Bencao Tujing

The Bencao Tujing (Illustrated Pharmacopoeia), also known as Tujing Bencao, is a famous imperially commissioned materia medica compiled under the direction of Su Song and others during the Jiayou era of the Northern Song (1058–1061). Its compilation arose when the Bureau for Correcting Medical Texts petitioned to follow the format of the Tang-dynasty Newly Revised Materia Medica, in which drug illustrations and illustrated descriptions were paired; localities across the empire were ordered to submit specimens and drawings of medicinal substances, with detailed discernment of the shape, color, and size of roots, stems, seedlings, leaves, flowers, and fruits, along with their places of origin, harvest months, and therapeutic effects; for products of foreign lands, merchants at customs and maritime trade offices were consulted. The work comprises twenty juan plus one juan of contents, organized by the natural properties of drugs into categories such as jade and stone, herbs, trees, beasts and birds, insects and fish, fruits, vegetables, and grains and pulses, with appendices on "herbaceous species outside the Canon" and "woody and vine species outside the Canon." It records more than eight hundred drugs and includes nearly a thousand illustrations, making it one of the world's earliest extant woodblock-printed illustrated drug catalogs. The original work was lost early; its surviving fragments and drug illustrations are mainly preserved in the Classified Materia Medica (Zhenglei Bencao) and the Shaoxing Materia Medica (Shaoxing Bencao). This book is the reconstructed, collated edition by Shang Zhijun (1918–2008, a scholar of materia medica literature at Yijishan Hospital Affiliated with Wannan Medical College), who gathered the text from the above works and added textual research and annotations; it was published by Anhui Science and Technology Publishing House in 1994. The drug illustrations in the book are compiled from the Shaoxing Materia Medica and the Zhenghe Materia Medica. Because of its careful reconstruction and meticulous collation and annotation, this edition has long served as an important basis for studying Song-dynasty materia medica, the textual research of individual drugs, and the correspondence between drug names and realities; Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu) also cites it in many places and praises it as "detailed and clear in textual research, with considerable development."