Běn Cǎo Gāng Mù: Compendium of Materia Medica

Who the author was, what drove him to write, and why the book appeared after his death.

Li Shizhen (1518-1593) was born in Qizhou, in present-day Hubei, the son and grandson of physicians. After failing the provincial examinations three times he abandoned the official career for medicine; he served at the court of the Prince of Chu and spent time at the Imperial Medical Academy. What drove him to write was not a shortage of repertories but their contradictory abundance: names that designated different plants, errors copied for centuries, attributions never checked. He worked on the Gangmu for some twenty-seven years, consulted hundreds of works, and rewrote the manuscript three times.

He never saw it printed. He considered the text finished around 1578, spent years looking for a publisher, and died in 1593; the first edition, known as the Jinling edition, came off Hu Chenglong’s press in Nanjing in 1596. His son Li Jianyuan presented it to the throne that same year with a memorial. It is worth remembering that this was a private undertaking: unlike the Xinxiu Bencao of 659 or the Song-period Zhenglei Bencao, no state office commissioned or funded it.

• Li Shizhen (1518-1593) came from a family of physicians in Qizhou, Hubei.
• The stated motive of the book is to correct errors accumulated in earlier bencao.
• Close to three decades of work and three successive redactions of the manuscript.
• Published posthumously in Nanjing in 1596, three years after his death.

Jinling edition 金陵本 The first printing of the Bencao Gangmu, Nanjing, 1596. It is the witness closest to Li Shizhen’s manuscript and the benchmark against which all later editions are collated.

The genre the work belongs to and the chain of texts it inherits and corrects.

A bencao is not a treatment manual but a repertory of substances: each entry gives names, origin, appearance, ascribed properties, and recorded uses. The genre advances by cumulative citation. The Han-period Shennong Bencao Jing was glossed by Tao Hongjing around 500; the Xinxiu Bencao of 659 was the first state-sponsored repertory; and Tang Shenwei’s Zhenglei Bencao, from the early twelfth century, gathered that whole mass while scrupulously citing its sources. The last of these is the Gangmu’s immediate foundation.

The inheritance carried an architectural problem. The Shennong Bencao arranged substances in three grades — upper, middle, lower — by declared toxicity and fitness for prolonged use, a criterion that grouped materials with no natural relation to one another. As entries multiplied, that classification stopped helping anyone find anything. Li Shizhen did not add a storey to the inherited building: he replaced its foundations.

• A bencao records substances, names, and ascribed uses; it does not reason through clinical cases.
• The genre advances by citation: each work quotes the previous one and marks its additions.
• Tang Shenwei’s Zhenglei Bencao is the direct base on which Li Shizhen works.
• Of the Gangmu’s 1,892 entries, 374 are new additions; the rest is inheritance.

Zhenglei Bencao 证类本草 A repertory compiled by Tang Shenwei around 1108 that preserved much of the earlier bencao literature by quoting it. Without it, a great deal of previous materia medica would have vanished without trace.

What the title means and how it reorders nearly nineteen hundred entries by natural affinity.

The title announces the method. Gang is the heading rubric; mu, the subheadings that depend on it. Li Shizhen applied the pair at two levels. Across the work, sixteen sections — waters, fires, earths, minerals, herbs, grains, vegetables, fruits, trees, clothing and utensils, insects, scaly creatures, shelled creatures, birds, beasts, and the human being — are subdivided into sixty classes. Within each entry, the substance name serves as gang and the descriptive rubrics that follow it as mu.

The order of the sections follows a stated logic: first water and fire, which the author holds to precede everything else; then earth, mother of things; then the minerals that come from it; and then plants and animals, “from the small to the large” and “from the humble to the noble”, ending with the human being. It is a scale of nature with cosmological and moral roots, not an evolutionary sequence: reading it as a forerunner of modern biological classification projects backwards a question the sixteenth century was not asking.

• Gang is the heading rubric; mu, the subheadings that depend on it.
• Sixteen sections divided into sixty classes replace the inherited three grades.
• The ordering criterion is declared natural affinity, from mineral to human.
• The system makes the work searchable: for the first time one can look things up by kind.

Gang Mu 纲目 “Rubric and subrubric”. An expression from historiographical vocabulary — Zhu Xi’s Tongjian Gangmu had made it famous — applied here to the ordering of materia medica.

The fixed rubrics under every substance, and where the author actually speaks.

Each substance unfolds through a fixed set of rubrics, and that regularity is what turns the Gangmu into an instrument of consultation. Shiming clarifies names and their variants; jijie gathers what earlier authors said about origin, habitat, and appearance; zhengwu corrects specific errors; xiuzhi describes preparation; qiwei gives nature and flavor within the classical model; zhuzhi lists recorded uses; faming carries Li Shizhen’s own analysis; and fufang appends ascribed formulas.

The decisive distinction for a modern reader lies between jijie and faming. The first rubric compiles other voices and attributes them; the second is where the author speaks in the first person, accepting, qualifying, or rejecting. The more than eleven thousand appended formulas come mostly from earlier sources and are recorded as evidence of what was used, not as verified recommendation. No rubric contains what we would now mean by clinical indication or dosage.

• Eight fixed rubrics: names, compilation, correction, preparation, nature and flavor, uses, analysis, formulas.
• Jijie compiles other people’s sources; faming is Li Shizhen’s own voice.
• More than eleven thousand appended formulas, mostly inherited from earlier repertories.
• Zhuzhi records attested historical uses; it is not a list of current indications.

Fa Ming 发明 “Elucidation”. The rubric in which Li Shizhen sets out his own judgement on a substance. It is the part of the book where there is an author, and hence the part historians quote most.

The book’s mixed texture, and why it is best looked at without idealizing or dismissing.

The Gangmu contains pages of remarkable precision. Li Shizhen described the poisoning of miners who went down with oil lamps following lead veins, with their sallow pallor, abdominal distension, and outcome; he dated the appearance of alcohol distillation to the Yuan dynasty; and he dismantled, quoting them one by one, the claims of earlier repertories that declared mercury harmless, recalling how many people had died seeking longevity in it.

The same book carries material nobody would defend today: sympathetic-magic remedies, a whole section on clothing and utensils and another on substances of human origin, and marvellous tales accepted unfiltered. Both faces coexist because Li Shizhen’s criterion was coherence between testimonies plus his own experience, not a procedure of proof. Acknowledging this does not diminish the work: it places it in its century, which is the only way to read it profitably.

• An early description of occupational poisoning among lead miners.
• Explicit criticism of the bencao that had declared mercury free of toxicity.
• Natural-historical and technical observations, such as dating distillation to the Yuan.
• Alongside them, sympathetic magic, substances of human origin, and legendary reports.

Zheng Wu 正误 “Correction of errors”. A rubric for flagging and amending mistaken claims in earlier works. Its systematic presence is what gives the Gangmu the character of a critical edition.

Unstable botanical identity, toxic substances, protected species, and reliable editions.

Three problems make it impossible to use a Gangmu entry as a guide to use. The first is identity: one Chinese name has designated different species by period and region, and the substitution of plants by others of the genus Aristolochia is documented as a cause of severe nephropathy and urinary-tract cancer. The second is toxicity: the book describes mercury, lead, arsenic, and cinnabar among the materials in its repertory. The third is legal.

Animal-derived entries such as rhinoceros horn, tiger bone, pangolin scales, or musk come from species protected by CITES: trading in them or using them is illegal in most countries and fuels poaching. They must not be used under any circumstances. To this is added an editorial problem: many modern reprints descend from Zhang Shaotang’s 1885 edition, whose illustrations were redrawn from a different work and are not the ones that accompanied the 1596 text.

• A historical name does not guarantee the species: always check the source identity.
• Aristolochic acid, present in plants of the genus Aristolochia, causes irreversible kidney damage.
• Mercury, lead, arsenic, and cinnabar appear as described substances, not as safe materials.
• Rhinoceros, tiger, pangolin, and musk deer are CITES-protected: their use is illegal and must not be considered.

Aristolochic acid A compound present in plants of the genus Aristolochia, nephrotoxic and carcinogenic. Its ingestion, often through substitution of one plant for another with a similar name, caused documented cases of kidney failure and urothelial cancer.