard Read, Chinese Materia Medica (Peking Natural History Bulletin: 1923–1931, reprinted 1982 by Southern Materials Center, Taipei); Métailié, “The Bencao gangmu”; and Nathan Sivin, “Li Shih-chen (1518–1593),” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 8 (New York: Scribner, 1973), 391. 76. Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany. 77. Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 7. 78. For a detailed chronicle of the origins and development of the bencao genre in China, see Keiji Yamada, ed., ChÄgoku kodai kagaku shiron (Kyoto: KyÃto daigaku jinbunkagaku kenkyÄo, 1989), 451–567. For another account of the nature of bencao as a textual tradition, see Marta Hanson, “Why Were The PenTs’ao (Chinese Materia Medica) Written?” (Unpublished paper, awarded the Jerry Stannard Memorial Award in May 1992). Hanson uses a close reading of seven bencao prefaces to understand the genre in the context of Neo-Confucian ethics. 79. See BC 1.lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages]. Li gave the name of each bencao work included, followed by a capsule history, which occasionally related historical accounts by previous medical authors. 80. The dates and attribution provided reflect Li’s opinions as stated in his an170


notations to the list. In some cases he is probably mistaken, and I provide explanations and, where necessary, corrected dates in the footnotes to Appendix 1. For a more recent list of what one modern author considers important bencao works, see P. S. Kwan, Bencao yanjiu rumen [Primer on bencao research] (Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 1999), 6–12. 81. There are many editions of this text available. I have used Shennong bencao jing jizhu, collated by Ma Jixing (Beijing: Renmin weisheng chubanshe, 1995). 82. The earliest known reference to Shennong in conjunction with drugs is in the Huainanzi, which claimed that he tried several drugs for himself in order to identify the toxic plants and thereby spare others from mistakenly ingesting poisonous substances. On the early history of literary references to Shennong, see Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 11–17. In the work of Mencius (372–289 bce) and in the “Great Commentary” to the Yijing [Classic of change], Shennong was the paradigmatic husbandman. 83. See Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany, 244, and Métailié, “The Bencao gangmu,” 224. This contrasts with the timing provided for the text in Table 1, which (as with the other data provided in the Table) instead reflects Li Shizhen’s notion of the timing of the Bencao jing. 84. For a list and a brief description of some of the Ming and Qing commentaries and revised editions of the Bencao jing, see Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 183–204. 85. Su Jing, Xinxiu bencao [Newly revised bencao] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), 619–709. An extended discussion of the work can be found in Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 44–50. 86. See Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998). 87. On the transmission of Sanskrit medical terminology and practices into Chinese as a result of Buddhist activity, see Chen Ming, Shufang yiyao: chu tu wenshu yu xiyu yixue [Medical manuscripts discovered in Dunhuang and Western regions: foreign medicine in medieval China] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2005). For the relevance of Buddhist activity in shaping material culture, see John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 88. Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany, 355–439, provides brief treatments of botanical monographs on citrus fruits, bamboo, peonies, chrysanthemums, orchids, roses, and other ornamental plants. 89. The term hu was often used to refer broadly to foreign peoples, or to the people of Central Asia that came into contact with, or resided in, the western or northwestern borders of China. For a lengthy description of the history of the appellation hu in Chinese drug and place names, see Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1919), 194–202. On hu and fan in the context of medieval Buddhist texts in China, see Daniel Boucher, “On Hu and Fan Again: The Transmission of ‘Barbarian’ Manuscripts to China,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23.1 (2000): 7–28. 90. Li Xun, Haiyao bencao [Compendium of overseas drugs] (Shang ZJ, 171


comp.) (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1999). In Zhongguo bencao quanshu, 7:1–40. See also Chen Ming, “The Transmission of Foreign Medicine via the Silk Roads in Medieval China: A Case Study of Haiyao Bencao,” Asian Medicine 3 (2007): 241– 264. 91. See Song Xian, Huihui yaofang kaoshi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999), 1:3. 92. Many of the texts cited in the extant portions of the Haiyao bencao were regional accounts like the Linhai zhi, Guangzhou ji, Yiyu ji, and Jiaozhou ji, among others. 93. On the composition of the Zhenglei bencao, see Asaf Moshe Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200 (London: Routledge, 2009), 116–121. Li described some Song and Ming revisions of the Zhenglei bencao in BC 1.lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages]. See also Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 70–82, and Needham and Gweidjen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany, 282–288. 94. On Song imperial pharmacies, see Asaf Moshe Goldschmidt, “Commercializing Medicine or Benefiting the People: The First Public Pharmacy in China,” Science in Context 21.3 (2008): 311–350. 95. Goldschmidt, Evolution of Chinese Medicine, 121, describes the innovation of the Zhenglei bencao in incorporating formularies with collections of materia medica. 96. Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 232, discusses this text, printing the title with an alternate form for zhong. 97. For a collection of Jin, Song, Ming, and Qing monographic works, see the Congshu jicheng xinbian, vol. 44. 98. Prominent Ming examples included the Shennong bencao jingshu [Commentary to the Shennong bencao jing] and the Bencao shengya banji [Four beautiful aspects of bencao, divided in half]. 99. The term wuxing is most commonly translated as “Five Phases,” “Five Agents,” or “Five Elements.” Most contemporary scholars prefer not to use the “Five Elements” translation out of concern that it invites a direct comparison with the Aristotelian elements, from which the Chinese concept differs considerably. “Five Phases” and “Five Agents” are preferable in that they convey the transitory and not necessarily the material aspect of the wuxing. For “Five Agents,” see Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts (London: Kegan Paul International, 1998), 9. It must also be kept in mind that the wuxing sometimes did have a very material sense for early modern authors (for Song Yingxing (b. 1587), for example) and must be understood in context. For the classic treatments of this concept in Western languages, see Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. Derk Bodde, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 19–23, and Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 232–273. A helpful discussion of the wuxing (here called “The Five Evolutive Phases”) in the context of Chinese medicine can be found in Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine: Systems of Correspondence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 43–54. A clear treatment of the wuxing 172


in the philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) is found in Yung Sik Kim, The Natural Philosophy of Chu Hsi (1130–1200) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000), Chapter 4. 100. Charlotte Furth describes the system of yin and yang as “an overarching binary principle of growth and decline governing the tempo and pattern of change in phenomenal things,” in Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21. 101. In his pivotal work on the history of Chinese bencao, Paul Unschuld (see Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 21 and 146–147) has described a trend in Ming bencao literature away from an emphasis on theories of cosmological correspondence that had characterized literature of the Jin-Yuan period. According to this theory, while medical works in the Jin-Yuan featured structural architecture and guiding theory based in notions of wuxing and yin and yang, the literature of the late Ming “reacted” to the rigid intellectual constraints this structure implied (sometimes referred to as “suffocating,” in language reminiscent of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in its use of terms like “crisis” and “reaction”) and instead took a more philological or technical turn. Unschuld went on to argue that Li Shizhen was heavily influenced by the work of his father, Li Yanwen, in arguing on the basis of Jin-Yuan medical theories. While Li did cite from his father’s works on ginseng and pulse diagnosis, his use of the notions of phase-mediated transformation in the natural world was quite different from the arguments of his father. The elder Li’s concern was largely with the correlation between phases and the zang (organs or functions) of the body, whereas Li tended to treat water, fire, earth, metal, and wood simultaneously as correlative concepts and as physical stuff, broadening his concern to encompass the natural world as much as the human body.

2. GENERATION: ANATOMY OF A NATURALIST

1. See BC 17.mantuoluo hua [Datura blossom].sm. Datura was best known as “nightshade of the wind” and “nightshade of the mountains” (fengqie’er and shanqiezi). 2. An interesting discussion of the issue of “experience” can be found in Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in James Chandler et al., eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 363–387, and Thomas Holt’s response in the same volume. 3. On the importance of mantuoluo hua as a sleep aid and anesthetic in modern Chinese medicine, and for a brief account of its history, see Zhongyao da cidian [Dictionary of Chinese drugs], 2002, 2:1719–1722 (yangjin hua), esp. 1721. 4. The account is from BC 17.mantuoluo hua [Datura blossom].fm. 5. Peter Dear and others have stressed the significance of experience and experiment in shaping the science of early modern Europe. For a recent historiographical overview of this issue, see Peter Dear, “The Meanings of Experience,” in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106–131. An173


other example of this type of work is Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). 6. This relocation is one of the major revisions Li Jianyuan cited in his memorial presenting the Bencao gangmu to the Emperor in 1596. Wubeizi was a popular drug prescribed for more than 50 different types of illness in the Bencao in Li’s section on illnesses, BC 3–4.Baibing zhuzhi yao [Drugs for treating one hundred illnesses]. For a description of Li’s careful investigation of the drug, see BC 39.wubeizi [Insect gall]. 7. Though some historians place the rise of experience as a reliable way of knowing about nature squarely within the development of concrete studies (shixue) in the late Ming, experience (much like observation) was invoked as an important means of testing others’ claims in natural history writing as early as the Song. On the significance of the combined roles of “data drawn from one’s own perceptions of the myriad things in the realm of heaven-and-earth” and “data drawn from earlier, not necessarily ancient, texts” in the late Ming, and especially in the work of Li Shizhen, see Willard Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in Dennis Twitchett and Frederick Mote, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 781–784. 8. BC 43.shuishe [Water snake].pi [Skin].ff. The process of skinning and drying snakes for medical preparation can be found in BC 43.ranshe [Python].dan [Gallbladder]. 9. This animal was also known as chuanshanjia. See BC 43.lingli [Pangolin].jj. 10. See BC 52.munaiyi [Human mummy confection]. 11. Li treated the Zhouli this way throughout the Bencao. He begins in BC 1.lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages]. Shiliao bencao [Bencao of dietetic remedies]: “Because of the importance of food and medicine in the Zhouli, [Meng Xian, author of the Shiliao bencao] singled out this work, and expanded significantly on it.” Li also cited the Zhouli as an authority on edible salt (shiyan, 441; rongyan, 445); on the edibility of cattail plants (xiangpu, 925); on biscuits made of sesame dregs (makubing, 974); and on edible grains like millet (liang, 997), wild rice (gumi, 1003), and winter grain (hanju, 1035). The Zhouli was also the basis for some of Li’s claims about tangerines (ju, 1199), an officer in charge of nuts and fruits (xiangshi [Acorns], 1215), wild oranges (zhi, 1394), abalone (baoyu, 1645), ducks (wu, 1700), pheasant meat (zhirou, 1727), and pork (jiazhurou, 1769). There were also several places where Zhouli quotations regarding officers in charge of certain ritual preparations were noted. 12. Li placed this entry first in the Bugs (chong) section of the Bencao, its primacy of place indicating Li’s conception of its importance as a drug. On the significance of honey (and “stone honey” (shimi), which may in fact have been a sugarcane derivative) in late imperial China, see Edward Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 152–154. 13. BC 39.fengmi [Honey].zw. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 174


16. According to the Yixue rumen [Primer on the study of medicine], an influential introductory medical textbook published in the Ming, observation/inspection of a patient’s color, moistness, weight/girth, and eyes was the first step of diagnosing an illness. See Li Chan (fl. 1573–1619), Yixue rumen [Primer on the study of medicine] (Beijing: Zhongguo zhongyiyao chubanshe, 1995). In modern Chinese medicine, the typical steps of diagnosis are observation, auscultation and olfaction, interrogation, pulse taking, and palpation. See Angela Leung, “Medical Instruction and Popularization in Ming-Qing China,” Late Imperial China 24:1 (June 2003): 134. Also see Judith Farquhar, Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Elisabeth Hsu, The Transmission of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999); and Shigehisa Kuriyama, “Visual Knowledge in Classical Chinese Medicine,” in Don Bates, ed., Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 205–234. 17. On Bian Que’s relevance to the importance of visuality in Chinese medicine, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, “Visual Knowledge,” 208–209. For the classic biography of Bian Que, see Shiji [Records of history] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 9:2785. 18. BC.xu [Preface]. 19. For a careful discussion of the language of visuality as it applied to visual art, see Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 111–133. Clunas briefly turns to religious and medical observation on pp. 120 and 129, relying largely on Kuriyama, “Visual Knowledge.” In several respects, the language deployed in the cases Clunas describes differed significantly from the way the same language was used in the Bencao, inviting a more fully developed cultural history of late Ming observation as it manifested in different circumstances: appraisal of painting, drugs, bones, animals, and the like. For a comparative perspective on vision in early modern Europe, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). For an excellent study of vision in the context of scientific instrumentation in eighteenth-century Japan, see Timon Screech, The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). 20. On mirrors, see BC 8.gujing [Old mirrors]. On golden goose feces, see BC 8.jin [Gold].jj. 21. Li used the phrase guanci more than sixty times in the Bencao, according to my count. 22. BC 5.jingquan shui [Water from wells and springs].fm. 23. BC 8.yu [Jade, precious stones].jj. 24. For “far away,” Li used the phrase tianyu, from hetian yu, or jade, from the faraway area of Hotan. 25. BC 51.xi [Rhinoceros].jj. 26. BC 50.goubao [Dog treasure].jj. 27. In Pictures and Visuality, Craig Clunas translates guan as “contemplation” 175


or “visualization,” and he specifically contrasts this with that which the “vulgar” are capable of. Though it might be more likely that an educated person would be capable of the kind of reasoning observation-comparison embodied in guan, describing the distinction between guan and jian in terms of eliteness and “vulgarity” does not encompass Li’s distinction between these modes of observation-based knowledge. 28. BC 51.hu [Tiger].jj. 29. On the history of pharmacies in China, see Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: Historical Artifacts and Images (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 48–50. A variety of imperially sponsored and privately run pharmacies in the Ming offered drug paraphernalia and prescriptions for sale. On the processing of drugs in imperial pharmacies in the Song period, see Asaf Moshe Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200 (London: Routledge, 2009), 121–134. 30. For several pages on the dangers of the drug marketplace, see Bencao mengquan, zonglun [General discussion], in Zhang Ruixian, ed., Bencao mingzhu jicheng [Collected bencao works of note] (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1998), 67– 68. 31. On mantis eggs, see BC 39.sang piaoxiao [Mantis eggs on mulberry tree]. 32. On concerns with drug counterfeiting in the Song medical marketplace, see Asaf Moshe Goldschmidt, “Commercializing Medicine or Benefiting the People: The First Public Pharmacy in China,” Science in Context 21.3 (2008): 311–350, especially pages 328–335. 33. BC 51.xi [Rhinoceros].jj. 34. BC 8.shuijing [Crystal].jj; BC 8.liuli [Colored glaze].jj; BC 8.pusashi [Bodhisattva stone].jj. 35. BC 8.jin [Gold].jj. 36. BC 8.zirantong [Pyrite].jj. 37. BC 42.chanchu [Toad].jj. 38. BC 8.qian [Lead].jj. 39. BC 8.fenxi [Powdered tin].jj. 40. BC 8.manao [Carnelian].jj. 41. BC 9.dansha [Cinnabar].jj. Similar distinguishing of varieties of cinnabar based on leaving marks on paper could also be found in alchemical prescriptions. See, for example, Fabrizio Pregadio, The Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 195. 42. E jiao was a drug made from cow or donkey skin, and it is still marketed in some forms today under the enticing moniker of “Asses’ Glue.” In modern pharmacy, this product is associated particularly with Shandong. See BC 50.e jiao [Donkey glue].jj. 43. On food and sensation in China, see, for example, Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), and Vivienne Lo, “Pleasure, Prohibition, and Pain: Food and Medicine in Traditional China,” in Roel Sterckx, ed., Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 163–185. 44. Sound and musicality pervaded Li’s descriptions of birds. One of his major sources for evidence on fowl was a text attributed to Shi Kuang (sixth century 176


bce), allegedly a music master and court musician of a Duke of Jin (557–532 bce). On the portrayal of Shi Kuang as a music master and, in particular, as a master of bird language in early China, see Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 130, 134, 159, and especially 224. 45. BC 42.qiuyin [Earthworm].fm/jj. 46. On Li’s quarrel with daoshi and daojiao, see Tang Mingbang, Li Shizhen pingzhuan [Critical biography of Li Shizhen] (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 1991), 296–298, and Qian Yuanming, ed., Li Shizhen yanjiu [Research on Li Shizhen] (Guangdong: Guangdong keji chubanshe, 1984), 235. 47. On the complexity of using the language of “Daoism” to describe a collection of scientific and religious beliefs, see Nathan Sivin, “On the Word ‘Taoist’ as a Source of Perplexity, with Special Reference to the Relations of Science and Religion in Traditional China,” in Nathan Sivin, Medicine, Philosophy, and Religion in Ancient China (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), Ch. 6, 304–330. In this chapter, I take “Daoism” as an operative category defined by Li’s own use of related terms. 48. Goulou Peak is on Mount Heng in Hunan. 49. BC 42.chanchu [Toad].jj. 50. Ibid. 51. BC 40.zhizhu [Spider].jj. 52. On earthworms, see BC 42.qiuyin [Earthworm].fm. On bugs that ate Daoist words, see BC 41.yiyu.jj. 53. On the magicians’ (shenxian jia) hidden name for lead (according to Li, they called it shuizhong jin, or “the gold in the water”), see BC 8.qian [Lead].sm. 54. The interweaving of food and ritual in early China is detailed in several articles collected within Sterckx, Of Tripod and Palate. See especially Michael Puett, “The Offering of Food and the Creation of Order: The Practice of Sacrifice in Early China,” 75–95; Roel Sterckx, “Food and Philosophy in Early China,” 34–61; and Constance A. Cook, “Moonshine and Millet: Feasting and Purification Rituals in Ancient China,” 9–33. 55. BC 39.mifeng [Honeybee].jj. The term fan is another name for the honeybee, more typically called mifeng. See Liji, juan 27 for the list of foodstuffs to which Li referred. 56. See Shang Wei, “‘Jin Ping Mei’ and Late Ming Print Culture,” in Judith Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 187–238. Wei treats the Jinpingmei [Plum in the golden vase] as an exemplar of the rise of a “new kind of novel” resulting directly from the widespread availability of popular print materials, such as collections of popular song and jokes, drama miscellanies, handbooks of various sorts, and daily-use encyclopedias, during the late Ming printing boom. 57. Li probably used major collectanea such as Taiping yulan, Shiwu jiyuan [Record of the origins of things and affairs], Shiwen leiju [Affairs and writings, collected and classified], and Baichuan xuehai [Sea of wisdom of one hundred rivers]. On Song, Yuan, and Ming collectanea more broadly, see Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 28–29 and 34–46. 177


58. The Taiping yulan was compiled by a team of scholars in response to an imperial mandate of 977. The encyclopedia consists of excerpted passages from about two thousand works and some complete individual pieces, arranged into categories. 59. BC 1.lidai zhujia bencao [Bencao works through the ages].Haiyao bencao [Bencao of overseas drugs]. See Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 53, for a very brief discussion of mistakes in the Bencao that stemmed from Li’s reliance on secondary sources of citations or from his misreading of texts. 60. On Li’s prolific citation from the Zhenglei bencao and two revisions of the text, the Jingshi zhenglei Daguan bencao [Daguan period bencao, revised and classified, based on classics and histories] aka Daguan bencao, and Zhenghe jingshi zhenglei Daguan bencao [Zhenghe period revision of the Daguan period bencao, revised and classified, based on classics and histories] aka Zhenghe bencao, see Zheng Jinsheng, “Shilun Bencao gangmu bianji zhong de jige wenti,” in Li Shizhen yanjiu lunwen ji [Collected essays on Li Shizhen research] (Wuhan: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1985), 89–95. For a Jin edition of the Zhenglei bencao, see Tang Shenwei, Chongxiu Zhenghe jingshi zhenglei beiyong bencao [Newly amended Bencao of the Zhenghe period, based on classics and histories, revised and classified, organized for practical use] (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1976, reprint of 1204 edition revised by Zhang Cunhui). For a modern reprint of the Daguan bencao, see Tang Shenwei, Daguan bencao [Daguan period bencao] (Hefei: Anhui kexue jishu chubanshe, 2002, reprint of 1108 edition in modern typeface). 61. For a description of literati reading practices and the keeping of “notation books” in the Qing and their roots in Tang and Song biji, see Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2001), 211–214. 62. See Li Shizhen, “Binhu maixue,” in Xia Kuizhou et al., eds., Li Shizhen yixue quanshu [Complete medical works of Li Shizhen] (Beijing: Zhongguo zhongyiyao chubanshe, 1996), 1241. 63. On Li’s citation practices generating occasional misquotation of text and titles of books, see Zheng Jinsheng, “Shilun Bencao gangmu,” 98–103. 64. BC 17.mantuoluo hua [Datura blossom].fm.

INTERLUDE. HERE BE DRAGONS: A READER’S GUIDE TO THE BENCAO GANGMU

1. See Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 2, footnote, for a brief explication of the term. 2. The Zhenglei bencao, in contrast, was thirty juan. 3. See Appendix B for a full list of contents of the Bencao gangmu. 4. On prefaces as vehicles for competitive late Ming scholarly debate, see Katherine Carlitz, “Printing as Performance: Literati Playwright-Publishers of the Late Ming,” in Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 293–294. 178


See 290 for an example of prefaces of drama works being justified by an appeal to “correct errors” of past editions, a trope that recurs in Ming medical prefaces as well. 5. BC.fanli [Li Shizhen’s preface to the Bencao gangmu]. 6. On the illustrations of the Bencao, see Xie Zongwan, “Bencao gangmu tuban de kaocha [Investigation into the published illustrations of the Bencao gangmu],” in Li Shizhen yanjiu lunwen ji [Collected essays on Li Shizhen research] (Wuhan: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1985), 145–199. 7. According to the 1596 edition of the Bencao gangmu held by the Library of Congress, both juan of images were compiled by Li Jianzhong. The images in the first juan were drawn by Li Jianyuan, and those in the second juan were drawn by Li Jianmu. Li’s grandsons, Li Shuzong and Li Shusheng, were credited as final editors of the images in the first and second juan, respectively. 8. Recall that improving the illustrations was one justification for reprinting provided in the prefaces to the 1603 Jiangxi edition. For a list of major changes in the images between these editions, see Carla Nappi, “The Monkey of the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006), 78. 9. Color manuscript editions of Ming bencao typically have more detail and background landscape than Ming woodblock editions do. On color illustrations in some Ming bencao works, see Zheng Jinsheng, “Mingdai huajia caise bencao chatu yanjiu [Research on the color illustrations in Ming bencao],” Xinshi xue 14.4 (2003): 65–120. On the Siku quanshu project and its printing, see R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ienlung Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), esp. 104–120. 10. BC 41.zaoma [Steed of the kitchen stove].cuzhi [Cricket]. 11. The following segments of the Bencao can be found at BC 43.long [Dragon]. 12. This is usually abbreviated as Bencao jing, and I will follow that convention here. 13. Boshan is the abbreviated name for the boshan lu, a type of incense burner shaped like a mountain peak. In the context of this Bencao passage, boshan and chimu refer to the same structure on the dragon’s head, probably shaped like a peak (or boshan lu) and without which the dragon could not ascend to the heavens. The boshan censers, thought to date from the western Han, are also believed to depict mountainous homes of Daoist immortals and to have Daoist resonances. 14. The xianghuo is a special kind of fire inside the body that is stoked by feelings of anger or desire. 15. This is an especially problematic phrase. Sibao has been rendered “hatch by its thoughts” by Bernard Read, and it is one possible (yet less probable) rendering of this phrase. See Bernard Read, Chinese Materia Medica: Dragon and Snake Drugs (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1982), 5. 16. With the phrase shidian, Li might be indicating a particular book, though there is no book of that title (or of a longer title containing those elements) in his bibliography. More likely, he may be using the phrase here in the sense of “Buddhist classics.” 179


17. Kongqing is sometimes translated as “azurite” in modern medical texts and translations. 18. The Five Colors are black (corresponding with water), red (corresponding with fire), green-blue (wood), white (metal), and yellow (earth). The phrase can also indicate a state of simply being variegated or many colored, or beautifully colored. 19. See Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), Wuzazu [Fivefold miscellany] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2000), juan 9, wu bu yi [Things, part I]. 20. The “nine similarities” trope appeared in many natural history texts. In the Wuzazu, Wang Fu was also quoted, but that account credits dragons with having the eyes of a demon (instead of the eyes of a rabbit). See Xie Zhaozhe, Wuzazu, 522. 21. The Chuci anthology was composed between the third century bce and the second century ce. For a succinct introduction to the Chuci collection, see Charles Hartman, “Ch’u-tz’u,” in William H. Nienhauser, ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 347–349. 22. Liang was an area roughly coextensive with today’s Kaifeng in Henan province. Yi was an area in what today is Yunnan. Ba was basically equivalent to today’s eastern Sichuan. 23. Literally, the Five Excrescences (borrowing Robert Campany’s translation for zhi). According to Campany’s insightful treatment of the problem of translating zhi in the works of Ge Hong, “The very term zhi is redolent of the numinous; it clearly does not mean ‘mushroom’ but is a generic word for protrusions or emanations from rocks, trees, herbs, fleshy animals, or fungi (including mushrooms).” See Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27. Typically, these are associated with Daoist adepts and are mentioned in the context of food eaten by sages or Daoists. 24. The Beimeng suoyan was a collection of stories of the life and travails of scholar-officials during the Tang and the Five Dynasties periods. 25. The Shuyi ji was a sixth-century collection of strange and bizarre stories collected by Ren Fang (460–508). 26. There have been many interpretations of so-called “dragon bone” as fossilized animal and human remains. On dragon bones in the Bencao as dinosaur fossils, see Bernard Emms Read, Chinese Materia Medica: Dragon & Snake Drugs (Beijing: Peking Natural History Bulletin, 1934, reprinted 1982 by Southern Materials Center, Taipei). For a more recent case, see “Fossil Dust Used as Drugs in China: Bones of Prehistoric Animals Ground and Sold as Medicine, Scientist Reports,” New York Times, October 28, 1923. On the interpretation of dragon bones as fossils in modern China, see Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 35–37, and occasional pages as indicated in the index. 27. In the calcination process, a material is heated to a temperature below its melting point to remove liquid water, and this dehydration often results in the transformation of the substance into a powder. This can also be accomplished by 180


the use of lime instead of heat. Calcination can be accompanied by oxidation, and the red color described by Li Shizhen might have something to do with this process. 28. The Shilin guangji was a popular encyclopedia compiled in the thirteenth century and revised significantly in the Yuan dynasty. 29. See also Li’s section on swallow meat, where he again commented on the practice of invoking swallows in some prayers (qidao) to attract dragons. BC 48.yan [Swallow].rou [Flesh]. In other late Ming texts, such as the Wuzazu, dragons were also invoked in ceremonies to pray for rain. On the invocation of dragons in rain ceremonies, see Xie Zhaozhe, Wuzazu [Fivefold miscellany] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2000), 522. 30. BC 48.yan [Swallow].jj. 31. BC 48.yan [Swallow].rou [Flesh]. 32. Li explicated his understanding of these concepts at length in his commentary to the Shennong bencao jing in the prefatory material to the Bencao. See BC 1.Shennong benjing mingli [Introduction to the Shennong bencao jing]. For Tao Hongjing’s comments, see Shennong benjing mingli, juan 1. 33. See Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21–23. Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 27, calls this “thermo-influence.” 34. For an introduction to the issue of du in Chinese medicine, see Frédéric Obringer, L’Aconit et l’orpiment: Drogues et poisons en Chine ancienne et médiévale (Paris: Fayard, 1997). Obringer focuses on Song-period texts. 35. Zhen Quan (541–643) wrote the Gujin luyan fang [Old and new prescriptions noted from experience] formulary, among other works. 36. The nature of this disease is unclear, though zhu is used in modern medicine to denote a kind of summer illness, usually suffered by children. 37. The phrase “eclipse of the moon” is a euphemism for a woman’s illness that probably involves irritation of some sort to the genitals. Luo Xiwen, trans. and annot., Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003), has chosen to render this phrase as “erosion of the vulva,” and whatever that exactly is supposed to mean, it sounds like it would be rather uncomfortable. 38. Some reference works translate this as “milkwort.”

3. TRANSFORMATION: ELEMENTS OF CHANGE

1. See the account of this in BC 9.shuiyin [Quicksilver].jj. Li Shizhen credited the story to the Liangshan motan [Brush talk on the two mountains] of Chen Ting (jinshi 1502). 2. See Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu [Exploiting the works of the natural artificer] (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1987), juan 16, 276. In a passage in the discussion of the pigment vermillion (zhu), Song invokes the story of the “mercury sea” (honghai, where hong is an alternate name for shuiyin) and “herb mercury” (caohong). On the Tiangong kaiwu, see the work of Dagmar Schäfer, especially “The Congruence of Knowledge and Action: The Tiangong kaiwu and Its 181


Author Song Yingxing,” in H. J. Vogel, C. Moll-Murata, and Jianze Song, eds., Chinese Handicraft Regulations of the Qing Dynasty: Theory and Application (Munich: Iudicum, 2005), 35–60. 3. BC 9.shuiyin [Quicksilver].sm. 4. BC 5.mulu [Contents and preface]. 5. BC 6.yanghuo yinhuo [Yang and yin fire].jj. 6. BC 8.mulu [Contents and preface]. 7. BC 4.baibing zhuzhiyao [Main indications of drugs for one hundred illnesses].xufa [Beard and mustache hair]. 8. BC 40.renshi [Human lice].jj. 9. For a treatment of this problem in a different context, see Elisabeth Hsu, “Change in Chinese Medicine: Bian and Hua, An Anthropologist’s Approach,” in Viviane Alleton and Alexei Volkov, eds., Notions et perceptions du changement en Chine (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, 1994), 41–58. In her investigation of the use of bian and hua in the Suwen chapter of the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, Hsu finds that hua changes take place invisibly inside the body, whereas bian changes are visible to an observer. 10. According to my own count, while bian occurs more than 300 times in the Bencao, uses of hua top 780. 11. Song Yingxing also treated the Five Phases as both material stuff and correlative principles in much of his work. See Christopher Cullen, “The Science/Technology Interface in Seventeenth-Century China: Song Yingxing on Qi and the Wuxing,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53:2 (1990): 295– 318. 12. According to the Baopuzi, the Five Stones are dansha (cinnabar), xionghuang (orpiment or realgar), baifan (often translated as alum), cengqing, and cishi (often translated as lodestone). 13. For a convenient chart detailing a number of correlative systems of five, see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 22. For Li’s own general statements and lists of the correlations between several fivefold systems, see BC.qiwei yinyang [Quality, flavor, yin, and yang]; wuwei yiji [Recommendations and taboos concerning the Five Flavors]; wuwei piansheng [Dominating and submissive relationships of the Five Flavors]; and biaoben yinyang [Symptoms and root causes of yin and yang]. 14. BC 5.mulu [Contents and preface]. 15. BC 6.yanghuo yinhuo [Yang and yin fire].jj. 16. BC 7.mulu [Contents and preface]. 17. As previously mentioned, the Woods category was not placed in a series after the other four phases, but was nestled within a series of plant-related categories. See BC 34.mulu [Contents and preface]. 18. See Li Jianmin, “Bencao gangmu huobu kaoshi [Fire as medicine: The “fire” section of the Bencao gangmu],” Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 73:3 (2002): 395–441. 19. These include Wu Yiluo’s eighteenth-century Bencao congxin [New compilation of materia medica]. 182


20. Li identified water with the kan trigram (see BC 5.mulu [Contents and preface]), fire with the li trigram (see BC 6.mulu [Contents and preface]), and earth with the kun trigram (see BC 7.mulu [Contents and preface]). 21. For a sustained study of the Huangdi neijing suwen [Yellow Emperor’s inner classic: Basic questions], see Paul U. Unschuld, Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge and Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Another invaluable resource for the study of the Huangdi neijing suwen is Hermann Tessenow and Paul U. Unschuld, A Dictionary of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 22. On the dating and provenance of the Huangdi neijing, see Nathan Sivin, “Huang ti nei ching,” in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993), 196–215. 23. See, for example, in juan 1: caiyao fenliuqi suiwu [Timing of drug collection according to qi and wu], 44; qifang [Seven prescriptions], 44–46; and wuwei yiji [Recommendations and taboos concerning the Five Flavors], 53–54. 24. BC 6.yanghuo yinhuo [Yang and yin fire].jj. In this section of the Bencao, Li also directed the reader’s attention to other drugs of interest in the Woods and Beasts sections, from which he derived many stories cited in the discussion of yin and yang fires. 25. Ibid. 26. The Yuanhuaji was a Tang work by a Master Huangfu that included zhiguai-like records and stories of unusual change-related creatures and events, and Li cited it only once in the entire Bencao. Of course, metamorphosing objects, plants, and creatures also appeared in other sections of Li’s work, and in those sections he occasionally invoked texts devoted to the issue of transformation but largely neglected by other bencao authors. These included the tenth-century Hua shu [Book of transformation], variously attributed by Li to Song Qiqiu (886–959) and a Mr. Tan (Tanzi) and cited roughly five times by Li in discussions ranging from plants and insects to mankind. On the Hua shu and its history, see John Didier, “Messrs. T’an, Chancellor Sung, and the Book of Transformation (Hua shu): Texts and the Transformations of Traditions,” Asia Major, 3rd series, vol. 11 (1998): 99–151. 27. On the Dijing tu, see Ho Peng Yoke, Explorations in Daoism: Medicine and Alchemy in Literature, ed. John P. C. Moffett and Cho Sungwu (New York: Routledge, 2007), 95–103. 28. Joseph Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt. 2, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), includes a brief section on the Baozang lun (273–276), which Li did not list in the bibliography of the Bencao as one of the texts to which he had access. Needham and Gwei-djen Lu place the date of the text ca. 918. See also Ho Peng Yoke, Explorations, 116–121. 29. BC 5.jingquan shui [Well and spring water].jj. Correspondences between the land and the human body, especially in the context of Daoist symbolism, have been discussed at length in such works as Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 30. BC 5.mulu [Contents and preface]. 183


31. Jiuzhou indicates the nine divisions into which China was supposedly divided in remote antiquity, though classic texts varied in their characterizations and identifications of these. On perceptions of regional difference, also see Marta Hanson, “Robust Northerners and Delicate Southerners: The Nineteenth-Century Invention of a Southern Wenbing Tradition,” positions 6:3 (Winter 1998): 515– 549. 32. From BC 5.mulu [Contents and preface]. 33. BC 6.mulu [Contents and preface]. 34. These differences are described in BC 6.yanghuo yinhuo [Yang and yin fire].jj. 35. BC 8.yunmu [Cloud-mother]. This term is commonly translated into modern English as “muscovite” or “mica.” 36. BC 8.yunmu [Cloud-mother].sm. 37. See Peter Golas, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt. 13, Mining (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 38. BC 9.dansha [Cinnabar].jj. 39. BC 8.chitong [Red copper].jj. 40. BC 8.qian [Lead].jj. 41. BC 8.yu [Jade, precious stones]. 42. See BC 8.zhutieqi [Assorted iron implements].tiefu [Iron axe]. 43. See Nathan Sivin, “Chinese Alchemy and the Manipulation of Time,” Isis 67.4 (December 1976): 512–526. 44. Li included in BC 9.shuiyin [Quicksilver].fm a very extensive discussion by Kou Zongshi. 45. BC 8.qian [Lead].fm. Li also included a recipe explaining how to make wuxu qianshu, a lead comb for turning facial hair black. 46. See BC 9.dansha [Cinnabar].ff for the directions for making the drug wuzi bianbai [Turning a black mustache white]. 47. The first chapter of Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), provides an excellent introduction to the interest of this Daoist author in plants, stones, and metals used in the making of elixirs in “inner alchemy.” For a general introduction to elixirs and inner alchemy, see Fabrizio Pregadio and Lowell Skar, “Inner Alchemy (Neidan),” in Livia Kohn, ed., Daoism Handbook, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 464–497. 48. BC 9.shuiyin [Quicksilver].fm. 49. BC 8.yu [Jade, precious stones].fm. 50. BC 8.yunmu [Cloud-mother].fm. 51. BC 8.jin [Gold].jj. 52. For Kou Zongshi’s comments on the relative medical efficacy of unprocessed silver versus that processed by adepts (shushi), see BC 8.yin [Silver].jj. For similar concerns regarding naturally occurring versus adept-manufactured substances, see BC 8.tie [Iron].jj; BC 8.boli [Glass].jj; BC 8.shuijing [Crystal].jj; and BC 8.liuli [Glaze].jj. 53. BC 10.pishi [Arsenic stone].sm. According to Li, the pi of arsenic (pishi) was a homophone of the pi of the beast’s name, so chosen to indicate the fierceness 184


of the stony material. Recall that homophones were also invoked in Li’s discussion of the source of names for the dragon (long), discussed above. 54. See Joseph Needham and Robin D. S. Yates, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt. 6, Military Technology: Missiles and Sieges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for a discussion of the use of stone and animal poisons in the early manufacturing of gunpowder. On the blister beetle, see BC 40.banmao [Spanish fly]. On poisonous gunpowder, see Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu, juan 15, huoyao liao [Gunpowder ingredients], 259. 55. BC 10.pishi [Arsenic stone].jj/fm. Li credited Su Song, Chen Cheng, and Kou Zongshi with the distinction between watery and fiery processing. 56. Ibid. 57. Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu, juan 11, pishi, 201. 58. Fire-processed arsenic was a Song addition to bencao literature, and Chen mentioned that this type of arsenic had been widely prescribed by the makers of elixirs only prior to the Song. For the use of poisons such as arsenic in Song medicine, see Frédéric Obringer, L’Aconit et l’orpiment: drogues et poisons en Chine ancienne et médiévale (Paris: Fayard, 1997), and, more recently, Frédéric Obringer, “A Song Innovation in Pharmacotherapy: Some Remarks on the Use of White Arsenic and Flowers of Arsenic,” trans. Janet Lloyd, in Elisabeth Hsu, ed., Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 192– 214. 59. This was according to Li. See BC 10.pishi [Arsenic].jj/fm. 60. Ibid. 61. For this debate, see BC 8.yin [Silver].jj. Li also argued with previous bencao authors over the toxicity of cinnabar when used with different combinations of other drugs (BC 9.dansha [Cinnabar].fm). 62. BC 9.shuiyinfen [Calomel, or powdered quicksilver].fm, and BC 9.dansha [Cinnabar].fm. 63. Mirrors were usually referred to in Ming literature as jing but were alternately called jian or zhao. They can be located in early modern encyclopedias under any of these names. 64. BC 8.gujing [Ancient mirror].fm. The following accounts by Li on mirrors also come from this section. 65. Discussions in the Bencao of types of plants whose leaves were compared to the shape of a mirror indicate that mirrors during Li’s time were usually round. Also, the size of a typical mirror was likely to have fallen within a specific range, as the size of a handful of objects in the Bencao are compared to that of a mirror. See also Julia K. Murray and Suzanne E. Cahill, “Recent Advances in Understanding the Mystery of Ancient Chinese ‘Magic Mirrors,’” Chinese Science 8 (1987): 1–8. 66. BC 8.gujing [Ancient mirror].fm. 67. Ibid. 68. BC 8.gujing [Ancient mirror].zz. 69. In medical texts since the Han, there was a common trope whereby a person’s illness sank deeper and deeper within the body over time if not properly treated. The root of legendary doctor Bian Que’s fame rested in claims that he could see inside his patients’ bodies, thereby divining the cause (or even existence, 185


in the case of otherwise healthy-seeming people) of their illnesses and treating them accordingly. 70. BC 8.gujing [Ancient mirror].fm. 71. Shen Gua has been a figure of particular interest to the history of Chinese science, and his work awaits a more systematic study. The classic anglophone biography of Shen Gua, and description of the interest of his work to the history of science, remains Nathan Sivin, “Shen Kua,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography XII (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 369–393. On the dangers of translating Shen Gua’s work into modern science, see Daiwie Fu, “On Mengxi Bitan’s World of Marginalities and ‘South-Pointing Needles’: Fragment Translation vs. Contextual Translation,” in Viviane Alleton and Michael Lackner, eds., De l’un au multiple: Traductions du chinois vers les langues européennes (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1999), 175–202.

4. TRANSFORMATION: SPROUTS OF CHANGE

1. Plants occupied BC 12–37. 2. See BC.fanli [Li Shizhen’s preface to the Bencao gangmu]. 3. See Appendix B for a full list of subcategories, including the number of drugs included within each. Each subcategory typically receives one juan, unless otherwise indicated in Appendix B. Building on the work of Scott Atran, Georges Métailié has described this as an “ethnobotanical” classification. See Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4. For an example of the voluminous literature on the plants of the Bencao, see Joseph Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.1, Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and the work of Georges Métailié, author of numerous articles in French and in English on the history of botany (and in particular of “ethnobotany”) in China. 5. BC 38.mulu [Contents and preface]. 6. Zhong Kui lived during the reign of Emperor Gaozu (r. 618–627) according to a Yishi [Lost history] cited by Li. See BC 38.zhongkui.jj. Richard von Glahn discusses a popular story that locates the emergence of a Zhong Kui cult during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–755). See Richard von Glahn, The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 122–128. 7. For an introduction to the stresses of examination candidates and the resulting anxieties and dreams, especially in the Ming and Qing, see Benjamin A. Elman, “Emotional Anxiety, Dreams of Success, and the Examination Life,” chap. 6 in A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).. 8. For an account of these Zhong Kui portraits in the Ming, see Stephen Little, “The Demon Queller and the Art of Qiu Ying (Ch’iu Ying),” Artibus Asiae 46:1–2 (1985): 5–128. Also see Sherman Lee, “Yan Hui, Zhong Kui, Demons and the New Year,” Artibus Asiae 53:1–2 (1993): 211–227. 9. BC 38.zhongkui.ff. Li’s sources were two books of prescriptions: the Yangqi 186


jianbian fang and the Song Shengji zonglu. This method of burning paper and consuming the ash can be traced back to Han Daoist practices. 10. BC 38.zhongkui.jj. On the trope of the fabricator in Ming literature and society, see Craig Clunas, “Connoisseurs and Aficionados: The Real and the Fake in Ming China (1368–1644),” in Mark Jones, ed., Why Fakes Matter: Essays on Problems of Authenticity (London: British Museum, 1992), 151–156. 11. Ibid. Recall previous cases wherein Li explained the origin of an object’s name by associating it with the meaning of a homophonous term: dragons and arsenic. 12. On the connection between the hammer and Zhong Kui, see von Glahn, Sinister Way, 123. 13. On naming in early Chinese thought, see John Makeham, Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). On naming in Chinese thought and history, see Extrême-Orient, Extrême Occident 15: Le Just Nom (1993), and Christoph Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7.1, Language and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 52–60 and 311–326. 14. On the Shiming, see Roy Andrew Miller, “Shih ming,” in Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993), 424–428. 15. The Shiming was invoked in BC 38 when discussing the names of hanshan [Unlined upper garment], pixue [Leather boot], maxie [Hemp shoe], caoxie [Straw sandal], jiti bisheng [Hemp string on a wooden sandal], zhi [Paper], jianke jicu [Arrow shaft and head], and shubi [Wooden comb]. 16. Many works of medicine (including some ditties circulating in late Ming daily-use encyclopedias) were composed in verse in order to facilitate memorization, including Li’s Maijue kaozheng [Rhymed investigation of the vessels] and Huashe zhuan [Story of the dappled snake]. 17. Including all citations of Lu Ji’s commentary on the plants and animals of the Shijing would increase the count even further. 18. BC 27.baihe [Lily].gen [Root].fm. 19. BC 34.mulu [Contents and preface]. 20. Li occasionally cited the Lisao [Encountering sorrow], a poem in the Chuci collection, when the quotation he provided was actually from another poem in the collection. For one example of this, see BC 40.yi [Ant].jj. In this section, Li referred to a phrase from the “Lisao” on a war between red and black ants as “not an analogy” or “not an allegory” (fei yuyan). The phrase he cited actually comes from the Zhaohun poem in the Chuci, not from the Lisao. Li seems to have mentally equated the Lisao with the Chuci collection at times or relied on a text that had made a similar error. 21. Li invoked Su Shi more than the others in part because he cited the Su Shen liangfang [Excellent prescriptions from Su Shi and Shen Gua], a late Song compilation of medical writings. On the Su Shen liangfang, see Asaf Moshe Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200 (London: Routledge, 2009), 118 and 175–176. 22. BC 22.mulu [Contents and preface]. In the preface to Grains, we learn that 187


poets wrote of the “eight grains” (bagu) and “hundred grains” (baigu), illustrating the variety of cereals in the world. 23. BC 40.yi [Ant].jj. 24. BC 26.xie [Xie onion].fm. 25. BC 30.haihong [Sea red crabapple].sm. 26. These included the Guoran fu [Rhapsody on the guoran, a monkey-like beast], the Yaoxing fu [Rhapsody on the qualities of drugs], the Bingji fu [Rhapsody on illnesses], and the Song Shilei fu [Rhapsody on categories of affairs]. Fu were critical to the post-Ming development of natural history as well, being regularly included as part of the natural history of objects described in the plant and beast sections of the Gujin tushu jicheng. 27. For an excellent introduction to fu in general, and for full translations of many of the fu used by Li Shizhen that are mentioned here, see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan, or, Selections of Refined Literature, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982–1996). 28. Wenxuan poems cited in the Bencao included those of Sima Xiangru (especially his Shanglin fu [Rhapsody on the imperial park] and Zi Xu [Sir Vacuous]), the Nandu fu [Southern capital rhapsody] by Zhang Heng (78–139), and the Dongdu fu [Eastern capital rhapsody] by Ban Gu (32–92). Li seemed particularly fond of the Sandu fu [Three capitals rhapsody] of Zuo Si, and cited it several times in connection with his discussion of plants. 29. BC 21.zhili [Zhili moss].jj. In this section Li recapitulated a trope that was ubiquitous among fu in the Wenxuan: enumerating the types of plant in each direction or area of a given place, repeating the same form each time (In the North, there is X plant; In the South, there is Y plant). 30. BC 14. Miwu [Miwu herb].jj. For an English translation of the Shanglin fu, see Knechtges, Wen Xuan, vol. 2, Rhapsodies on Metropolises and Capitals, 73– 114 (“Rhapsody on the Imperial Park”). Knechtges translates jiangli as “green basil” and miwu as “lovage” (p. 85). To preserve Li Shizhen’s sense that the two names actually refer to the same plant, I leave the pinyin untranslated here. 31. BC 38.mulu [Contents and preface]. 32. BC 38.kundang [Undergarments].ff, for a series of prescriptions with ashed underwear featured as the major component. 33. BC 38.maxie [Hemp shoes], and BC 38.pushan [Cattail fan]. 34. BC 38.siren zhenxi [Dead person’s pillow mat].fm. 35. See BC 38.toujin [Headscarf].sm; BC 38.futou [Headdress].sm; BC 38.pixue [Leather boots/shoes].sm; and BC 38.jiaojiaobu [Bandages used in foot binding].sm. These discussions occur under the shiming heading on “names” for each of these objects. This is significant in that Li usually placed such a discussion under the jijie heading detailing the previous history of an object; since this Clothing and Tools section is Li’s own invention, he moved his commentary to the primary, naming discussion of an object. 36. BC 38.toujin [Headscarf].fm. The translations here of kinds of cloth and hats are approximate. Li also provided capsule histories under the faming headings for mian [Silk fiber], hanshan [Unlined upper garment], toujin [Headscarf], 188


jiaojiaobu [Bandages used in foot binding], baitiangong [Used bamboo hat], pixue [Leather boots/shoes], maxie [Hemp shoe], and zhi [Paper]. 37. BC 38.futou [Headdress].sm. 38. For a brief treatment of paper in the Bencao with some German translations, see Peter F. Tschudin, Bencao kangmu: die grosse Pharmakopöe des Li Shizhen 1596: ergänzt durch Zitate aus älteren Schriften: Abschnitte über Papier und Tusche (Muttenz-Basel: Sandoz, 1993). For a more general treatment of the history of paper and printing in China, see Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, pt.1, Paper and Printing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 39. “Green sweat” (hanqing) refers to the liquid that would be “sweated” off the bamboo strips as they were heated. To use a cooking analogy, this is like the liquid that comes off carrots and onions when they are “sweated” in a pan. 40. BC 38.zhi [Paper].sm. 41. See BC 38.qingzhi [Indigo paper]; BC 38.yinzhi [Official seal]; and BC 38.liri [Daily calendar]. 42. Compare the uses of BC 38.juan [Fabric woven out of raw silk] and BC 38.bo [Silk], objects that are listed under separate headings and distinguished under the shiming headings of each drug. 43. The prescriptions are listed in BC 38.toujin [Headscarf].ff. Other prescriptions that specified the inclusion of used or filthy garments were included in the entries for underwear (kundang), mourning garments (xiaozi shan), sick patient’s garments (bingren yi), headdress (futou), leather boots (pixue), bamboo hats (baitian gong), leather head wrapping (pijinzi), and garment belt (yidai). 44. BC 38.kundang [Undergarments].fm. 45. In the kundang section, Li recorded such prescriptions from Zhang Zhongjing, the Taibai yinjing by Li Quan, the Qianjin yaofang [Essential prescriptions worth a thousand in gold], the Sanshiliu huangfang [Thirty-six yellow recipes], and the Zhao Yuanyang zhenren jiji fang. See BC 38.kundang [Undergarments].ff. 46. BC 38.bingren yi [Sick person’s clothing].zz. 47. BC 38.bohuozhang [Fire-adjusting stick].zz. 48. BC 38.chuihuotong [Tube to blow on a fire].zz. 49. BC 38.dengzhan [Lamp cup].zz. For the ditty, see BC 38.dengzhanyou [Lamp oil].ff. 50. See BC 38.zeng [Steamer], and BC 38.guogai [Lid of a cooking pot], as well as several other food-related implements that follow these in the same juan. 51. BC 38.bu [Cloth].zz/ff. 52. Most of these were made into decoctions and ingested, but the processing of shoes found beneath a funeral bier is unclear. See BC 38.zijing sisheng [Rope used to hang oneself]; BC 38.lingchuang xiaxie [Shoes beneath a funeral bier]; and BC 38.siren zhenxi [Dead person’s pillow mat]. It is significant that the source for all three of these death-related drugs was Chen Zangqi, author of the Song Bencao shiyi. Throughout the Bencao, Chen is cited as the source of prescriptions to be used by criminals and soldiers and prescriptions for the use of controversial drugs, 189


like human flesh. Though Li also cited Chen in the case of more mundane and prosaic natural objects, it is no coincidence that Chen recurs throughout this text as the keeper of much naughty knowledge. 53. On the charcoal-like souls of suicides by hanging, see BC 52.renpo [Human Po soul].jj. 54. BC 38.mulu [Contents and preface].

5. TRANSFORMATION: BODIES OF CHANGE

1. For a concise treatment of the history of this term, see Francine Fèvre, “Drôles de bestioles: qu’est-ce qu’un chong?” Anthropozoologica 18 (1993): 57– 65. 2. For a recent study of the Shanhaijing and a translation into English, see Richard E. Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 3. BC 39.mulu [Contents and preface]. 4. This was a critical break with previous means of classifying bugs, which were largely based on body covering. 5. For the egg-born bugs, see BC 39–40. 6. For the change-born bugs, see BC 41. 7. For the moisture-born bugs, see BC 42. 8. BC 39.mulu [Contents and preface]. 9. On the song of the earthworm, see BC 42.qiuyin [Earthworm].jj. On their windborne mating with grasshoppers, see BC 41.fuzhong [Grasshopper].jj. 10. The Zhouguan was another name for the Zhouli. 11. The huzhuoshi (Cauldron Beater) was a member of the Ministry of Justice whose job was to beat an overturned kettle (hu) to frighten away bugs. Charles Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 257, translates it as “Water Sprinkler.” 12. BC 39.mulu [Contents and preface]. 13. BC 39.yeweng [Yeweng wasp]. The guoluo was also called the yeweng and identified by this name in the Bencao. This is often translated today as “parasitic wasp,” though the behavior of the guoluo in Chinese commentaries was not parasitic, per se. 14. Hence the phrase mingling zi was used from at least the late Ming period to allude to an adopted child. For the original poem see the Shijing poem 196: “Xiaowan,” in the subsection Xiaoya. 15. BC 40.jiadie [Butterfly].jj. 16. BC 39.yeweng [Yeweng wasp].jj/zw. 17. See the Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu, juan 2. 18. BC 39.yeweng [Yeweng wasp].jj/zw. This was alternately rendered as “leiwo leiwo” or “siwo siwo,” when this anecdote was cited in later texts. 19. See Wang Rongbao, Fayan yishu [Commentary to the meaning of Yang Xiong’s Aphorisms] (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), yi [Chapter 1], xuexing [Learning], juan diyi [First subsection]. 190


20. This text was either two or five juan and is no longer extant, but it was cited by many Song and Ming bencao authors. 21. As cited in BC 39.yeweng [Yeweng wasp].jj. Han Baosheng’s work, the Chongguang Yinggong bencao [Expanded bencao of Yinggong] in twenty juan, has been lost and is now known solely through widespread quotations in other texts. 22. See Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker(London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 35. 23. This translation invokes Darwin’s description of the first iguanas he saw in the Galápagos on his Beagle voyage. James Legge translates yu as “water-bow” (a nod to an alternate name of the creature, the shuinu [Water crossbow]) but likens it to an “imp” in his translation of the Shijing. See James Legge, Book of Poetry (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1967), 260–262. 24. BC 42.xiguichong [Stream demon]. This creature was also known by several alternate names, including yu and shegong. All of these names appear within the discussion of this object in the Bencao, and I am using the term “yu” for convenience to encompass all of them. Bernard Read equated yu with the modern bombardier beetle. For an interesting comparative case, see discussions of the Japanese kappa water-demon, in Michael Dylan Foster, “The Metamorphosis of the Kappa,” Asian Folklore Studies 57:1 (1998): 1–24. 25. Translation based on Legge, Book of Poetry, 260–262. See “Herensi,” poem 199, in the Xiaoya section of the Shijing. Waley’s translation of these lines reads quite differently: “If you were a ghost or gremlin / Then of course I could not have you / But I see in your expression / Someone who knows no limits / Thus I have made this good song / To express my restless heart.” Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs (New York: Grove, 1996), 180–182. 26. Translations of segments of the poem are that of Legge. 27. On the association between the yu and sex in the southern regions, see Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 176 and 220. See also Chen Jue, “Shooting Sand at People’s Shadow,” Monumenta Serica 47 (1999): 169–207, for another treatment. 28. BC 42.xiguichong [Stream demon].jj. Southerners, according to the Caomu niaoshou chongyu shu, would avert this fate by agitating and muddying the water before entering so that the yu wouldn’t have a clear reflection at which to shoot. See this citation in Xu Ding, Maoshi mingwu tushuo [Images and stories of famous things in the Mao Poems], in Ren Jiyu, ed., Zhongguo kexue jishu dianji tonghui, vol. 2, pt. 2, 700. 29. Some texts discussed agricultural pests as mingyu or huangyu. For a discussion of mingyu, see Lüshi chunqiu [Mr. Lu’s Spring and Autumn Annals], juan 26. 30. Also known as the qiusou, this is often translated as “earwig” in modern English, but the early use of this term indicated a much more ghostly, complexly storied creature. See BC 42.shanqiongchong [Mountain-cricket chong].qusou [Demon earwig]. 31. Ibid. I am not sure which edition of Sun’s work Li was working from. The edition of the Qianjin yifang I have seen records a much shorter version of these 191


events: “Flavor pungent and slightly warm. Cures sores from the urine of the qusou. Eating too much makes a person pant rapidly.” See Sun Simiao, Qianjin yifang, juan 4, cai bu [Vegetables].ji. 32. BC 51.zhang [Zhang beast].rou [Flesh].fm, and BC 51.xi [Rhinoceros].jj. Li cited the zhang’s fleeing from its own reflection as the explanation given by Daoist texts (daoshu) for proof that the zhang and lu (deer) lack hun souls. 33. Many of the following descriptions are taken from BC 42.xiguichong [Stream demon]. 34. Ge Hong, Xin yi Baopuzi, ed. Zhonghua Li and Zhimin Huang (Taibei: Sanmin shuju, 1996), vol. 1, 431–432. Descriptions likening the yu to a cicada frequently accompanied allusions to the sound of the creature, raising the possibility that the cicadalike appearance was assumed because of the noise the creature reportedly made. 35. See Du Taiqing (fl. 581), Yuzhu baodian [Precious allusions illuminated by the jade candle], juan 4: siyue mengxia [Fourth lunar month, first month of summer]. 36. BC 42.xiguichong [Stream demon].jj. 37. Ye Ziqi, Caomuzi [Master of herbs and trees] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), 15. The text is in juan 1, xia (the second half of chapter one), in the guanwu pian [Notes on observing things]. The Caomuzi, written in 1378, was first published in 1516 by Ye’s grandson. 38. Zhou Lüjing, Jinsi xuanxuan [Mysteries within mysteries of the goldenbamboo chest] (Taipei: Yi wen yinshuguan, 1966). 39. Ye Ziqi, Caomuzi, 15. 40. BC 40.renshi [Human lice].jj. 41. These are all typical ways of indicating crop pests. 42. BC 42.huichong.jj. Huichong is commonly translated as “roundworm,” though it is more properly a term to indicate bugs of all kinds living (uninvited) in the human body. 43. BC 41.yinghuo [Firefly]. 44. BC 41.yinghuo [Firefly].jj. 45. Ibid. 46. For the description of this pill and its effects, see BC 41.yinghuo [Firefly].fm. 47. BC 40.ying [Fly].jj. Snakes, cicadas, and dragons also were reported to slough off material and transform. 48. Ibid. 49. On stories of animal metamorphosis in China’s Warring States and Han periods, especially with respect to animals as symbols of human ideals, morals, and government, see Sterckx, “Changing Animals,” in The Animal and the Daemon, 165–204. 50. BC 39.xuecan [Snow silkworm].jj; BC 43.zhushe [Various snakes].jj; BC 43.jiaolong [Flood dragon].fl. 51. BC 41.lougu [Mole cricket].jj. 52. Armies, quite literally. See BC 40.yi [Ant].jj for the story mentioned earlier of a war between two armies of ants, red and black, that occurred in an important 192


poem in the Chuci collection and was cited by Li Shizhen, who emphasized that the poetic account was “not a [mere] analogy.” 53. BC 40.yi [Ant].baiyi [White ant]. 54. BC 40.qingling [Dragonfly].jj, and BC 48.que [Sparrow].jj. 55. It is possible that the cauldron-bug is also relevant in its relationship to fire. The color of the bug, red, was associated with the phase of fire, and this could indicate that the bug was generated during the forging process. 56. Recall the quote earlier in this chapter from BC 42.huichong [Roundworm, body parasite].jj. 57. For the full text of the poem, see Xiao Tong (501–531), Wenxuan [Selections of refined literature] (Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1987), 604–610. For an annotated English translation, see David Knechtges, Wen Xuan, vol. 3, Rhapsody on the Houlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 41–48. 58. Zhao Xuemin, Bencao gangmu shiyi [Correcting and supplementing the Bencao gangmu] (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1971 and 1982), 521. This is from juan 10, chong bu [Bugs], renya [Human aphids]. Zhao did not separate the individual object entries into headings (shiming, jijie, and so forth) like Li had. 59. Note here that this is a change in emblematization, but a recognition that the bodies of individuals differed and required different drug regimens as a result was present also in twelfth-century bencao. Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), contains a discussion of Kou Zongshi’s Bencao yanyi, especially with regard to taking young/old and rich/poor distinctions into account when treating individuals. Li Shizhen also shared this tendency in many respects. Also see Asaf Moshe Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200 (London: Routledge, 2009), 121–123, for a general introduction to Kou’s text.

6. TRANSFORMATION: CREATURES OF CHANGE

1. Journal Book of the Royal Society 2, 232–233, 22 August 1666, cited in John H. Appleby, “The Royal Society and the Tartar Lamb,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 51:1 (January 1997): 23–34. This creature was also known as the Scythian lamb, borometz (spelled variously in different sources), or vegetable lamb. 2. Appleby, “The Royal Society,” 23–24. 3. Ibid, 24. 4. BC 50.yang [Sheep].dishengyang [Earth-sprouting lamb]. This part of Li’s account is taken from Duan Gonglu’s (fl. 9th century) Beihu lu [Records of the northern gateway]. 5. Ibid. Li also cited an account from Liu Yu’s thirteenth-century Chushi xiyu ji (this probably should be the Xishi ji) that recommended releasing the lamb by beating a piece of wood nearby. For an account of the vegetable lamb in Chinese sources, see Berthold Laufer, “The Story of the Pinna and the Syrian Lamb,” The Journal of American Folklore 28:108 (April–June 1915): 103–128. Laufer concluded that these accounts were actually early means of describing and understanding the cotton plant, a conclusion that has been widely accepted. 193


6. See Appendix B for more detail. For the text of the categories themselves, see BC 43–51. 7. On antidotes for various types of snake poison, see BC 43.zhushe [Various snakes]. On poisonous fish, see BC 44.zhuyu youdu [Various poisonous fish]. On poisonous birds, see BC 49.zhuniao youdu [Various poisonous birds]. On poison meats and various antidotes, see BC 50.zhurou youdu [Various poisonous meats], and BC 50.jie zhurou du [Cures for the poison of various meats]. 8. BC 45. This section is made up of seventeen types of “turtle,” including crabs (xie) and horseshoe crabs (houyu). 9. BC 46.beizi [Cowry shell].jj. 10. BC 45.daimao [Hawksbill turtle].saba’er [Turtle sperm]. 11. BC 14.shechuang [Snake’s bed].fm. Snake’s bed was a popular ingredient in aphrodisiac recipes in some Ming daily-use encyclopedias (riyong leishu), which often included medicinal and culinary prescriptions. For a minicompendium of the medical sections in these encyclopedias, see Zhongguo bencao quanshu, 1999, 394:207–552, which includes selections from the Wuche bajin, Wanyong zhengzong, Wenlin juba, Wanyong zhengzong buqiuren (comp. Zhu Dingchen), Wanzhu junang buyong qiuren, Wanbao quanshu, and Quanshu beikao. For uses of snake’s bed see, for example, Wuche bajin 1999 [1597]. In this collection of “dongfang chunyi miao fang” (literally, wondrous prescriptions for springtime in the nuptial chamber, included under the heading Qingshu jiyao [Love notes] within the category of Fengyue men [Romantic affairs]), snake’s bed seeds were included in six aphrodisiac mixtures. 12. This term was often used by Li Shizhen, Chen Zangqi, and Su Gong to indicate foreign people and was not associated with a particular place of origin. Many translate hu as “Mongol” or “Tartar.” The resonance of the term hu is discussed at greater length in Chapter 1. 13. For these examples, see BC 18.yuzhizi [Foresight vine].jj; BC 34.suhexiang [Oriental sweet gum].jj; BC 43.linshe [Scaly snake].jj; and BC 51.mugou [Leopard].jj. On the idea of indigenous nature in early modern Europe, see Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 14. BC 50.ma [Horse].baimaniao [Urine of a white horse].fm. 15. Among the monographic works listed in Li’s bibliography are treatises on chrysanthemums, peonies, bamboo, tea, fragrances, mushrooms and excrescences, forage plants, plums, lychees, and scholarly apparatus such as ink, inkstones, pens, and paper. The monographs devoted specifically to animals include Majing [Horse classic], Guoran fu [Rhapsody on the guoran beast], Guijing [Turtle classic], Zhang Shinan’s Zhigui lun [Discussion of turtle characteristics], Fu Gong’s Xiepu [Treatise on crabs], Zhu Zhong’s Xiangbeijing [Classic of cowry appearance], Wang Yuanzhi’s Fengji [Records of bees and wasps], Huang Shengzeng’s Shoujing [Beast classic], the Huainan bagong xianghejing [Classic of crane physiognomy by the eight ministers of Prince Huainan], the Shi Kuang qinjing [Shi Kuang’s bird classic], and the Yiyutu [Illustrations of unusual fish]. 16. Usually cited by Li in the simplified form Qinjing, this was a text on birds attributed to Shi Kuang (6th century bce) and annotated by Zhang Hua. 194


See Qinjing [Bird classic], Congshu jicheng xinbian (Taibei: Xinwenfeng, 1985), 44:252–256. 17. See, for example, BC 48.heji [Heji bird].jj. 18. BC 47.he [Crane].jj. Recall that earthworms and grasshoppers engaged in a similar practice. 19. For Li’s discussion of this, see BC 47.mulu [Contents and preface]. 20. See BC 47.guan [Stork].zw. 21. Many of the domestic animals in the Beasts section, for example, were associated with a particular phase, which helped Li determine their preparation as drugs. 22. For a seventeenth-century account of snakestones by a Jesuit in China, see U. Libbrecht, “Introduction of the Lapis Serpentinus into China: A Study of the Hsi-tu-shih of F. Verbiest, S.J.,” Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 18 (1987): 209– 237. Libbrecht’s article includes images of the Chinese texts he describes. Marta Hanson discusses this case in “Jesuits and Medicine in the Kangxi Court (1662– 1722),” Pacific Rim Report 43 (July 2007): 1–3. 23. BC 50.niuhuang [Ox bezoar].jj. 24. BC 50.niuhuang [Ox bezoar]. 25. For these claims, see BC 50.niuhuang [Ox bezoar].jj. 26. Ibid. 27. BC 50.diyejia [Theriac], and BC 50.e jiao [Donkey glue]. 28. The term lin is now also translated as “gonorrhea.” Here it indicates some condition wherein stones are sprinkling or pouring out of a man, much like water. 29. BC 50.goubao [Dog treasure].jj. 30. Ibid. 31. Judith Zeitlin, “The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese Literature, Art, and Medicine,” Late Imperial China 12:1 (June 1991): 1–26, treats the discussion of these human obsession stones, or pishi, as part of a concern with obsession in the late Ming. 32. From Xie Zhaozhe, Wuzazu [Fivefold miscellany] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2000), 522. The citation comes at the beginning of juan 9, wu bu yi [Things, pt. I]. 33. Terms for shape included xing or xingzhuang, surface markings were usually wen or ban, and color was usually se or one of many specific color words. Though authentication of genuine drugs or objects was largely through manipulation, differentiation and identification of varieties was primarily through observation. 34. The term lin as used here is short for qilin and is occasionally translated as “unicorn.” 35. Xie Zhaozhe, Wuzazu, 522. On dragons in the Wuzazu, also see Mark Elvin, “The Man Who Saw Dragons: Science and Styles of Thinking in Xie Zhaozhe’s Fivefold Miscellany,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 25–26 (1993–1994): 1–41. 36. Xie Zhaozhe, Wuzazu, 522. 37. Recall Li’s discussion of dragons in BC 43.long [Dragon]. 38. Li Su, Jian Wu [Seeing things], Congshu jicheng xinbian edition (Taipei: 195


Xinwenfeng, 1985), vol. 44, Lü Kun’s preface on p. 133. Lü was a scholar-official from Ningling, Hunan. On Lü Kun’s preoccupation with knowledge gained through sight, see Joanna F. Handlin, Action in Late Ming Thought: The Reorientation of Lü K’un and Other Scholar-Officials (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 161–185. 39. For an especially helpful introduction to these issues, see Donald Leslie, “Man and Nature: Sources on Early Chinese Biological Ideas” (manuscript, offprint collection of the Needham Research Institute). 40. Wang Chong, Lunheng, cited in Leslie, “Man and Nature.” 41. See Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 17–18, for a brief discussion of the term wu with respect to understanding the general concept (or lack thereof) of “animal” in Warring States and Han China. 42. Li Su, Jian Wu, Lü Kun preface, 133. 43. BC 52.rengui [Human oddities]. Wang Chong had also compared earliest human reproduction to that of animals. 44. Ibid. On reproductive oddities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Charlotte Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century China,” Late Imperial China 9:2 (1988), 1–31. 45. BC 52.rengui [Human oddities]. Among many examples, Li listed the five “nonfemale women” and the five “nonmale men.” 46. A litany of examples is provided in ibid. It was a well-known story, for example, that rabbits gave birth by vomiting out their young after licking the down off leaves. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. The phrase Li used is huangyi zhiwai (literally, beyond the border/periphery; that is, beyond the borders of the empire). 49. In daily-use encyclopedias and illustrated editions of the Shanhaijing [Classic of mountains and seas] that circulated widely in the late Ming, descriptions of animals and accounts of odd foreigners living in lands (guo) outside the boundaries of the dynasty were typically juxtaposed on a single page, creating a kind of explicit visual comparison. See, for example, Xu Qilong, Wanshu yuanhai [A deep sea of ten thousand works] (Tokyo: Kyuko Shoin, 2001 reprint of the 1610 woodblock edition), and Xu Qilong, Wuche wanbao quanshu [Five carts full of treasures] (Tokyo: Kyuko Shoin, 2001 reprint of the 1614 woodblock edition). 50. BC 52.rengui [Human oddities]. 51. BC 50. 52. An excellent monograph on the history of one such creature is Robert van Gulik, The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967). 53. The most lucid accounts of the study of wild men in America that I have found are Joshua Blu Buhs, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Loren Coleman, Bigfoot!: The True Story of Apes in America (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2003); and Jeff Meldrum, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (New York: Forge Books, 2006). On popular 196


accounts of hairy yeren (wild men) in modern China, see Sigrid Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 210–245. For an anthropological spin on the same topic, see Frank Dikötter, “Hairy Barbarians, Furry Primates, and Wild Men: Medical Science and Cultural Representations of Hair in China,” in Barbara Diane Miller et al., eds., Hair: Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 51–74. 54. BC 51.mihou [Mihou beast]. In modern Chinese, mihou is frequently translated as “macaque.” The mihou was often depicted in illustrations with a fruit in its hand, likely a means of representing the mihoutao, or “peach of the mihou,” now identified as a kiwi. The mihou was often paired with another apelike beast, the yuan, defined as a gibbon in van Gulik, The Gibbon in China. Van Gulik highlighted the importance of Ming debates about the arms of the yuan, as some scholars thought the beast’s arms to be directly interconnected. The yuan was apparently adept at climbing trees, had arm bones that could be fashioned into flutes, and lived a very long life due to its skill in practicing qi circulation. 55. BC 51.mihou [Mihou beast].sm. Li also included a Sanskrit name: mosi. 56. BC 51.mihou [Mihou beast].jj. The provenance of the Majing that Li used is uncertain. Li provided no indication of the date or authorship of the text. 57. Ibid. 58. BC 51.mihou [Mihou beast].jue [Jue beast]. This is sometimes also pronounced “que.” 59. BC 51.guoran [Guoran beast]. 60. BC 51.guoran [Guoran beast].jj. 61. Zhong Yu was an author of fu poetry active during the Wei period (220– 265) of the Three Kingdoms (220–280). Li listed this fu as an independent entry in the nonmedical texts section of his bibliography. The Guoran fu [Rhapsody on the guoran beast] was also invoked in the Xixi congyu [Collected stories from the western brook], a collection of jottings (biji) by Song author Yao Kuan (1105– 1162). See Yao Kuan, Xixi congyu (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1939): juan 2, guoran. 62. The previous quotation from the Guoran fu had claimed that the flesh of guoran was not especially tasty and the beast was good only for its hide. Li offered this tidbit from the Lüshi chunqiu as a way of raising a question: because the guoran and the two beasts mentioned in the Lüshi chunqiu were alike, how could it be that the flesh of the guoran was not tasty as well? 63. BC 51.xingxing [Xingxing beast].sm. The xingxing’s ability to call out its own name and foretell the future was provided as justification for the beast’s moniker: the homophone xingxing meant “wise.” Xingxing is often translated as “orangutan” today. 64. The claims related in this paragraph are found in BC 51.xingxing [Xingxing beast].jj. 65. Medieval travel writer William of Rubruck included a version of the xingxing story in the accounts of his travels to China. See Willem van Ruysbroeck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900), 199–200. Different versions of this story appear relatively 197


frequently in Chinese literature. For a translation of the Shanhaijing account, see Richard E. Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 189. 66. BC 51.xingxing [Xingxing beast].jj. 67. BC 51.xingxing [Xingxing beast].yenü [Wild women]. See also BC 49.zhiniao [Zhiniao bird].jj. Recall that elsewhere in the Bencao Li reported additional cases of printed or otherwise marked concretions in human bodies, including a petrified heart with a landscape formed inside it and a monk’s heart whose center was found to contain a miniature statue of the Buddha. 68. BC 51.feifei [Feifei beast]. Today this is often translated as “baboon.” 69. BC 51.feifei [Feifei beast].jj. 70. BC 51.wangliang [Wangliang beast].jj, and BC 51.feifei [Feifei beast].fl. 71. BC 51.feifei [Feifei beast].muke [Muke beast]. 72. BC 51.feifei [Feifei beast].shanxiao [Shanxiao beast]. 73. Li prescribed all of these remedies in BC 51.feifei [Feifei beast].fl. 74. Vivienne Lo has written extensively on the connection between medicine and the culinary arts in China. See, for example, Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett, “Cooking up Fine Remedies: On the Culinary Aesthetic in a Sixteenth-Century Chinese Materia Medica,” Medical History 49 (2005): 395–422, and Vivienne Lo, “Pleasure, Prohibition, and Pain: Food and Medicine in Traditional China,” in Roel Sterckx, ed., Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 163–185. 75. Eating habits were also used to justify naming practices, especially with regard to insects. See, for example, BC 41.feilian [Cockroach].sm. Here, Li explained that three bugs (the feilian, the xingye [a kind of beetle, sometimes translated as Bombardier beetle], and the fuzhong [grasshopper]) were different creatures that had been conflated: “Western and Southern barbarians all eat them, mixing them together and calling them ‘fupan (plate of burdens).’” 76. Modern accounts of cannibalism in China include the journalistic Zheng Yi, Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). On cannibalism in Chinese literary history, see Gang Yue, The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). The use of human body parts in traditional Chinese medicinal recipes has also been a popular topic in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Some examples include Mo Yan, “The Cure,” in Howard Goldblatt, ed., Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today’s China (New York: Grove, 1995), 172–181, and Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” and “Medicine,” in William Lyell, trans., Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 29–41 and 49–58. 77. See BC 52. 78. On cannibalism and the consumption of mummies and “corpse-medicine” in early modern Europe, see Richard Sugg, “‘Good Physic but Bad Food’: Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and its Suppliers,” Social History of Medicine 19.2 (2006): 225–240. 79. See Shi Nai’an, Shuihu zhuan [Water Margin] (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 327. 80. For a classic treatment of the use of human body parts as drugs, especially 198


with regard to correlations with modern biomedicine, see William Cooper and Nathan Sivin, “Man as Medicine: Pharmacological and Ritual Aspects of Traditional Therapy Using Drugs Derived from the Human Body,” in S. Nakayama and N. Sivin, eds., Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 203–272. 81. Li discussed the issue of gegu (cutting the thigh/flesh) in BC 52.renrou [Human flesh].fm. He criticized folk who engaged in this practice as “foolish people” (yumin). For an example of the gegu literary tradition, see William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, comps., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 532–534. The selection, “Guanyin and Cutting One’s Body (Gegu),” contains accounts from the Guanyin jingzhou linggan huiyao and the Gujin tushu jicheng. For an exhaustive discussion of cannibalistic practices in Chinese dynastic histories, see Bengt Pettersson, “Cannibalism in the Dynastic Histories,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 71 (1999): 73–182. 82. BC 52.mulu [Contents and preface]. For Li’s comments on the moral questions regarding the use of human flesh in medicine, see BC 52.renrou [Human flesh].fm. 83. See Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 50–52, on Chen Zangqi and his prescription of human drugs. 84. BC 52.rengu [Human bones].fm. 85. BC 52.tianlinggai [Human skullcap].fm. 86. This was according to Li. See BC 52.renbao [Human placenta].fm, and BC 52.baoyi shui [Placental fluid]. 87. The region Liuqiu guo described in Sui dynasty (581–619) sources has been identified variously as Taiwan or RyÄkyÄ. For other accounts of cannibalism in Liuqiu related in the Suishu, see Pettersson, “Cannibalism,” 127. 88. BC 52.renbao [Human placenta].fm. The term I translate here as “ferocious” (liao) can also be interpreted as an alternate form of the name of an ethnic minority group from southern China. 89. See BC 52.chusheng qidai [Umbilical cord].sm. 90. BC 52.rendan [Human Gallbladder].fm. See Zheng Yi, Scarlet Memorial, for very similar descriptions recapitulated in stories about cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution, stories that often invoked the medicinal and tonic benefits of such practices. 91. BC 52.renxue [Human blood].fm. 92. BC 52.renrou [Human flesh].fm. 93. See BC 52.fabi [Wig of human hair].sm, and BC 52.luanfa [Hair in disarray].sm, for more detailed discussion. 94. BC 52.renniao [Human urine].ff. Another interesting urine-derived drug discussed in this literature was qiushi, now understood to be a kind of processed urinary sediment. Li related that wealthy customers had long been known to refuse to use urine in medicine, believing it to be unclean, which prompted “adepts” to manufacture (or fake) this stuff as a more appealing alternative. This case illuminates what seems to have been a difference in drug markets between wealthy and lower-class patients. 95. See Zeitlin, “Petrified Heart,” on the relationship between pishi and litera199


ture on obsession. See also BC 52.pishi [Obsession stone]. This was a human version of petrified animal concretions like bezoars. 96. In the Gujin tushu jicheng edition of the Jilebian, this term reads as “ugly custard,” while in the Siku quanshu, it reads as “doesn’t envy sheep.” Transcription mistakes seem responsible for the transformation of these terms in later texts, which include versions like “the sheep that goes into the custard” (xiagengyang) in a Yuan edition of the Chuogenglu, or “the ugly sheep” (weimeiyang) in a citation of the Jilebian included in the Siku quanshu edition of the Ming text Yuzhitang tanhui [Gatherings at Jade Mushroom Hall]. 97. In his citation of the Jilebian, Tao Zongyi used this name to describe both old, thin men and women. 98. See Tao Zongyi, Chuogenglu [Notes made on a rest from plowing] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 123–124. Euphemistic analogy also occurs elsewhere in the Bencao, where the edible flesh of the frog (thought by many to be a foul creature) was called the “field chicken,” and rats were deemed “house deer.” This dialogue somewhat resembles the Daoist and Buddhist proscriptions against eating beef, a practice that also encouraged the creation of euphemisms. See John Kieschnick, “Buddhist Vegetarianism in China,” in Sterckx, Of Tripod and Palate, 186–212. 99. BC 52.renrou [Human flesh].fm. 100. Ibid. 101. See Taiping yulan [Imperial digest of the Taiping era] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998), vol. 4, juan 786, Zhenla, 3483; vol. 3, juan 549, shi [Corpses], 2485; vol. 3, juan 506, yimin [Recluses] 6, 2308; vol. 2, juan 339, xubingqi [Soldiers’ weapons], 1555; and vol. 4, juan 828, maimai [Selling and buying], 3693. For examples of foreign cannibalism in dynastic histories, see Pettersson, “Cannibalism,” 126–128.

CONCLUSION. ROT AND REBIRTH: THE AFTERLIFE AND REINCARNATION OF A NATURALIST

1. The comic is Li Shizhen: Weida de yaowu xuejia [Li Shizhen: Great scholar of medical drugs] (Tianjin: Zhongsheng shudian, 1955). It was based on a popular biography of Li Shizhen written by Zhang Huijian, Li Shizhen (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1954). 2. For a few examples of a prolific literature crediting Li as a father of modern science in China, see Li Shuzeng, Zhongguo mingdai zhexue [A history of philosophy of the Ming dynasty] (Henan: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2002); Wang Jian et al., Li Shizhen xueshu yanjiu [Academic research on Li Shizhen] (Beijing: Zhongyi guji chubanshe, 1996); and Na Qi, Bencaoxue [Studies of Chinese bencao] (Taizhong: Huihuang shudian, 1974). On the dangers of translating segments of premodern Chinese texts into bits of scientific evidence, see Daiwie Fu, “On Mengxi Bitan’s World of Marginalities and ‘South-Pointing Needles’: Fragment Translation vs. Contextual Translation,” in Viviane Alleton and Michael Lackner, eds., De l’un au multiple: Traductions du chinois vers les langues européennes (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1999), 175–202. 200


3. Though itself a monumental work that is useful in many respects, Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China quite explicitly compares Li Shizhen to the pantheon of Western naturalists, including Linnaeus, and credits Li with “scientific” systematicity, the use of a scala naturae, and many other features of the history of Western science. Though misleading, these comparisons can be highly amusing. One of my favorite examples is from Joseph Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6.1, Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 309, fn. b: “This may be a piece of hagiography, but it is pleasant to think of Li Shih-Chen as one of the Anargyroi celebrated in every Orthodox liturgy.” 4. From Jia Yi, “Owlet Rhapsody” [Funiao fu], in Xiao Tong, Wenxuan [Selections of refined literature] (Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1987), 604–610. Translation is my own. 5. BC 52.rengui [Human oddities]. 6. See Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 7. Many of these texts, especially surviving documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have been collected and preserved (albeit not entirely in clearly readable editions) in the Zhongguo bencao quanshu series (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1999). See especially vols. 395–398, which include works on materia medica in Tibetan, Uighur, Perso-Arabic, Chinese, Yi, and Mongolian. 8. The Bencao gangmu shiyi was not published until 1871. On the text, see Needham and Gwei-djen Lu, SCC 6.1: Botany, 325–328, and Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 164–168. The other significant commentary to the Bencao, first published about 1652, was Cai Liexian’s Bencao wanfang zhenxian [Needle and thread for the ten thousand prescriptions in the Bencao]. This work was intended to make the Bencao more usable by acting as an index to its contents, arranged by illness rather than object. Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 164, has a brief treatment of the work, which was often included as an appendix to editions of the Bencao after its publication. 9. The Bencao gangmu shiyi was one of eleven texts by Zhao, all combined and published as the “Twelve Useful Works.” Only the Bencao gangmu shiyi and a wandering doctor’s manual called the Chuanya survive. 10. Zhao added the discussion of opium smoking as an appendix to the Fires category of the original Bencao. See Zhao Xuemin, Bencao gangmu shiyi, juan 2, huo bu [Fires], yapian yan [Opium smoke; uses an alternate form of yan]. A translation can be found in Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, 167. Zhao’s account of cinchona bark (jinjilei) was based on the Renhai ji [Notes on society], the travel account of Zha Shenxing (1650–1727), one of many sources on foreign areas published after Li’s death and typical of the kind of source Zhao brought to his task. See Zhao Xuemin, Bencao gangmu shiyi, juan 6, mu bu [Woods], jinjilei [Cinchona bark]. 11. See Zhao Xuemin, Bencao gangmu shiyi, juan 10, lin bu [Scaly], longyan xiang [Fragrant dragon saliva; possibly ambergris], longxie [Dragon’s secretion]. 12. The material had, however, appeared in European texts some decades 201


earlier. The dongchong xiacao was first mentioned by Réaumur in 1726 (as “Hia Tsao Tom Tchom”). For the Réaumur account, see M. J. Berkeley, “On Some Entomogenous Sphaeriae,” in William Jackson Hooker, ed., London Journal of Botany, vol. 2 (London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1843), 207–208. [The full citation in Berkeley is René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences 1726, p. 302, tab. 16.] 13. The Sichuan tongzhi was later copied into the Siku quanshu compendium [The emperor’s four treasuries] of 1782. 14. Translation modified from Wu Jingzi, The Scholars, trans. Gladys Yang (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 295. 15. Wu Yiluo, Bencao congxin (Beijing: Renmin weisheng chubanshe, 1990 [1751]), 26. 16. This was probably due to the fact that the sprouting body (understood as a plant, not as a fungus) was most typically prescribed for use in medicine through the nineteenth century: it was harvested for use in medicine after having transformed to its herb form. 17. Zhao Xuemin, Bencao gangmu shiyi, juan 5, cao bu xia [Plants, pt. II], xiacao dongchong. The name of the drug was commonly written in both forms: dongchong xiacao or xiacao dongchong. 18. For du Halde’s account, see Jean-Baptiste du Halde, The General History of China (London: John Watts, 1736), electronic reproduction (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2003), 4:41–42. 19. On British colonial botanists in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, see Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 20. Cordyceps sinensis was catapulted into worldwide notoriety in the mid1990s. Chinese track and field coach Ma Junren’s (also known as Ma Zunren in some articles) rigorous training routine for his athletes included breakfasts of chongcao, a tonic that he claimed, according to several news stories, Chinese people had been drinking for hundreds of years. Cordyceps was credited as an important part of the dietary regimen that had helped Ma’s athletes break numerous world records in several events at the 1993 China National Games in Beijing and perform at record levels in international competitions thereafter. Though Ma was later implicated in a doping scandal and his fungal potion reportedly revealed to be nothing but sugar water, the international news coverage resulting from his prescription of the drug electrified the market for caterpillar fungus across East Asia through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. The discussion was renewed in the months prior to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, as Ma’s case was revived in articles about doping scandals of the 2008 Olympics and athletes and coaches debated whether it was safe to take “traditional Chinese herbal medicines,” like caterpillar fungus, to enhance vitality. 21. On the interpretation of bencao and other Chinese texts by Western naturalists in China, see Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists, 100–121. 22. For Read’s PhD thesis, see “The Influence of Chaulmoogra Oil on Calcium Metabolism” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1924). The Peking Society of Natural 202


History, founded in 1925 under the leadership of Nathaniel Gist Gee and geologist Amadeus W. Grabau, was in principle an international center for exchange among all scientists interested in Chinese natural history and in fact operated an engine for the reevaluation of Chinese natural knowledge in terms of Western science. The first issue of the Peking Society of Natural History Bulletin includes a brief prefatory note by editor in chief W. H. Wong that explains the motivation of the society, along with an appended selection of meeting proceedings and lecture transcripts that provide a more detailed picture of the individuals involved in the society in its first years. Obituaries of society charter members Amadeus W. Grabau, Gist Gee, and George Wilder can be found in the appended back matter of Peking Natural History Bulletin 16.3/4 (March–June 1948). On the involvement of foreign scientists like Grabau in establishing such scientific societies in Republican China, see Grace Yen Shen, “Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China, 1911–1949” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007), especially 118–173. 23. Bernard Emms Read, Chinese Materia Medica (Beijing: Peking Natural History Bulletin, 1923–1931), reprint (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1982). Read’s partial translation of the Bencao gangmu, according to the reprinted ordering with original publication information in parenthesis, consists of the following: I Animal Drugs (pt. 1, “The Domestic Animals,” originally in PNHB 5.4; pt. 2, “The Wild Animals,” pt. 3, “The Rodentia,” pt. 4, “The Monkeys and Supernatural Beings,” and pt. 5, “Man as a Medicine,” all originally in PNHB 6.1); II Avian Drugs (pt. 6, “Avian Drugs,” originally in PNHB 6.4); III Dragon and Snake Drugs (pt. 7, “Dragons and Snakes,” originally in PNHB 8.4); IV Turtle and Shellfish Drugs (pt. 8, published separately by PNHB); V Fish Drugs (pt. 9, published separately by PNHB); and VI Insect Drugs (pt. 10, published separately by PNHB). Read also coauthored a 1936 list of the medicinal plants of the Bencao gangmu and a 1936 study of the stone and mineral drugs of the Bencao gangmu (originally in PNHB 3.2). Incidentally, the Chinese name for the bulletin was Beiping bowu zazhi, once again revealing a modern connection between the Chinese bowu and the term “natural history.” 24. According to Read’s obituary in the bulletin, the income from his Bencao translations helped keep the society afloat. See Alice M. Boring, “In Memoriam: Bernard Emms Read (May 17, 1887–June 13, 1949),” Peking Natural History Bulletin 18.1 (1949): unpaginated front matter. 25. In Tibetan the name is approximately equivalent to the Chinese: dbyar (summer), rtsa (grass, herb), dgun (winter), ‘bu (worm). The Qing court had established a Tibetan School (Tanggute guanxue) in 1657 to train scholars for translation work. Tibetan language training peaked in the eighteenth century and accompanied a substantial increase in the printing of Tibetan books. On language training see Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), especially 28–29. On Qing printing of non-Han texts, see Evelyn S. Rawski, “Qing Publishing in Non-Han Languages,” in Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 304–331. Though 203


most of the translated texts were religious in content, many included plants, minerals, or creatures used for healing purposes. It is possible that textual knowledge of Tibetan medicinal drugs came into the Chinese-language canon via Mongol or Manchu, as literacy in these languages was advocated by Qing policies and many Mongols were trained in the Tibetan language at monasteries patronized by the Qing court. In his treatment of Sino-Tibetan loan words, Berthold Laufer identified dongchong xiacao as a Tibetan loan from Chinese. See Berthold Laufer, “Loanwords in Tibetan,” T’oung Pao 17 (1916): 445–446. In the end, whether the name was originally Tibetan or Chinese is less important than the fact that it was a contested object that apparently lived in both languages and medical literatures. 26. See Qiangbeiduojie (Tibetan: ‘Jam-dpal-rdo-rje), Mengyao zhengdian (Tibetan: Mdzes mtshar mig rgyan), in Zhongguo bencao quanshu (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1999), 397:261. A number of translations of this text into modern Chinese are also readily available. On the historical interweaving of Mongolian and Tibetan medicines, see Craig R. Janes and Casey Hilliard, “Inventing Tradition: Tibetan Medicine in the Post-Socialist Contexts of China and Mongolia,” in Laurent Pordie, ed., Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World: Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice (London: Routledge, 2008), 40. 27. I use the language of “tradition” here bearing in mind that many of the indigenous medical traditions identified today are in fact modern constructions and hybrid, changing entities. Janes and Hilliard, “Inventing Tradition,” provides an excellent discussion of the operation of this concept in modern Tibetan and Mongolian medicines as well as a brief introduction to the tangled history of Tibetan medicine within the context of modern Chinese political history. 28. See Kim Taylor, Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–63: A Medicine of Revolution (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), especially 79–108. 29. Weisheng Shouce: Gong chijiao yisheng yong [Hygiene handbook: For the general use of barefoot doctors] (Anhui: Anhuisheng weisheng fangyisuo, 1976), 3. 30. Jay Chou, Still Fantasy, compact disc, Sony BMG, 2006, “Bencao gangmu” (translated in the liner notes as “A [sic] Herbalist’s Manual”). 31. Bencao yaowang (The Herbalist’s Manual), DVD, 10 discs (25 episodes), TVBI, 2005. 32. Jorge Luis Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,” in Eliot Weinberger, ed., Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 231. 33. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xv–xvi. 34. On the idea of China in Borges’s work, see Zhang Longxi, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry 15.1 (Autumn 1988): 108–131. Zhang also discusses Borges’s invocation of a Chinese encyclopedia in the short story “The Congress,” in which the “silky volumes” of the encyclopedia are described. Note the resonance between the “silky volumes” of the Chinese encyclopedia in “The Congress” and the “silky” mane of the Chinese monkey in The Book of Imaginary Beings: in Borges’s work, silk acts as a kind of metonym for China itself. See Jorge Luis Borges (with Margarita Guerrero), The Book of Imaginary Beings (London: Vintage, 2002 [1969]). 204


APPENDIX A. LI SHIZHEN, LIDAI ZHUJIA BENCAO [BENCAO WORKS THROUGH THE AGES]

1. Though its authorship was unclear, elsewhere Li referred to this book as the work of Tao Hongjing (425–536). Tao’s commentary edition of the Shennong bencao jing was the version known to Song and Ming scholars, and it is unclear whether there was a version of the Bencao jing before Tao’s. 2. Though Li Shizhen credited Tao Hongjing with writing the Mingyi bielu, the authorship is actually unclear. 3. According to Li, the first version of this text was commissioned by Emperor Gaozong (reigned 650–683) early in his reign, planned as a revision of “Tao Hongjing’s” Mingyi bielu. The emperor ordered an additional revision of the resulting work, and this was led by Su Gong from 656–660. 4. Li’s source for this entry was Zhang Yuxi (fl. ca. 1180), author of the Jiayou buzhu bencao [Annotated and supplemented bencao of the Jiayou period]. 5. Li initially said that Meng lived in the Liang (502–557) but went on to describe his life in the Tang (618–907). 6. Li Shizhen placed Li Xun in the Suzong (756–762) and Daizong (762–780) reign periods of the Tang. Others have situated Li in the middle of the tenth century, which is much more likely given what is known of his family. 7. Li cited Zhang Yuxi, who himself had probably not seen the text. 8. Though Zhang Yuxi attributed this to Chen Shiliang, Li maintained that the book was simply a compilation of older texts and contained nothing new. 9. According to Li this was a revision of the Tang Bencao with a preface by Meng Chang, a ruler during the Five Dynasties period who had ordered members of the Hanlin Academy to compile the text. 10. Elsewhere Li referred to this text as the Bencao tujing. 11. The period in which the first version was written by Tang Shenwei. 12. The period of the composition and printing of the revision by Cao Xiaozhong. 13. This is an elementary work in verse to facilitate memorization. Li included a note saying Ming medical scholars Liu Chun, Xiong Zongli, and Fu Zibei had also written medical works in verse for ease of memorization by students. 14. Li attributed this work to Prince Xian of Zhou, a son of Zhu Xiao, prince and the fifth child of the emperor Ming Taizu. The attribution should properly be to Zhu Su, also known as Prince Ding of Zhou, and editors of many modern versions of the Bencao gangmu have corrected Li’s error in the text. See any of the Siku quanshu editions for the attribution to Prince Xian. The Liu and Liu edition of the Bencao shows the corrected attribution to Prince Ding. 15. This prince of Ning was Zhu Quan (1378–1448), a son of the first emperor of the Ming. His works spanned several fields, from medicine and agriculture to drama criticism and poetry.

205

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

anâ•‡ 暗

banmaoâ•‡ 斑蝥

anchashiâ•‡ 按察使

baoâ•‡ 鴇 baomuâ•‡ 苞木

Baâ•‡ 巴

Baopuziâ•‡ 抱朴子

baguâ•‡ 八穀

Baopuzi neipianâ•‡ 抱朴子內篇

bagu wenâ•‡ 八股文

baoyishuiâ•‡ 胞衣水

baguaâ•‡ 八卦

baoyuâ•‡ 鮑魚

Baguiâ•‡ 八桂

Baozang lunâ•‡ 寶藏論

baibing zhuzhiyaoâ•‡ 百病主治藥

Beihu luâ•‡ 北戶錄

Baichuan xuehaiâ•‡ 百川學海

Beimeng suoyanâ•‡ 北夢瑣言

baifanâ•‡ 白礬

beiziâ•‡ 貝子

baiguâ•‡ 百穀

bencaoâ•‡ 本草

baiheâ•‡ 百合

Bencao bieshuoâ•‡ 本草別說

baimaniaoâ•‡ 白馬溺

Bencao congxinâ•‡ 本草從新

Baimao tang jiâ•‡ 白茅堂集

Bencao fahuiâ•‡ 本草發揮

baitiangongâ•‡ 敗天公

Bencao gangmuâ•‡ 本草綱目

baiyiâ•‡ 白蟻

Bencao gangmu shiyiâ•‡ 本草綱目拾遺

banâ•‡ 斑

Bencao gekuoâ•‡ 本草歌括

Ban Guâ•‡ 班固

Bencao huibianâ•‡ 本草會編

banggeâ•‡ 蚌蛤

Bencao jingâ•‡ 本草經

207


Bencao jiyaoâ•‡ 本草集要

boâ•‡ 帛

Bencao mengquanâ•‡ 本草蒙筌

bohuozhangâ•‡ 撥火杖

Bencao shengya banjiâ•‡ 本草乘雅半偈

boliâ•‡ 玻璃

Bencao shiyiâ•‡ 本草拾遺

boshanâ•‡ 博山

Bencao shuâ•‡ 本草述

boshan luâ•‡ 博山爐

Bencao tujingâ•‡ 本草圖經

bowuâ•‡ 博物

Bencao wanfang zhenxianâ•‡ 本草萬方鍼線

bowuguanâ•‡ 博物館

Bencao xing shileiâ•‡ 本草性事類

bowuxueâ•‡ 博物學 bowuyuanâ•‡ 博物院

Bencao yanyiâ•‡ 本草衍義

bowuzheâ•‡ 博物者

Bencao yanyi buyiâ•‡ 本草衍義補遺

Bowuzhiâ•‡ 博物志

Bencao yaowangâ•‡ 本草藥王

Boyaâ•‡ 博雅

Bencao yinyiâ•‡ 本草音義

buâ•‡ 布

bianâ•‡ 變

buciyangâ•‡ 不羨羊

Bian Queâ•‡ 扁鵲

bujingâ•‡ 不經

bianbaiâ•‡ 變白

bumeigengâ•‡ 不美羹

biandongâ•‡ 變動

burenâ•‡ 不仁

bianheiâ•‡ 變黑

buzuxinâ•‡ 不足信

bianhuaâ•‡ 變化 biantongâ•‡ 變通

caiâ•‡ 菜

bianwuâ•‡ 辨物

Cai Bianâ•‡ 蔡卞

biaoben yinyangâ•‡ 標本陰陽

Cai Liexianâ•‡ 蔡烈先

bieâ•‡ 鱉

caiji zhujia bencao yaopin zongshuâ•‡ 采集諸家本草藥品總數

bijiâ•‡ 筆記

caiyao fen liuqi suiwuâ•‡ 采藥分六氣歲物

bing you bayao liushi liubuzhiâ•‡ 病有八要六失六不治

canâ•‡ 蠶

Bingji fuâ•‡ 病機賦

Cangzhouâ•‡ 滄州

bingren yiâ•‡ 病人衣

caoâ•‡ 草

Binhu maixueâ•‡ 瀕湖脈學 208


Cao Kuanâ•‡ 曹寬 Cao Xianâ•‡ 曹憲 Cao Xiaozhongâ•‡ 曹孝忠 caohongâ•‡ 草澒

Chongguang Yinggong bencaoâ•‡ 重廣英公本草 chongsha yuanheâ•‡ 蟲沙猿鶴 chongshouâ•‡ 蟲獸

caomu chongyu niaoshouâ•‡ 草木蟲魚鳥獸

Chongxiu Zhenghe jingshi zhenglei beiyong bencaoâ•‡ 重修政和經史證類備用本草

Caomuziâ•‡ 草木子

chuâ•‡ 畜

caoxieâ•‡ 草鞋

chuanshanjiaâ•‡ 穿山家

ceâ•‡ 策

Chuanyaâ•‡ 串雅

cengqingâ•‡ 曾青

Chuciâ•‡ 楚辭

Chajingâ•‡ 茶經

chuihuotongâ•‡ 吹火筒

chanchuâ•‡ 蟾蜍

Chuogengluâ•‡ 輟耕錄

changâ•‡ 常

chusheng qidaiâ•‡ 初生臍帶

che'aoâ•‡ 車螯

Chushi xiyu jiâ•‡ 出使西域記

chenâ•‡ 臣

ciâ•‡ 辭

Chen Chengâ•‡ 陳承

cishiâ•‡ 慈石

Chen Jiamoâ•‡ 陳嘉謨

cixuâ•‡ 髭鬚

Chen Shiliangâ•‡ 陳士良

congâ•‡ 聰

Chen Tingâ•‡ 陳霆

Cui Jiayanâ•‡ 崔嘉彥

Chen Zangqiâ•‡ 陳藏器

cuzhiâ•‡ 促織

Chen Zangqi Zhuxu yongyao fanliâ•‡ 陳藏器諸虛用藥凡例 chiâ•‡ 尺 chijiao yishengâ•‡ 赤腳醫生 chimuâ•‡ 尺木 chitongâ•‡ 赤銅 chiyinâ•‡ 齒垽 chongâ•‡ 蟲

Daguan bencaoâ•‡ 大觀本草 daiâ•‡ 帶 Dai Kaizhiâ•‡ 戴凱之 Dai Qizongâ•‡ 戴起宗 daimaoâ•‡ 玳瑁 danâ•‡ 丹 danshaâ•‡ 丹砂

209


daojiaâ•‡ 道家

eâ•‡ 蛾

daojiaoâ•‡ 道教

e jiaoâ•‡ 阿膠

daoshiâ•‡ 道士

ersaiâ•‡ 耳塞

daoshuâ•‡ 道書

Eryaâ•‡ 爾雅

Daqinâ•‡ 大秦

Erya yiâ•‡ 爾雅翼

Daxueâ•‡ 大學

Erya zhushuâ•‡ 爾雅注疏

dengzhanâ•‡ 燈盞 dengzhanyouâ•‡ 燈盞油

fabiâ•‡ 髮髲

diâ•‡ 地 [earth]

famingâ•‡ 發明

diâ•‡ 砥 [whetstone]

fanâ•‡ 范

dihuangâ•‡ 地黃

fan ceâ•‡ 反側

Dijing tuâ•‡ 地鏡圖

fangcaoâ•‡ 芳草

dishengyangâ•‡ 地生羊

fangjiâ•‡ 方技

diyejiaâ•‡ 地野迦

fangminâ•‡ 方民

dongchong xiacaoâ•‡ 冬蟲夏草

fangshiâ•‡ 方士

Dongdu fuâ•‡ 東都賦

fangyuâ•‡ 魴魚

dongfang chunyi miao fangâ•‡ 洞房春意妙方

fanliâ•‡ 凡例 Fanshuâ•‡ 梵書

douâ•‡ 斗

fanzhiâ•‡ 幡紙

Douzhen zhengzhiâ•‡ 痘疹証治

Fayanâ•‡ 法言

duâ•‡ 毒 [efficacy, poison]

fei yuyanâ•‡ 非寓言

duâ•‡ 蠹 [kind of moth]

feifeiâ•‡ 狒狒

Du Fuâ•‡ 杜甫

feilianâ•‡ 蜚蠊

Du Shanfangâ•‡ 杜善方

feiyiâ•‡ 非異

Du Taiqingâ•‡ 杜臺卿

fenâ•‡ 分

Duan Gongluâ•‡ 段公路

Fengjiâ•‡ 蜂記

ducaoâ•‡ 毒草

fengmiâ•‡ 蜂蜜

duoniâ•‡ 多膩

fengqie'erâ•‡ 風茄兒

210


Fengyue menâ•‡ 風月門

Ge Hongâ•‡ 葛洪

fenxiâ•‡ 粉錫

gebangâ•‡ 蛤蚌

fouyiâ•‡ 芣苡

geguâ•‡ 割股

fuâ•‡ 腐 [to decay]

gejueâ•‡ 歌訣

fuâ•‡ 賦 [verse form]

geleiâ•‡ 葛藟

Fu Gong/Hongâ•‡ 傅肱

genâ•‡ 根

Fu Zibeiâ•‡ 傅滋輩

Gengxin yuceâ•‡ 庚辛玉冊

fuboâ•‡ 服帛

gewuâ•‡ 格物

fufangâ•‡ 附方

goubaoâ•‡ 狗寶

Fuhou beiji fangâ•‡ 肘後備急方

Goulou shenshuâ•‡ 岣嶁神書

Fulinâ•‡ 佛林

guâ•‡ 穀

fulu zhuguoâ•‡ 附錄諸果

guaiâ•‡ 怪

Funiaofuâ•‡ 鵩鳥賦

guanâ•‡ 鸛 [stork]

fuqiâ•‡ 服器

guanâ•‡ 觀 [to observe]

furen yueshuiâ•‡ 婦人月水

guanci .Â€.Â€. zeâ•‡ 觀此則

futouâ•‡ 袱頭

guangâ•‡ 光

futuâ•‡ 附圖

Guangyaâ•‡ 廣雅

fuyao shijiâ•‡ 服藥食忌

Guangya shuzhengâ•‡ 廣雅疏證

fuzhongâ•‡ 蛗螽

Guangzhou jiâ•‡ 廣州記 guanmuâ•‡ 灌木

ganâ•‡ 甘

guanwu pianâ•‡ 觀物篇

Gan Baoâ•‡ 干寶

guiâ•‡ 桂 [cinnamon]

gangâ•‡ 綱

guiâ•‡ 龜 [type of turtle]

gangmuâ•‡ 綱目

guibieâ•‡ 龜鱉

Gao Yangshengâ•‡ 高陽生

Guijingâ•‡ 龜經

Gaozuâ•‡ 高祖

guilinâ•‡ 鬼磷

geâ•‡ 合

guiyuan jianjinâ•‡ 貴遠賤近

geâ•‡ 葛 [plant from Shijing]

guizhongâ•‡ 貴重

211


guizhuâ•‡ 鬼疰

haoshizheâ•‡ 好事者

Gujin luyan fangâ•‡ 古今錄驗方

heâ•‡ 鶴

Gujin tushu jichengâ•‡ 古今圖書集成

hegulanâ•‡ 和骨爛

gujingâ•‡ 古鏡

hejiâ•‡ 鶡雞

gumiâ•‡ 菰米

Hengshanâ•‡ 衡山

guoâ•‡ 國 [country, land]

Herensiâ•‡ 何人斯

guoâ•‡ 果 [fruit]

hetian yuâ•‡ 和闐玉

Guo Puâ•‡ 郭璞

Hong Chuâ•‡ 洪芻

guogaiâ•‡ 鍋蓋

honghaiâ•‡ 澒海

guoluoâ•‡ 蜾臝

houâ•‡ 猴

guoranâ•‡ 果然

houyuâ•‡ 鱟魚

Guoran fuâ•‡ 果然賦

Huâ•‡ 胡 [ethnic group]

Guoshi buâ•‡ 國史補

huâ•‡ 虎 [tiger]

gushuâ•‡ 古書

huâ•‡ 斛 [unit of meaÂ�sure] Hu bencaoâ•‡ 胡本草

haiâ•‡ 害

Hu Chenglongâ•‡ 胡承龍

haihongâ•‡ 海紅

Hu Shikeâ•‡ 胡仕可

haitangâ•‡ 海棠

huaâ•‡ 化

haitangliâ•‡ 海棠梨

Huainan bagong xianghejingâ•‡ 淮南八公相鶴經

haitunyuâ•‡ 海豚魚

Huainan wanbi shuâ•‡ 淮南萬畢術

Haiyao bencaoâ•‡ 海藥本草

Huainanziâ•‡ 淮南子

hanâ•‡ 寒

Huang Shengzengâ•‡ 黃省曾

Han Baoshengâ•‡ 韓保昇

Huangdiâ•‡ 黃帝

hanhuoâ•‡ 寒火

Huangdi neijingâ•‡ 黃帝內經

hanjuâ•‡ 寒具

Huangfu Miâ•‡ 皇甫謐

hanqingâ•‡ 汗青

huangniaoâ•‡ 黃鳥

hanshanâ•‡ 汗衫

huangniuâ•‡ 黃牛

Hanshuâ•‡ 漢書

212


huangyi zhiwaiâ•‡ 荒裔之外

jianghu yiâ•‡ 江湖醫

huangyuâ•‡ 蝗蜮

jiangliâ•‡ 江蘺

Huashe zhuanâ•‡ 花蛇傳

Jianguoâ•‡ 兼國

huashengâ•‡ 化生

jianke jicuâ•‡ 箭笴及鏃

Huayang zhenyiâ•‡ 華陽真逸

Jianwuâ•‡ 見物

huiâ•‡ 回

jiaoâ•‡ 蛟

huichongâ•‡ 蚘蟲

Jiaoding bencao qiuxu xizeng zhiâ•‡ 校定本草求敘戲贈之

hujiaoâ•‡ 胡椒 hunâ•‡ 魂 huncaiâ•‡ 葷菜 huoâ•‡ 火 Huoren xintongâ•‡ 活人心統 huoyaoliaoâ•‡ 火藥料 hurenâ•‡ 胡人 hurouâ•‡ 狐肉 huzhuoshiâ•‡ 壺涿氏

jiaojiaobuâ•‡ 繳腳布 jiaolongâ•‡ 蛟龍 Jiaozhou jiâ•‡ 交州記 Jiayou buzhu bencaoâ•‡ 嘉祐補注本草 jiazhurouâ•‡ 豭豬肉 jieâ•‡ 介 [armored] jieâ•‡ 解 [to dissect, to analyze] jie zhurou duâ•‡ 解諸肉毒 Jiegu zhenzhu nangâ•‡ 潔古珍珠囊

jiâ•‡ 稷 [millet] jiâ•‡ 蕺 [type of vegetable] Ji Kangâ•‡ 嵇康 jiaâ•‡ 假 [fake] jiaâ•‡ 價 [pricey, valuable] Jia Sidaoâ•‡ 賈似道 Jia Yiâ•‡ 賈誼 jiadieâ•‡ 蛺蝶 jianâ•‡ 簡 [bamboo strip] jianâ•‡ 鑒 [mirror] jianâ•‡ 見 [to observe]

Jijieâ•‡ 集解 Jilebianâ•‡ 雞肋編 jinâ•‡ 錦 [brocade] jinâ•‡ 金 [gold, metal] jinâ•‡ 斤 [unit of meaÂ�sure] jingâ•‡ 精 [essence] jingâ•‡ 鏡 [mirror] Jingnan zhiâ•‡ 荊南志 jingqiâ•‡ 精氣 jingquan shuiâ•‡ 井泉水 jingshi baijiaâ•‡ 經史百家

213


Jingshi zhenglei beiji bencaoâ•‡ 經史證纇備急本草

kanâ•‡ 坎 [trigram] kan ruâ•‡ 看如

Jingshi zhenglei Daguan bencaoâ•‡ 經史證類大觀本草

kan wuâ•‡ 看物

jinjileiâ•‡ 金雞勒

Kaogong ji zhuâ•‡ 考工記注

Jinlingâ•‡ 金陵

Kaopanâ•‡ 考槃

Jinpingmeiâ•‡ 金瓶梅

Kesuoguanâ•‡ 薖所館

jinshiâ•‡ 金石

Kesuoguan shijiâ•‡ 薖所館詩集

Jinsi xuanxuanâ•‡ 金笥玄玄

Kong Fuâ•‡ 孔鮒

jinxieâ•‡ 金屑

Kong Yingdaâ•‡ 孔穎達

jisuâ•‡ 稷粟

kongqingâ•‡ 空青

jiti bishengâ•‡ 屐屜鼻繩

Kou Zongshiâ•‡ 寇宗奭

jiuâ•‡ 韭

koujintuoâ•‡ 口津唾

jiuchongâ•‡ 九蟲

kuâ•‡ 苦

Jiuhuang bencaoâ•‡ 救荒本草

kunâ•‡ 坤

jiuqiaoâ•‡ 九竅

kundangâ•‡ 褌襠

jiuyuezhangâ•‡ 救月杖 Jiuzhouâ•‡ 九州

lanâ•‡ 爛

juâ•‡ 橘

lancaoâ•‡ 蘭草

juanâ•‡ 卷 [chapter/section]

leiâ•‡ 類

juanâ•‡ 絹 [fabric woven out of raw silk]

Lei Gongâ•‡ 雷公

juan'erâ•‡ 卷耳

Lei Gong paozhi lunâ•‡ 雷公炮炙論

jueâ•‡ 訣 [rhyme]

Lei Gong yaoduiâ•‡ 雷公藥對

jueâ•‡ 玃 [type of beast]

leishuâ•‡ 纇書

jujiuâ•‡ 雎鳩

leiwo leiwoâ•‡ 類我類我

junâ•‡ 君

liâ•‡ 鯉 [carp] liâ•‡ 理 [principle]

Kaibao bencaoâ•‡ 開寶本草

liâ•‡ 離 [trigram]

kanâ•‡ 看 [to observe]

liâ•‡ 里 [unit of length]

214


Li Baiâ•‡ 李白

linâ•‡ 鱗 [scaly]

Li Chanâ•‡ 李梴

linâ•‡ 麟 [unicorn-like beast]

Li Dangzhiâ•‡ 李當之

linâ•‡ 淋 [urinary stones, gonorrhea]

Li Dongbiâ•‡ 李東壁

Lin Yiâ•‡ 林億

Li Dongyuan Suizheng yongyao fanliâ•‡ 李東垣隨證用藥凡例

Linhai zhiâ•‡ 臨海志

Li Gaoâ•‡ 李杲 Li Hanguangâ•‡ 李含光 Li Quanâ•‡ 李筌 Li Shiâ•‡ 李石 Li Shizhenâ•‡ 李時珍 Li Suâ•‡ 李蘇 Li Xunâ•‡ 李珣 Li Yanwenâ•‡ 李言聞 Li Zhaoâ•‡ 李肇 liangâ•‡ 涼 [cool] liangâ•‡ 粱 [millet] Liangâ•‡ 梁 [place name] liangjiaoyangâ•‡ 兩腳羊 Liangshan motanâ•‡ 兩山墨談

lingchuang xiaxieâ•‡ 靈床下鞋 lingliâ•‡ 鯪鯉 linsheâ•‡ 鱗蛇 linshiâ•‡ 淋石 liriâ•‡ 曆日 Lisaoâ•‡ 離騷 Lishi yaoluâ•‡ 李氏藥錄 Liu Chunâ•‡ 劉純 Liu Hanâ•‡ 劉翰 Liu Ruojinâ•‡ 劉若金 Liu Wansuâ•‡ 劉完素 Liu Xiangâ•‡ 劉向 Liu Xuehuâ•‡ 劉雪湖 Liu Yuâ•‡ 劉郁

lianzhiâ•‡ 楝枝

liufu liuzang yongyao qiwei buxieâ•‡ 六腑六臟用藥氣味補瀉

liaoâ•‡ 獠 [ferocious]

liuliâ•‡ 琉璃

liaoâ•‡ 蓼 [knotweed]

Liuqiu guoâ•‡ 琉球國

lidai zhujia bencaoâ•‡ 歷代諸家本草

longâ•‡ 龍

lie zhuanâ•‡ 列傳

longguâ•‡ 龍骨

Lieziâ•‡ 列子

Longmenâ•‡ 龍門

Lijiâ•‡ 禮記

longxieâ•‡ 龍泄

linâ•‡ 林 [forest]

longyan xiangâ•‡ 龍涎香

215


louguâ•‡ 螻蛄

makubingâ•‡ 麻枯餅

loutaiâ•‡ 漏胎

mamaidaoâ•‡ 麻麥稻

luâ•‡ 鹿 [deer]

manaoâ•‡ 馬腦

luâ•‡ 鹵 [salt]

mancaoâ•‡ 蔓草

Lu Demingâ•‡ 陸德明

mangcaoâ•‡ 菵草

Lu Dianâ•‡ 陸佃

mantuoluo huaâ•‡ 曼陀羅花／華

Lu Jiâ•‡ 陸璣

maoâ•‡ 茅

Lü Kunâ•‡ 呂坤

Mao Changâ•‡ 毛萇

Lu Yuâ•‡ 陸羽

Mao Hengâ•‡ 毛亨

Lu Zhiyiâ•‡ 盧之頤

Mao Jinâ•‡ 毛晉

luanfaâ•‡ 亂髮

Maoshiâ•‡ 毛詩

luanshengâ•‡ 卵生

Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shuâ•‡ 毛詩草木鳥獸蟲魚疏

Lunyuâ•‡ 論語 luoâ•‡ 蓏

Maoshi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu guangyaoâ•‡ 毛詩草木鳥獸蟲魚疏廣要

Luo Yuanâ•‡ 羅願

Maoshi liutie jiangyiâ•‡ 毛詩六帖講意

luocaiâ•‡ 蓏菜 Luoyang mudan jiâ•‡ 洛陽牡丹記

Maoshi Lushu guangyaoâ•‡ 毛詩陸疏廣要

lurouâ•‡ 鹿肉

Maoshi mingwu jieâ•‡ 毛詩名物解

Lüshi chunqiuâ•‡ 呂氏春秋

Maoshi mingwu tushuoâ•‡ 毛詩名物圖說

luxianâ•‡ 鹵鹹

maxieâ•‡ 麻鞋 Mei Yaochenâ•‡ 梅堯臣

maâ•‡ 馬

Meipuâ•‡ 梅譜

Ma Zhiâ•‡ 馬志

Meng Changâ•‡ 孟昶

maiâ•‡ 脈

Meng Shenâ•‡ 孟詵

Maijueâ•‡ 脈訣

mianâ•‡ 綿

Maijue kaozhengâ•‡ 脈訣考証

Miaojin wanbao quanshuâ•‡ 妙錦萬寶全書

maimaiâ•‡ 賣買

mifengâ•‡ 蜜蜂

Majingâ•‡ 馬經

mihouâ•‡ 獼猴 216


mihoutaoâ•‡ 獼猴桃

niuhuangâ•‡ 牛黃

mingâ•‡ 名 [name]

nuanâ•‡ 暖

mingâ•‡ 明 [light] Ming shiâ•‡ 明史

Ouyang Xiuâ•‡ 歐陽修

minglingâ•‡ 螟蛉 mingling ziâ•‡ 螟蛉子

piâ•‡ 貔

Mingyi bieluâ•‡ 名醫別錄

pi weiâ•‡ 脾胃

mingyuâ•‡ 螟蜮

pijinziâ•‡ 皮巾子

mishiâ•‡ 米食

pingâ•‡ 平

miuâ•‡ 謬

pingshiâ•‡ 萍實

miwuâ•‡ 蘼蕪

pishiâ•‡ 砒石 [arsenic stone]

moâ•‡ 墨

pishiâ•‡ 癖石 [obsession stone]

Mojingâ•‡ 墨經

pishuangâ•‡ 砒霜

mosiâ•‡ 摩斯

pixueâ•‡ 皮靴

muâ•‡ 目 [subcategories]

Piyaâ•‡ 埤雅

muâ•‡ 木 [trees, woods]

Piya guangyiâ•‡ 埤雅廣義

mugouâ•‡ 木狗

piyaodaiâ•‡ 皮腰袋

mukeâ•‡ 木客

poâ•‡ 剖 [to cut open]

muluâ•‡ 目錄

poâ•‡ 魄 [type of soul]

munaiyiâ•‡ 木乃伊

poâ•‡ 破 [worn out, shabby] puluâ•‡ 譜錄

najiaâ•‡ 那伽

pusashiâ•‡ 菩薩石

Nandu fuâ•‡ 南都賦

pushanâ•‡ 蒲扇

niaoâ•‡ 鳥 nibaiyinâ•‡ 溺白垽

qiâ•‡ 氣

Ning Xian wangâ•‡ 寧獻王

Qi ai zhuanâ•‡ 蘄艾傳

Ning Yuanâ•‡ 寧原

Qi Boâ•‡ 岐伯

niuâ•‡ 牛

qianâ•‡ 鉛

217


Qianjin shizhiâ•‡ 千金食治

qusouâ•‡ 蠷螋

Qianjin yaofangâ•‡ 千金要方

quzaoâ•‡ 屈造

Qianjin yifangâ•‡ 千金翼方 qiaomuâ•‡ 喬木

ransheâ•‡ 蚺蛇

qiaoqiao cuoxin, yanyi qichuâ•‡ 翹翹錯薪, 言刈其楚

raobahuoâ•‡ 饒把火 reâ•‡ 熱

qidaoâ•‡ 祈禱

renâ•‡ 人

qifangâ•‡ 七方

renbaoâ•‡ 人胞

qijia rujinâ•‡ 其價如金

rendanâ•‡ 人膽

Qijing bamai kaoâ•‡ 奇經八脈考

renguâ•‡ 人骨

qilinâ•‡ 麒麟

renguiâ•‡ 人傀

qinâ•‡ 禽

Renhai jiâ•‡ 人海記

qinglingâ•‡ 蜻蛉

renhanâ•‡ 人汗

Qingshu jiyaoâ•‡ 情書紀要

renjingâ•‡ 人精

qingzhiâ•‡ 青紙

renniaoâ•‡ 人尿

Qinjingâ•‡ 禽經

renpoâ•‡ 人魄

qiushiâ•‡ 秋石

renqiâ•‡ 人氣

qiusouâ•‡ 蛷螋

renrouâ•‡ 人肉

qiuyinâ•‡ 蚯蚓

renshenâ•‡ 人參

qiweiâ•‡ 氣味

renshen jinjiâ•‡ 妊娠禁忌

qiwei yinyangâ•‡ 氣味陰陽

Renshen zhuanâ•‡ 人參傳

qiwuâ•‡ 器物

renshiâ•‡ 人屎 [human excrement]

Qizhouâ•‡ 蘄州

renshiâ•‡ 人虱 [human lice]

Qizhou zhiâ•‡ 蘄州志

renshiâ•‡ 人勢 [human penis]

quâ•‡ 蛆

renxiongâ•‡ 人熊

Qu Yuanâ•‡ 屈原

renxueâ•‡ 人血

Quanshu beikaoâ•‡ 全書備考

renyaâ•‡ 人蚜

queâ•‡ 雀

Rihua zhujia bencaoâ•‡ 日華諸家本草

218


Riyong bencaoâ•‡ 日用本草

shangyangâ•‡ 商羊

riyong leishuâ•‡ 日用纇書

Shanhaijingâ•‡ 山海經

rongyanâ•‡ 戎鹽

shanqieziâ•‡ 山茄子

rouhuaâ•‡ 柔滑

shanqiongchongâ•‡ 山蛩蟲

ruâ•‡ 儒

shanxiaoâ•‡ 山喿

ruxueâ•‡ 儒學

sheâ•‡ 蛇

ruyiâ•‡ 儒醫

shechuangâ•‡ 蛇床

ruzhiâ•‡ 乳汁

shegongâ•‡ 射工 shenâ•‡ 神

saba’erâ•‡ 撒八兒

Shen Guaâ•‡ 沈括

Sandu fuâ•‡ 三都賦

shengâ•‡ 升

sanfen wudianâ•‡ 三墳五典

Shengji zongluâ•‡ 聖濟總錄

sang piaoxiaoâ•‡ 桑螵蛸

shengjiang fuchenâ•‡ 升降浮沉

sanhuangâ•‡ 三皇

Shengxiaolunâ•‡ 生肖論

sanjiaoâ•‡ 三焦

Shennong bencao jingâ•‡ 神農本草經

sanshiâ•‡ 三尸

[Shennong] Bencao jing jizhuâ•‡ [神農]本草經集注

Sanshiliu huangfangâ•‡ 三十六黃方 Santai wanyong zhengzongâ•‡ 三台萬用正宗 Sanyin fangâ•‡ 三因方 seâ•‡ 色

Shennong bencao jing muluâ•‡ 神農本草經目錄 Shennong bencao jingshuâ•‡ 神農本草經疏

shanâ•‡ 山

Shennong benjing minglieâ•‡ 神農本經名例

shancaoâ•‡ 山草

shenqiâ•‡ 神氣

Shanfan bencaoâ•‡ 刪繁本草

shenxian jiaâ•‡ 神仙家

shang pinâ•‡ 上品

shiâ•‡ 屍 [corpse]

shangjiaoâ•‡ 上焦

shiâ•‡ 豕 [pork]

Shanglin fuâ•‡ 上林賦

shiâ•‡ 石 [stone]

shanguoâ•‡ 山果

shiâ•‡ 視 [to observe] shiâ•‡ 詩 [verse form] 219


Shi Kuangâ•‡ 師曠

shuâ•‡ 屬 [category]

Shi Kuang qinjingâ•‡ 師曠禽經

shuâ•‡ 鼠 [mice]

Shi Nai'anâ•‡ 施耐庵

Shu bencaoâ•‡ 蜀本草

shicaoâ•‡ 石草

shubiâ•‡ 梳篦

Shidianâ•‡ 釋典

shudouâ•‡ 菽豆

shiguâ•‡ 釋詁

shuiâ•‡ 水 [water, aquatic]

shijiâ•‡ 十劑 [ten functions]

shuicaiâ•‡ 水菜

Shijiâ•‡ 史記 [Records of History]

shuicaoâ•‡ 水草

Shijian bencaoâ•‡ 食鑒本草

shuiguiâ•‡ 水龜

Shijingâ•‡ 詩經

Shuihu zhuanâ•‡ 水滸傳

Shilei fuâ•‡ 事類賦

shuijingâ•‡ 水精

Shiliao bencaoâ•‡ 食療本草

shuinuâ•‡ 水弩

Shilin guangjiâ•‡ 事林廣記

shuisheâ•‡ 水蛇

shimiâ•‡ 石蜜

shuiyinâ•‡ 水銀

Shimingâ•‡ 釋名

shuiyinfenâ•‡ 水銀粉

shishengâ•‡ 濕生

shuizhong jinâ•‡ 水中金

Shiwen leijuâ•‡ 事文類聚

shujiaâ•‡ 術家

Shiwu bencaoâ•‡ 食物本草

Shuowen jieziâ•‡ 說文解字

Shiwu jiyuanâ•‡ 事物紀原

Shuoyuanâ•‡ 說苑

Shixing bencaoâ•‡ 食性本草

shushiâ•‡ 術士

shixueâ•‡ 實學

Shuyi jiâ•‡ 述異記

shiyanâ•‡ 食鹽

si baoâ•‡ 思抱

shiyingâ•‡ 石英

Sichuan tongzhiâ•‡ 四川通志

Shizhen yueâ•‡ 時珍曰

Sima Xiangruâ•‡ 司馬相如

shizhiâ•‡ 石脂

siren zhenxiâ•‡ 死人枕席

shizhongruâ•‡ 石鍾乳

Sisheng bencaoâ•‡ 四聲本草

shouâ•‡ 獸

sishi yong yaoliâ•‡ 四時用藥例

Shoujingâ•‡ 獸經

Sishuâ•‡ 四書

220


siwo siwoâ•‡ 似我似我

Tao Hongjingâ•‡ 陶弘景

siyue mengxiaâ•‡ 四月孟夏

Tao Yinju Mingyi bielu geyao fenji fazeâ•‡ 陶隱居名醫別錄合藥分劑法則

Sizhen famingâ•‡ 四診發明 Song bencaoâ•‡ 宋本草 Song bencao jiu muluâ•‡ 宋本草舊目錄 Song Yingxingâ•‡ 宋應星 Soushen jiâ•‡ 搜神記 Su Gongâ•‡ 蘇恭 Su Jingâ•‡ 蘇敬 Su Shen liangfangâ•‡ 蘇沈良方 Su Shiâ•‡ 蘇軾 Su Songâ•‡ 蘇頌 suanâ•‡ 酸 suhexiangâ•‡ 蘇合香 Suishuâ•‡ 隋書 Sun Guangxianâ•‡ 孫光憲 Sun Simiaoâ•‡ 孫思邈

Tao Zongyiâ•‡ 陶宗儀 taofuâ•‡ 桃符 taojueâ•‡ 桃橛 tianâ•‡ 天 Tianfangguoâ•‡ 天方國 Tiangong kaiwuâ•‡ 天工開物 tianguaâ•‡ 甜瓜 tianlinggaiâ•‡ 天靈蓋 tieâ•‡ 鐵 tiefuâ•‡ 鐵斧 Tong junâ•‡ 桐君 tongbao zhi minâ•‡ 同胞之民 Tongjun caiyaoluâ•‡ 桐君采藥錄 tongtianâ•‡ 通天 tougouâ•‡ 頭垢

taiâ•‡ 胎 Taibai yinjingâ•‡ 太白陰經 taicaoâ•‡ 苔草 Taiping yulanâ•‡ 太平御覽 Taiyuanâ•‡ 太原 Tang bencaoâ•‡ 唐本草 Tang Shenweiâ•‡ 唐慎微

toujinâ•‡ 頭巾 tuâ•‡ 土 [earth] tuâ•‡ 圖 [illustration] tuâ•‡ 兔 [rabbit, hare] Tujing bencaoâ•‡ 圖經本草 tuoâ•‡ 鼉 turenâ•‡ 土人

Tangye bencaoâ•‡ 湯液本草 Tanzhouâ•‡ 剡州 taoâ•‡ 桃

Wanbao quanshuâ•‡ 萬寶全書 Wang Fuâ•‡ 王符

221


Wang Haoguâ•‡ 王好古

Wu Mingqing zi Henan dacan guiliâ•‡ 吳明卿自河南大參歸里

Wang Jiâ•‡ 汪機

Wu Puâ•‡ 吳普

Wang Jixianâ•‡ 王繼先

Wu Qiuâ•‡ 吳球

Wang Lunâ•‡ 王綸

Wu Ruiâ•‡ 吳瑞

Wang Niansunâ•‡ 王念孫

Wu Yiluoâ•‡ 吳儀洛

Wang Shizhenâ•‡ 王世貞

wubeiziâ•‡ 五倍子

Wang Weiâ•‡ 王維

Wuche bajinâ•‡ 五車拔錦

Wang Yingâ•‡ 汪穎 Wang Yuanzhiâ•‡ 王元之

Wuche wanbao quanshuâ•‡ 五車萬寶全書

wangliangâ•‡ 罔兩

wudiâ•‡ 五帝

Wanshu yuanhaiâ•‡ 萬書淵海

wuguoâ•‡ 五果

Wanyong zhengzongâ•‡ 萬用正宗

Wuju bajinâ•‡ 五車拔錦

Wanyong zhengzong bu qiurenâ•‡ 萬用正宗不求人

Wulin qianyaâ•‡ 武林錢衙

Wanzhu junang buyong qiurenâ•‡ 萬珠聚囊不用求人

wulin yuâ•‡ 無鱗魚 wuqiongâ•‡ 無窮

weiâ•‡ 偽 [fake]

wuseâ•‡ 五色

weiâ•‡ 味 [flavor]

wushiâ•‡ 五石

Weiguzhaiâ•‡ 味古齋

Wushi bencaoâ•‡ 吳氏本草

weimeiyangâ•‡ 為美羊

wuweiâ•‡ 五味

wenâ•‡ 紋 [type of surface marking]

wuwei pianshengâ•‡ 五味偏勝

wenâ•‡ 溫 [warm]

wuwei yijiâ•‡ 五味宜忌

Wenlin jubaoâ•‡ 文林聚寶

wuxingâ•‡ 五行

Wenxuanâ•‡ 文選

Wuxing zhuanâ•‡ 五行傳

wuâ•‡ 鶩 [duck]

wuxu qianshuâ•‡ 烏鬚鉛梳

wuâ•‡ 物 [thing]

wuyun liuyin yongyao shiâ•‡ 五運六淫用藥式

Wu Caoluâ•‡ 吳草廬

wuzangâ•‡ 五臟

Wu Guanâ•‡ 吳琯

wuzang wuwei buxieâ•‡ 五臟五味補瀉

Wu Guolunâ•‡ 吳國倫 222


Wuzazuâ•‡ 五雜組

xiaoshuoâ•‡ 小說

wuzhiâ•‡ 五芝

Xiaowanâ•‡ 小宛

wuzi bianbaiâ•‡ 烏髭變白

Xiaoyaâ•‡ 小雅 xiaozishanâ•‡ 孝子杉

xiâ•‡ 犀[rhinoceros]

xicaoâ•‡ 隰草

xiâ•‡ 兕 [rhinoceros, horn from Shijing Poem 3]

xieâ•‡ 薤 [type of onion]

Xia Liangxinâ•‡ 夏良心 xia pinâ•‡ 下品 xiagengyangâ•‡ 下羹羊 xiajiaoâ•‡ 下焦 xianâ•‡ 鹹 Xiangbei jingâ•‡ 相貝經 xiangfan zhuyaoâ•‡ 相反諸藥 xianghuoâ•‡ 相火 xiangjianâ•‡ 詳見 xiangmuâ•‡ 香木 xiangpuâ•‡ 香蒲 Xiangpuâ•‡ 香譜 xiangrouâ•‡ 想肉 xiangshiâ•‡ 橡實 xiangwo xiangwoâ•‡ 象我象我 xiangxingâ•‡ 象形

xieâ•‡ 蟹 [crab] Xie Zhaozheâ•‡ 謝肇淛 Xiepuâ•‡ 蟹譜 xiguichongâ•‡ 溪鬼蟲 xinâ•‡ 辛 xingâ•‡ 形 Xing Bingâ•‡ 邢昺 xingcaiâ•‡ 荇菜 xingliâ•‡ 性理 xingxingâ•‡ 猩猩 [type of beast] xingxingâ•‡ 惺惺 [wise] xingyeâ•‡ 行夜 xingzhuangâ•‡ 形狀 Xinxiu bencaoâ•‡ 新修本草 Xiong Zongliâ•‡ 熊宗立 xionghuangâ•‡ 雄黃 Xishi jiâ•‡ 西使記

xiangxu xiangshi xiangwei xiang'e zhuyaoâ•‡ 相須相使相畏相惡諸藥

xitougouâ•‡ 膝頭垢

Xiao Bingâ•‡ 蕭炳

xiuâ•‡ 朽

Xiao Tongâ•‡ 蕭統

xiuzhiâ•‡ 修治

xiao'er taishiâ•‡ 小兒胎屎

Xixi congyuâ•‡ 西溪叢語

Xiaoqiuâ•‡ 蕭丘

xiyuâ•‡ 西域

223


xuâ•‡ 序

yaoâ•‡ 藥

Xu Bowuzhiâ•‡ 續博物志

Yao Kuanâ•‡ 姚寬

Xu Dingâ•‡ 徐鼎

Yao Shunmuâ•‡ 姚舜牧

Xu Guangqiâ•‡ 徐光啟

Yao zongjueâ•‡ 藥總訣

Xu Hongâ•‡ 許洪

Yaodui suiwu yaopinâ•‡ 藥對歲物藥品

Xu Qilongâ•‡ 徐企龍

yaoming tongyiâ•‡ 藥名同異

Xu Shenâ•‡ 許慎

Yaoxing bencaoâ•‡ 藥性本草

Xu Yanchunâ•‡ 徐彥純

Yaoxing fuâ•‡ 藥性賦

Xuanyan xianshengâ•‡ 玄晏先生

yapian yanâ•‡ 鴉片煙

xubingqiâ•‡ 敘兵器

Ye Ziqiâ•‡ 葉子奇

xuecanâ•‡ 雪蠶

yenüâ•‡ 野女

xufaâ•‡ 鬚髮

yepoâ•‡ 野婆

xulieâ•‡ 序例

yerenâ•‡ 野人

xunfuâ•‡ 巡撫

yeshiâ•‡ 夜視 yewengâ•‡ 蠮螉

yachiâ•‡ 牙齒

yiâ•‡ 蟻 [ant]

yanâ•‡ 燕

Yiâ•‡ 益 [place name]

yangâ•‡ 陽 [partner of yin]

yiâ•‡ 義 [propriety]

yangâ•‡ 羊 [sheep]

Yi Dunâ•‡ 倚頓

Yang Sunzhiâ•‡ 楊損之

Yi jingâ•‡ 易經

Yang Xiongâ•‡ 陽雄

yidaiâ•‡ 衣帶

yanghuo yinhuoâ•‡ 陽火陰火

yiguoâ•‡ 夷果

yangjin huaâ•‡ 洋金花

Yihe mingâ•‡ 瘞鶴銘

Yangqi jianbian fangâ•‡ 楊起簡便方

yijiaâ•‡ 醫家

yanleiâ•‡ 眼淚

yiminâ•‡ 逸民

yanmiâ•‡ 嚴蜜

yinâ•‡ 陰 [partner of yang]

Yanshanyuanâ•‡ 弇山園

yinâ•‡ 銀 [silver]

Yanzhou sibu gaoâ•‡ 弇州四部稿

yingâ•‡ 蠅 [fly]

224


yingâ•‡ 影 [shadow or reÂ�flection]

Yuanhuajiâ•‡ 原化記

yinghuoâ•‡ 螢火

yuanshiâ•‡ 遠視

yingtaoâ•‡ 櫻桃

yuanzhiâ•‡ 遠志

yinjing baoshiâ•‡ 引經報使

Yuechiâ•‡ 月池

yinju gujin jingshi baijia shumuâ•‡ 引據古今經史百家書目

Yuesheng suichaoâ•‡ 悅生隨抄 yuhuaâ•‡ 羽化

yinju gujin yijia shumuâ•‡ 引據古今醫家書目

yuleiâ•‡ 寓類

yinmaoâ•‡ 陰毛

yuminâ•‡ 愚民

yinshi jinjiâ•‡ 飲食禁忌

yumuâ•‡ 寓木

yinzhiâ•‡ 印紙

yunmuâ•‡ 雲母

Yishiâ•‡ 逸史

yushiâ•‡ 玉石

Yishu zaiâ•‡ 遺書載

Yuzhitang tanhuiâ•‡ 玉芝堂談薈

Yixue bamai zhuâ•‡ 醫學八脈注

yuzhiziâ•‡ 預知子

Yixue rumenâ•‡ 醫學入門

Yuzhu baodianâ•‡ 玉燭寶典

yiyuâ•‡ 衣魚 Yiyu jiâ•‡ 異域記

zacaoâ•‡ 雜草

Yiyutuâ•‡ 異魚圖

zamuâ•‡ 雜木

Yongyao faxiangâ•‡ 用藥法象

zangâ•‡ 臟

youming wuyongâ•‡ 有名未用

zangfuâ•‡ 臟腑

youqi er wuzhiâ•‡ 有氣而無質

zangfu xushi biaoben yongyaoshiâ•‡ 臟腑虛實標本用藥式

yuâ•‡ 寓 [dwellers] yuâ•‡ 魚 [fish] yuâ•‡ 蜮 [imp of darkness] yuâ•‡ 玉 [jade or precious stone] Yu Minzhongâ•‡ 于敏中 Yu Xiangdouâ•‡ 余象斗 yuanâ•‡ 原 [grassland]

zaohuaâ•‡ 造化 zaohua zhi qiâ•‡ 造化之氣 zaomaâ•‡ 灶馬 zaoniangâ•‡ 造釀 zengâ•‡ 甑 Zha Shenxingâ•‡ 查慎行 zhadaâ•‡ 鮓答

yuanâ•‡ 猿 [type of beast] 225


zhangâ•‡ 獐

Zhenlaâ•‡ 真臘

Zhang Dingsiâ•‡ 張鼎思

zhiâ•‡ 芝 [fungus, excrescence]

Zhang Gongâ•‡ 張肱

zhiâ•‡ 紙 [paper]

Zhang Hengâ•‡ 張衡

zhiâ•‡ 知 [to understand, to know]

Zhang Huaâ•‡ 張華

zhiâ•‡ 枳 [wild orange]

Zhang Shinanâ•‡ 張世南

zhi'erâ•‡ 芝栭

Zhang Yiâ•‡ 張揖

zhiguaiâ•‡ 志怪

Zhang Yuansuâ•‡ 張元素

Zhigui lunâ•‡ 質龜論

Zhang Yuxiâ•‡ 掌禹錫

zhijuâ•‡ 枳椇

Zhang Zhongjingâ•‡ 張仲景

zhiliâ•‡ 陟釐

Zhang Zihe Hantu xia sanfaâ•‡ 張子和汗吐下三法

zhiniaoâ•‡ 治鳥

zhaoâ•‡ 照

zhirouâ•‡ 雉肉 zhiyiâ•‡ 制義

Zhao Danâ•‡ 趙丹

zhizhuâ•‡ 蜘蛛

Zhao Xueminâ•‡ 趙學敏

zhongâ•‡ 種

Zhao Yuanyang zhenren jiji fangâ•‡ 趙原陽真人濟急方

Zhong Kuiâ•‡ 鍾馗

zhaojiaâ•‡ 爪甲

zhong pinâ•‡ 中品

Zhenâ•‡ 鎮 [place name]

Zhong Yuâ•‡ 鍾毓

zhenâ•‡ 真 [true, real]

zhong'eâ•‡ 中惡

Zhen Quanâ•‡ 甄權

zhongjiaoâ•‡ 中焦

zhengâ•‡ 正

zhongkuiâ•‡ 終葵

Zheng Zhuâ•‡ 鄭注

zhongruâ•‡ 鍾乳

Zhenghe bencaoâ•‡ 政和本草

zhongsiâ•‡ 螽斯

Zhenghe jingshi zhenglei Daguan bencaoâ•‡ 政和經史證類大觀本草

Zhou Lüjingâ•‡ 周履靖

Zhenglei bencaoâ•‡ 證纇本草

Zhouliâ•‡ 周禮

zhengmingâ•‡ 正名

zhuâ•‡ 朱

zhengwuâ•‡ 正誤

Zhu Dingchenâ•‡ 朱鼎臣

Zhou Xian wangâ•‡ 周憲王

226


Zhu Quanâ•‡ 朱權 Zhu Suâ•‡ 朱橚 Zhu Xiâ•‡ 朱熹 Zhu Zhenhengâ•‡ 朱震亨 Zhu Zhongâ•‡ 朱仲 zhuanwenâ•‡ 篆文 zhuniao youduâ•‡ 諸鳥有毒 Zhupuâ•‡ 竹譜 zhurou youduâ•‡ 諸肉有毒 zhusheâ•‡ 諸蛇 zhushuâ•‡ 注疏 zhutieqiâ•‡ 諸鐵器 zhuyu youduâ•‡ 諸魚有毒 zhuzhiâ•‡ 主治 Zi Xuâ•‡ 子虛 zijing sishengâ•‡ 自經死繩 zirantongâ•‡ 自然銅 Ziyuâ•‡ 子郁 Zizhi tongjian gangmuâ•‡ 資治通鑑綱目 zongmuâ•‡ 總目 zongziâ•‡ 粽子 Zu Taizhi zhiguaiâ•‡ 祖台之志怪 Zuo Siâ•‡ 左思 zuoshiâ•‡ 佐使

227

Index

Adepts, 44–46, 69, 72, 78, 79, 199n94 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 5 Analogy: as an epistemic tool, 8, 140; and naming, 55–56; and drug prescription, 65; and poetry, 88; in understanding wild women, 127; in consuming human bodies, 132, 135 Animals, 111–122 Arsenic, 79–81

Bowu scholarship, 26, 27, 51 Bowuzhi, 25, 26, 38, 59, 77 Broad learning. See Bowu scholarship Buddhism, 29, 33, 119, 131, 200n98; and bodhisattva stone, 42 Bugs. See Chong

Baihe. See Lily Baopuzi, 45, 75, 78, 81, 103, 104. See also Ge Hong Barefoot doctors, 146–147 Bell doctors (lingyi), 13 Bencao: as a textual genre, 28; history of, 28–31, 52, 141–142; history of, according to Li Shizhen, 151–154 Bencao congxin, 143 Bencao gangmu shiyi. See Zhao Xuemin Bencao jing. See Shennong bencao jing Bencao mengquan, 31, 41, 154 Bencao shiyi. See Chen Zangqi Bencao tujing. See Su Song Berkeley, Miles Joseph (mycologist), 144 Bezoars, 62, 117–119 Bian Que, 37, 185–186n69 Bibliography of Bencao gangmu, 20, 25, 28, 48, 52 Bigfoot. See Wild men (and women) Binhu maixue, 14, 47 Book of Imaginary Beings, The, 1 Borges, J. L., 1, 148–149

Cannibalism, 130–135 Caomuzi. See Ye Ziqi Caterpillar fungus. See Dongchong xiacao Change. See Metamorphosis Chen Jiamo. See Bencao mengquan Chen Zangqi, 29, 37, 115, 131–133, 152, 156, 189–190n52 Chong, 42, 43, 44–45, 46, 81, 96–110, 116 Chuanshanjia. See Lingli Chuci, 57, 88 Chou, Jay, 147–148 Chuogenglu. See Tao Zongyi Cinchona bark, 142 Cinnabar, 43, 46, 66, 77, 78, 81 Classic of changes. See Yijing Clothing and tools, 83–86, 90–95 Collectanea. See Encyclopedias Collections: cabinets of curiosities, 4–5, 6; scholarly, 5–6; and libraries, 46 Colonial medicine, 141–146 Color and identification of drugs, 92–93, 114, 120 Comic book, 136–138, 147 Communist reimaginings of Li Shizhen, 146–147 Comparative history, 161–162n17

229

INDEX

Confucius: urging students to study Shijing, 23–24, 85; allusion to by Wang Shizhen, 25, 26, 38; criticism by Tao Hongjing, 45; comparison with guoluo wasps, 99 Cordyceps sinensis. See Dongchong xiacao Correspondence, systems of, 58, 59, 62–63, 65, 72, 83, 155–156, 173n101. See also Five Phases Counterfeiting, 30, 37, 41–44, 60, 142, 187n10 Crickets, 53 Dansha. See Cinnabar Daoism: and Wang Shizhen, 17; and Tanyangzi, 17; Li Shizhen’s attitude toward, 44–46; and medicinal drugs, 78, 107; and corpse chong, 105–106; and food taboos, 200n98. See also Adepts; Ge Hong Daojia. See Daoism Darwin, Charles, 4, 20, 191n23 Dead bodies: manipulation of, 78; rape of, 78–79; chong within, 105–106, 110; corpse eaters, 129 Death: of dragons, 57–59, 60, 120–121; and immortality, 69–70, 78–79; and purity, 77–78; as a marker of medicinal drugs, 95; and shadows, 101; fear of, 104; and cranes, 116 Description de la Chine. See du Halde, JeanBaptiste Dictionaries, 85–86, 96. See also Erya; Shiming Dishengyang. See Vegetable lamb Dissection, 34–35, 39, 136 Divine Husbandman’s materia medica. See Shennong bencao jing Dongchong xiacao, 142–146, and athletes in modern China, 202n20 Douzhen zhengzhi, 13 Dragons, 4–6, 47, 53–67, 113, 118, 119– 121, 142; and water, 56, 57, 61–62, 64– 65, 109, 120; bones, 57–67, 180n26 Du. See Toxicity Du Fu, 88–89 du Halde, Jean-Baptiste, 144

Earth, 73, 75–76, 104, 106, 108–109. See also Five Phases Editions of Bencao gangmu, 19–20, 52–53 Encyclopedias: “Chinese encyclopedia,” 2, 20, 148–149; use of by Li Shizhen, 15, 47; for daily use, 47, 141, 194n11, 196n49 Erya: as basis for Bencao gangmu, 21; commentary editions, 22–23, 25; use of text and commentaries in Bencao gangmu, 56, 57, 85, 86, 98–99, 126 Euphemism, 134–135 Examinations, civil, 12–13, 84, 186n7 Exotica, 29–30, 35–36, 40, 89, 111–112, 114–115, 141–146, 149 Experience, 34–44, 66 Fabric, 91, 92–94, 95, 112, 126 Famine relief bencao. See Zhu Su Fangshi. See Adepts Feifei, 128–129 Fire, 73–75, 76, 82, 94, 106, 108, 193n55, 201n10. See also Five Phases Fireflies, 107 Five Phases, 70, 71–77, 79, 82, 96, 103, 106–110, 116–117, 140, 172–173n99 Flies, 108 Food and drink, 43; and ritual, 46, 97; ancient knowledge of, 46, 174n11; and evidence, 59, 60, 198n75; eating demons, 84–85; eating wild men and similar creatures, 124–130; euphemisms for human flesh, 134–135; connection with medical arts, 198n74. See also Cannibalism Foreign drugs. See Exotica Foucault, Michel, 2, 149 Fu poems, 89–90, 126, 138–139 Fuqi. See Clothing and tools Ge Hong, 16, 17, 45, 78. See also Baopuzi Gewu, 20, 21, 26–27, 48 Ginseng, 13, 31, 62, 144. See also Renshen zhuan Guan (and observation), 40–41 Gujin tushu jicheng, 23, 26, 142, 188n26 Gunpowder, 79

230

INDEX

Guo Pu, 22–23 Guoluo, 98–100 Guoran, 125–126 Haiyao bencao. See Li Xun Heterotopia. See Foucault, Michel; Huang Yong Ping Honey, 36–37, 65 Hu bencao, 30, 47 Hu Chenglong, 17 Huang Yong Ping, 2 Huangdi neijing, 74, 83 Huangfu Mi, 17 Human flesh and body parts. See Cannibalism Illustrations: in Bencao gangmu, 18, 52– 53; of invisible creatures, 104–105; of guoran, 126; of animals and foreign peoples, 196n49 Implements. See Clothing and tools Insects. See Chong Investigation of things. See Gewu Japanese use of Bencao gangmu, 20, 142, 165–166n33 Jia Yi, 89, 109, 138–139 Jian (and observation), 38–39 Jilebian, 134–135 Jingshi zhenglei beiji bencao. See Tang Shenwei Jiuhuang bencao. See Zhu Su Kan (and observation), 39 Kou Zongshi, 29, 43, 58, 59, 78, 80, 118, 153, 193n59 Lee, Sir Richard, 111, 112 Lei Gong paozhi lun, 58, 60, 61, 65, 151 Lei Xiao. See Lei Gong paozhi lun Leishu. See Encyclopedias Li Bai, 89 Li Jianyuan, 18, 19 Li Shizhen: comparison with Western naturalists, 4, 9, 138; health, 12; education, 12; and civil exams, 12–13; family, 13,

18; shorter works of, 14, 15, 19; friends of, 15; attitude toward Daojia, 44–46; patronage of by Gu family, 46; in popular media, 136–138, 147–148; as father of modern science, 138; eponymous film, 147 Li Xun, 30, 114, 152 Li Yanwen, 13 Liji, 46 Lily, 86, 87 Lingli, 35, 136, 138 Lisao. See Chuci Literati doctors (ruyi), 13 Locality: local knowledge, 35–37, 146; and medicinal drugs, 75–77, 112, 141, 142, 143–144; and classification, 83, 113–114. See also Names and naming Logic: idea of an indigenous, or Chinese, 5– 6, 149, 161n15; and locality, 6 Long. See Dragons Lougu. See Mole crickets Lu Ji, 24–25, 99 Lunyu. See Confucius Magic. See Adepts Maijue kaozheng, 14, 187n16 Mantuoluo hua, 33, 34, 48, 85 Mao Poems. See Maoshi Mao Zedong, 147 Maoshi, 24–25, 191n28 Mengyao zhengdian, 146 Menstrual blood as a medicinal drug, 93, 124, 130, 132 Mercury. See Quicksilver Metal. See Stone and metal Metamorphosis: and water, 61, 70; as a central concern in Bencao gangmu, 67, 139– 140; and Five Phases, 70–73, 105–110, 141; bian and hua, 70–71; “natural” vs. “artificial,” 77–81; and plant life cycles, 90; of objects by human use, 92–95; and chong, 96–97, 105–110; by guoluo wasps, 98–100; and life cycle of yu, 105; of mihou, 124; of hair from human blood, 133; of Dongchong xiacao, 143. See also Reproduction 231

INDEX

Mihou, 124, 125 Mingling worms. See Guoluo Mingyi bielu, 52, 57, 62, 63, 64, 65, 151, 155 Mirrors, 81–82, 101 Mole crickets, 108–109 Monsters, 129 Mummies, 36, 131, 198n78 Music and Bencao gangmu. See Chou, Jay Names and naming, 21–22, 23–24, 55, 84– 86, 91–92, 138, 203–204n25; local names, 76–77, 85, 115, 198n75; guoran calling out its own, 126; xingxing calling out those of people’s ancestors, 126; translation of animal and plant names in Shijing, 168–169n60 Nanjing, 16, 17 Natural history: in Europe, 4–5; connection with medicine, 6, 21; definition of, 8, 21 Needham, Joseph, 136, 138, 201n3 Nightshade. See Mantuoluo hua Observation: and bowu learning, 25–26; as a source of knowledge, 34–44, 48, 71, 140; vocabulary for, 38–41, 100; by animals, 41; light and mirrors, 81–82; of chong, 97–98; and invisibility, 101–105, 108 108 Cards, 2–4 Opium, 142, 144 Pangolin. See Lingli Paper, 85, 91–92 Parasites, in human bodies, 105–106 Peking Society of Natural History, 145 People-jerky, 133 Petrifaction, 40, 70, 118–119, 133. See also Bezoars Phases. See Five Phases Physiognomy: of the land, 75, 77; of seashells, 114; of men, 119–120 Pishi. See Arsenic Plants, 83–94 Poetry: by Li Shizhen, 14, 15, 163–164n11;

by Wang Shizhen, 16; allusions and natural history, 16; as a source of evidence, 86–90. See also Chuci; Fu Poems; Shijing Poetry classic. See Shijing Poison. See Toxicity Poverty Place (Kesuoguan), 12, 13–14 Pozzo, Cassiano dal, 5 Prefaces, 50–52, 85; by Wang Shizhen, 16, 17–18, 20, 27, 37–38, 39, 51; by Li Shizhen, 27, 51–52; of works consulted in Bencao gangmu, 28, 156; to Binhu maixue, 47; in introductory material in Bencao gangmu, 50–52; to individual categories in Bencao gangmu, 53, 67, 74, 83, 84, 88, 93, 97, 113, 117, 131 Prescriptions: language of, 39, 71; examples of, 60–61, 65–67 Printing: in the late Ming market, 5, 16, 17, 51; of Bencao gangmu, 17–18, 19, 52 Pulse diagnosis, 14, 47 Pulu and monographic works, 169n63, 194n15 Qi: as part of Qiwei rubric, 62–63, 65, 155; and Five Phases, 70; and locality, 75; and metamorphosis, 79, 123, 140; of humans, imbuing clothing, 93; and chong generation, 96–97, 106–110; corruption of by women, 101, 103; use of by creatures to attack humans, 103, 104 Qi ai zhuan, 13 Qijing bamai kao, 14 Qing expansion, 141–142, 145–146 Qinjing, 116 Qizhou, 13, 46 Qu Yuan, 56, 57 Quicksilver, 69–70 Read, Bernard Emms, 145 Reason, indigenous. See Logic Records of the strange. See Zhiguai Reflections, 101, 104. See also Mirrors Relativism, 162n19 Renshen zhuan, 13 232

INDEX

Reproduction: by gazing, 41, 117; on the wind, 56, 97; of dragons, 56, 120; influence of pregnancy by environment, 77; manipulation of by adepts, 78; of chong, 96–97; and burial, 108, 109, 117; of creatures, 116–117; of humans in odd cases, 122–123, 140 Rhapsody. See Fu poems Ricci, Matteo, 5 Royal Society, 111–112 Ru scholarship, 13, 21, 50 Rulin waishi, 142–143 Sanjiao (three body regions), 66 Sanskrit texts, 55–56, 85 Sasquatch. See Wild men (and women) Scholars, The. See Rulin waishi Sensation as evidence, 37, 42, 43, 118, 140 Shadows, 101, 103–104 Shanhaijing, 96, 196n49, 197–198n65 Shegong. See Yu (imp of darkness) Shen Gua, 82, 187n21 Shennong bencao jing, 28–29, 31, 52, 58, 59, 80, 118, 131, 133, 151, 155, 156 Shi (and observation), 39, 64 Shi Kuang qinjing. See Qinjing Shijing: and name of Li Shizhen’s home, 13– 14; as basis for Bencao gangmu, 21; commentary editions and natural history, 23– 25; as a source of creatures discussed in natural history texts, 98, 99–100, 101, 103. See also Names and naming Shiming, 86 Shuihu zhuan, 130–131 Shuiyin. See Quicksilver Shuowen jiezi, 55, 104, 124 Sima Xiangru, 90 Sizhen faming, 13, 14 Song Yingxing, 69, 80 Soylent Green reference, 131 Stone and metal: drugs, 42–43, 45, 46, 78, 79–82, 106, 109; category, 73, 75; and signs, 76–77. See also Five Phases Styles of reasoning, 7–8 Su Gong. See Su Jing (Su Gong)

Su Jing (Su Gong), 29, 37, 58, 151 Su Shi, 27, 88 Su Song, 29, 42–43, 59, 60, 88, 89, 115, 152 Sun Simiao, 104, 152 Taiping yulan, 15, 47, 135 Tang Bencao. See Su Jing (Su Gong) Tang Shenwei, 29, 30–31, 47, 153 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 101 Tanyangzi, 17 Tao Hongjing, 16–17, 29, 37, 45, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 100, 118, 151, 155 Tao Zongyi, 36, 133, 134 Television and Li Shizhen, 148 Tiangong kaiwu. See Song Yingxing Tibetan medical drugs, 145–146, 201n7 Toxicity, 28, 33, 40, 63, 79–81, 132; and organization of Shennong bencao jing, 28–29, 55; and poisoning by chong, 101– 105; and classification of animals, 113 Transformation. See Metamorphosis Translation of Bencao gangmu, 20, 26, 144–145 Turtle sperm, 114–115 Value: and visually emergent characteristics, 40, 120; and local origin of drugs, 114– 115 Vegetable lamb, 111–112, 121 Wang Shizhen, 15, 16–17; poem for Li Shizhen, 16. See also Prefaces Wang Wei, 86, 88 Wasp, parasitic. See Guoluo Water, 72–73, 74, 75–76, 82, 104, 106, 109. See also Five Phases Water Margin. See Shuihu zhuan Wei (flavor), 62, 63 Wenxuan, 89–90 Western naturalists in China, 144–145 Wild men (and women), 113, 121–122, 123–124, 126–130 “Winter worm, summer grass.” See Dongchong xiacao

233

INDEX

Women: and corruption of objects and spaces, 77, 101; and gender specificity in drug prescription, 93; and danger, 104; and reproduction, 123. See also Wild men (and women) Wu Guolun, 15 Wuxing. See Five Phases Wuzazu. See Xie Zhaozhe Xia Liangxin, 19 Xie onion, 88–89 Xie Zhaozhe, 119–121 Xingli, 20, 21 Xingxing, 126, 127–128 Xinxiu bencao. See Su Jing (Su Gong) Yang Xiong, 99 Ye Ziqi, 105, 106 Yellow Emperor’s inner classic. See Huangdi neijing Yeren. See Wild men (and women) Yeweng. See Guoluo

Yijing, 74 Yin and yang, 62, 63, 65, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 108, 155 Yinghuo. See Fireflies Yixue bamai zhu, 13 Yu (imp of darkness), 101–105 Zhang Dingsi, 19 Zhang Hua. See Bowuzhi Zhao Xuemin, 19, 110, 134, 135, 142, 143–144, 145–146 Zhenglei bencao. See Tang Shenwei Zhiguai, 25, 57, 82, 112, 115–116 Zhiwu mingshi tukao, 53 Zhong Kui, 84–85, 95 Zhou Lüjing, 105–106 Zhouli, 36, 46, 74, 97, 174n11 Zhu Su, 31, 53, 153 Zhu Xi, 27 Zhuangzi, 16, 45 Zizhi tongjian gangmu, 27 Zuozhuan, 59

234

The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History

China: Its History and Culture

Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Studies in Comparative Early Modern History)

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society

The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society

The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society

War In The Early Modern World (Warfare and History)

The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations

Harry and the Monkey

Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The China boom and its discontents

Early Modern Civil Discourses (Early Modern Literature in History)

Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Studies on China)

Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795 (Warfare and History)

Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Classes, Estates and Order in Early-Modern Brittany (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Landscape and Power in Early China

Ancient China and its Enemies

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period

Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period

The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History

China: Its History and Culture

Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Studies in Comparative Early Modern History)

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society

The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society

The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society

War In The Early Modern World (Warfare and History)

The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations

Harry and the Monkey

Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Women in Conversation (Early Modern Literature in History)

Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The China boom and its discontents

Early Modern Civil Discourses (Early Modern Literature in History)

Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Studies on China)

Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795 (Warfare and History)

Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Classes, Estates and Order in Early-Modern Brittany (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History)

Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Landscape and Power in Early China

Ancient China and its Enemies

Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period

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