Extract from Science and Civilisation in China Volume 6. Part 4

JOSEPH NEEDHAM

SCIENCE AND C I V I L I S AT I O N I N CHINA VOLUME 6

BIOLOGY AND BIOLOGICAL TECHNOLOGY PART IV: TRADITIONAL BOTANY: AN ETHNOBOTANICAL APPROACH

by GEORGES MÉTAILIÉ translated by janet lloyd

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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107109872 © Cambridge University Press 2015 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2015 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-1-107-10987-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements for Illustrations

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xxiii

List of Tables

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xxiv

List of Abbreviations

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xxv

Series Editor’s Preface

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xxvi

Author’s Note

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page xii

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38 (2) TRADITIONAL BOTANY: AN ETHNOBOTANICAL APPROACH . . . . . . . . . .

Introduction, p. 1

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(f) The sources of traditional botany and the various classifications, p. 14 (1) Texts of an encyclopaedic nature, p. 14 (2) The development of the various classifications, p. 32 i From the archaic period to the Song dynasty, p. 33 ii The Ming and Qing dynasties: works of materia medica, p. 66 iii The Ming and Qing dynasties: horticultural and agricultural texts, p. 105 iv The Ming and Qing dynasties: texts of an encyclopaedic nature, p. 110 v The Ming and Qing dynasties: notes by literati, p. 112 vi Plant classifications: an attempt at a synthesis, p. 113 (g) The description and illustration of plants, p. 119 (1) The canonical state of description: the Er ya and the Shuo wen jie zi, p. 119 (2) Exotic monographs, p. 129 (3) The description and illustration of plants under the Song, p. 131 (4) The description and illustration of plants under the Ming, p. 163 (5) An original example of a traditional botanist, Cheng Yaotian, p. 228 (6) The case of tong trees, p. 238 (h) Knowledge of plant life, p. 254 (1) The perception of plant life, p. 254 i Fundamental ideas, p. 254 ii Plants, soil and climate, p. 256 iii Plants and time, p. 260 iv Plants and regions, p. 267 v Plants and minerals: plants that indicate minerals, p. 267

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LIST OF CONTENTS

vi Plants and minerals: plants that are sources of minerals, p. 269 vii Plants and minerals: reciprocal actions, p. 270 viii Relations between plants, p. 272 ix Plants and humans, p. 276 x The properties of plants, p. 282 xi Attempts at synthesis: plant life, p. 283 xii Conceptions of the global functioning of plants, p. 287 xiii Conclusion, p. 292 xiv An external but close view: Kaibara Ekiken, p. 293 (2 ) On the sex of plants, p. 296 i A historical reminder, p. 296 ii The Chinese view, p. 299 iii The case of hemp, p. 303 iv Other sexualised grasses, p. 308 v The sex of trees, p. 314 (3 ) Parasitism and the epiphytic condition, p. 320 (4) Aquatic plants, p. 329 i Water grasses, p. 329 ii Algae, p. 336 (5 ) Fungi, p. 340 i Prologue, p. 341 ii Sources, p. 341 iii Treatises, p. 352 iv Toxicity, p. 367 v The characteristics of mushrooms, p. 368 vi An attempt at determination, p. 370 (i) Horticulture and its techniques, p. 394 (1) Prologue, p. 394 (2 ) Treatises on horticulture, p. 395 (3 ) Gardens, p. 443 i Definitions, p. 443 ii A glimpse of the great parks of antiquity, p. 446 iii Literati and plants, p. 450 (4) Fruit production, p. 482 i A glimpse of origins, p. 482 ii The improvement of quality and productivity, p. 484 iii The preservation and transformation of fruits, p. 488 (5 ) Grafting and vegetative propagation, p. 497 (j) Plants and botanical exchanges: the Chinese contribution to the rest of the world, p. 534 (1) Plant transmissions and exchanges of knowledge, p. 535

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LIST OF CONTENTS

i Plants introduced into China, p. 535 ii The diffusion of Chinese botanical knowledge to Japan, p. 545 iii The discovery of Chinese flora by westerners, p. 567 (2) The influence of Chinese gardens on Europe, p. 637 i Paper gardens: the basic texts, p. 638 ii Chinese plants in Europe, p. 648 (k) Conclusion, p. 656 (1) The Zhi wu ming shi tu kao, p. 659 BIBLIOGRAPHIES . . . . . . .

A Chinese and Japanese books before 1800, p. 670 B Chinese and Japanese books and journal articles since 1800, p. 682 C Books and journal articles in Western languages, p. 696

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GENERAL INDEX

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38 (2) T R A D I T I O N A L B O T A N Y : A N ETHNOBOTANICAL APPROACH INTRODUCTION

This volume, which Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen entrusted me to produce, is the sequel to Volume 6, Part i, Botany (1986). It consists of three parts. The first addresses various aspects of traditional Chinese botany, as I have managed to reconstruct them by analysing various documents devoted to the subject of plants.

This is therefore reconstituted knowledge that I have deduced from the original texts. This part of the work thus follows on directly from Volume 6, Part i, and belongs together with that previous volume. Part ii and Part iii could have formed the subjects of separate volumes. The former tackles the domain of the history of techniques by presenting a study of various aspects of horticultural practice in ancient China. The latter studies exchanges of plants, foreigners’ discovery of Chinese flora and the influence that Chinese gardens exerted upon European ones.

Part i ends grosso modo before the end of the Qing dynasty, as does Part ii, whereas most of the works and facts mentioned in Part iii date from the 17th century.

Although conscious of the problems that this apparent incoherence might present, I decided to stick as closely as possible to Joseph Needham’s plan for this volume. Actually, reading the text, it becomes clear that the incoherence is actually no more than apparent, for many of the texts cited in the various parts ‘correspond’ at the level of the logic of their contents (see, for example, the concept of plant life and grafting practices).

When Joseph Needham entrusted this task to me, he also gave me a copy of all the notes that he had made with Lu Gwei-djen. He advised me to use them as I wished, to add whatever I thought useful and perhaps to reject some of them. My text rests upon that whole collection of documents, to which a comparable number of further notes, resulting from my own reading, have been added.

Readers of the preceding volume devoted to botany will have recognised the importance attributed to plants in specialised medical and horticultural literature.

They will be familiar with the often laudatory descriptions of the techniques and knowledge of Chinese gardeners such as those produced by Father Cibot in particular.1 However, it is remarkable that no mention of botany as an autonomous science was made by the earliest missionaries who lived in China. Perhaps that is because, in 17th-century Europe likewise, botany was still hardly a science. However, in the 19th century, De Candolle wrote,

1

See Cibot (1777, p. 623; 1778a; 1778b).

1

2

INTRODUCTION

In the course of my researches, I have on many occasions felt how very helpful a study of Chinese and Japanese encyclopaedias would be to the history of cultivated species, which, in its turn, is important for the history of nations.2

It was a remark that, in roughly the same period, in 1852, the observations of Hoffmann and Schultes confirmed: If these countries were occupied by barbarians, we would content ourselves with what travellers discovered there and told us about, but the natives of China and Japan, who are fortunate to belong to a very ancient civilisation, and who have examined and determined what plants grow on their land, have produced a native literature on the plant kingdom.

That literature provides us with an ample harvest of interesting notes on the country, the migration, and the geographical distribution and use of cultivated plants, and promises to provide us with not only knowledge of this Flora, but also extremely interesting notions about the industry and arts of this country.3

Yet two decades later, in 1878, a Dutch scholar, A. J. C. Geerts, who pioneered the teaching of chemistry in Japan, would declare, when introducing a study on The Products of Japanese and Chinese Nature: In China, one cannot yet speak of the development of a free and pure science of nature, because this is only cultivated for essentially practical purposes. The progress made by the natural sciences in Europe since the last century has had very little influence on the state of knowledge of that nation, so that its scientific knowledge is hardly different from the picture that Von Siebold produced of natural history among the Japanese fifty years ago.4

Nevertheless, not much later, in the Preliminary Notices to the first volume of the Botanicon Sinicum, Emil Bretschneider, doctor to the Russian Legation in Beijing, declared: ‘There are numerous Chinese works dealing especially with Botany, Agriculture and other kindred sciences relating to Practical Botany. They are replete with information regarding the uses of plants for food, clothing, manufacturing purposes, etc.’5 It is important, at this point, to note one crucial aspect of my work. In accepting the proposal made by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, I had in effect accepted the idea that a form of clearly defined botany did exist in ancient China, given the voluminous corpus of texts to be analysed. However, as my reading proceeded, I was forced to admit, in the first place, that I had come across no Chinese term that might have even one of the modern meanings of ‘botany’.6 2

De Candolle (1855), cited by Bretschneider (1881, pp. 20–1).

Hoffmann and Schultes (1852, p. 6). This very precious article provides Japanese names in Latin transcriptions as well as ‘Chinese names used by the Japanese’ in characters and accompanied by their Chinese and Sino-Japanese transcriptions. To set up this list, the authors had access to documentation brought back by Siebold and, in particular, to ‘a complete list in Japanese and in Chinese of the plants collected by him, which he ‘had had made in Japan by a Japanese scholar’.

4 Geerts (1878, p. 6). This volume is devoted to ‘the inorganic and mineralogical part’. See Siebold (1826).

5 Bretschneider (1881, p. 21).

6 For example, the Longman Dictionary of the English Language (anon. 1984, p. 166) gives the three following definitions. 1. (A branch of biology that deals with) plants and plant life in the world; 2a. the plant life of a particular region; 2b. the properties and vital phenomena exhibited by a plant, plant type or plant group’. If we 3

INTRODUCTION

3

Furthermore, nor had I found any term that referred to any traditional knowledge specifically about plants before the creation, in 1858, of the term zhiwuxue 植物學, meaning botany in the modern sense of the term. Finally, among the abundant literature that I was working through, there was no text that could be regarded as a kind of botanical manual, nor was there any reference to what we call a flora.7 So was there no botany in China at that time? One is bound to recognise its absence if we consider, in comparison, the thought on plants that developed in Europe from the 13th century onward with the first works of Albertus Magnus (c.1193–1280)8 and the innovatory contribution of Valerius Cordus (1515–44),9 which, from the 17th century onward and above all in the 18th century, gave birth to a whole body of structured knowledge that was founded on observation and experimentation and that continues to evolve, namely modern botany. However, if the term ‘botany’ was taken to mean a whole body of types of knowledge – not always formalised and by no means exclusive – that relates to the plant world, then a vast and rich field of study opened up before me. That is why, in order to avoid all ambiguity and anachronism, I decided to refer, in the title to this volume, to ethnobotany, a discipline that studies relations that human societies and groups maintain with the plant world, essentially by drawing on the way in which their members describe, name, classify and interpret plants. A citation from an author whom Joseph Needham greatly appreciated and whom he advised me to read, Edward Lee Greene, will explain my approach and the method that I have adopted. In an early work published in 1909, Edward Lee Greene, the author of Landmarks of Botanical History, wrote the following very stimulating lines that define my own approach and the method that I have adopted and which shed new light upon the history of botany: Botany did not begin with the first books on botany, nor with the men who indited them, though every historian of the science whom I have read has assumed that it did. The most remote and primitive of botanical writers, of whatever country or language, found a more or less extensive vocabulary of elementary botany in the colloquial speech of all. The chief organs of plants – stem, trunk, branch, leaf, flower, fruit, pod, seed, root, tendril, thorn, and a multitude of others – had been discriminated and named; the organs even known by all who had acquaintance with plants and trees, and the names were everywhere in use. Even the functions of several of the organs had been correctly ascertained before ever a line of botany had been written, most probably even before letters had been invented.

The improvement of wild things by cultivation, the propagating of the newly acquired sorts of cuttings, by division of perennial roots and, in the case of trees, by grafting, are likewise arts that seem to antedate history; as do also the designating of different varieties turn to the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Babcock 1986, p. 258) we read the same three definitions, plus a fourth one, which is ‘a botanical treatise or study: esp. a particular system of botany’.

7 The meaning of this term is: ‘A work that describes and classifies the plant species of a region’, in Germain de Saint-Pierre (1870, p. 556).

8 On the work of Albertus Magnus, see Pouchet (1853, pp. 297–308); Sprague (1933a; 1933b); Arber (1950, pp. 24–32).

9 See Greene (1983, pp. 368–415); Morton (1981, p. 126); Sprague & Sprague (1939).

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INTRODUCTION

or species that are evidently nearly akin, by two-fold names, one generic, the other specific or varietal.10

I thus set out in quest of the knowledge – or different types of knowledge – about plants that had been written down in the course of Chinese history. These bodies of knowledge are scattered throughout the literary genres written by Chinese literati.

Fortunately for this research, much of the activity of literati was devoted to organising the scattered notes of predecessors into a thematic form in encyclopaedic works. As a result, there exist sections of great general encyclopaedias that are specifically devoted to plants; and there are likewise anthologies of texts that are devoted solely to plants.11 I also made use of treatises on painting, texts commenting on the ancient Classics and notes written down as ‘brush-stroke jottings’, bi ji 筆記 or suibi 隨筆. My investigation into the nature of this botany will not be limited to the literary genres cited above. The texts of works on materia medica, ben cao 本草, horticultural monographs, descriptions of exotic plants12 and likewise agricultural treatises13 already mentioned in previous volumes and general treatises on horticulture, which I shall shortly be describing: all these too have formed the basic material that I have used in an attempt to present a body of knowledge whose possessors seem not to have felt the need for systematic formalisation.14 Essentially, my study thus concerns types of knowledge as they are reported by literati. De facto, even if some do reflect popular practices (horticultural treatises, for example), they have undergone a process of organisation that turns them into works that reflect not only the point of view of their authors but also a certain orthodoxy in their style and form. It would certainly have been interesting to take account equally systematically of popular works and genres that are not directly related to plants, such as accounts of travels, monographs, local gazetteers and so on. Such texts do get a mention, but only when they are cited, as they often are. But it seemed to me that research of that kind in itself constituted a different subject; and I have preferred to concentrate on scholarly specialised literature, particularly given that Joseph Needham’s notes concerned only texts belonging to this category. So, faced with the spectacle of the plant world, what was the attitude of these men who have left us their impressions?15 The introductory remarks to their treatises are illuminating on this point: they are moved by practical concerns but also by philosophical 10 ‘The Philosophy of Botanical History’, in Greene (1983, p. 118). Since I first read it, this first volume has appeared in a remarkable second edition, accompanied by the publication of a second posthumous volume. Both are expanded by numerous very valuable notes and an abundant, equally valuable bibliography produced by Frank N. Egerton.

11 The titles of these works generally contain caomu 草木, ‘grasses-trees’, and also fang 芳, ‘fragrances’.

12 13 See SCC Volume 6, Part i, pp. 440 ff.

See SCC Volume 6, Part ii, by Francesca Bray.

14 In a letter dated 21 October 1773 that Pierre Cibot sent from Peking to Stehlin, a member of the Académie des sciences in Paris, Cibot commented on this subject as follows: ‘It would have been easy for me to reach further and show to what extent the Chinese have deigned to pay attention to the facts in their study of Nature but without paying attention to its Laws or connecting them by systems’. I must thank Marie-Pierre Dumoulin-Genest for bringing this document to my attention (Fonds JBM 65, Archives des Jésuites, Vanves).

15 I have come across only texts by male literati but a few rare women have left pictures of plants.

INTRODUCTION

5

preoccupations. Sometimes it is a matter of helping doctors to acquire a better understanding of materia medica so as to provide better care; sometimes of teaching how to cultivate the soil in order to produce edible or ornamental plants; or how, using ink and a brush, to bring to life the plants that are provided by nature or the arts of a gardener. But almost always there is a mention of a quest for an ultimate knowledge, which refers to a famous passage at the beginning of the Great Study, Da xue 大學, one of the Confucian Classics relating to ‘the investigation of things’, gewu 格 物, which is the means of ‘reaching an extension of knowledge’, gezhi 格 致: The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their own states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.16

The thoughts that Chen Jingyi 陳景沂, the author of the Quan fang bei zu 全芳備祖, records in his preface, dated 1256, are particularly revealing regarding the practical applications of those thoughts: It is said that the Heaven and the Earth produce things (wu 物). But is there not also that which controls itself? The eye blinks and does not seek for the basis and origin of this, so how does this case differ from that of the morning mushroom [which makes no distinction between the morning and the evening]? Why are bamboos hollow and trees solid? [There are some plants that] grow in the spring and wither in the autumn while others remain unchanged throughout the four seasons. Branches become leafy. What it is difficult to know is the principle (li 理) behind these changes . . . Some people reproach me for indulging in trifles and producing pleasant amusements. I shall reply to them with an adage of the Ancients: ‘absorb yourself in the meaning of things and do not be misled simply by their appearance’. Anyone who indulges in mere distraction is indeed ridiculous, but the Great Study (Da xue) bases its teaching above all on the observation of things (ge wu 格物) and the task of whoever studies (xue zhe 學者) is to acquire a good knowledge of the names of birds, beasts, grasses and trees.17

That last sentence alludes to remarks of Confucius, recorded in the Lun yu (Analects) in Book 9, Chapter 17, 9:18 ‘My children, why do none of you study the Poems? . . . They tell us much about the names of animals and plants’.19 This passage, the meaning of which may seem insignificant, in fact reveals a fundamental aspect of ancient Chinese thought, namely the theory of zheng ming 正名, ‘the rectification of names’.20 This short 16 See Legge (1969, pp. 4–6). On the subject of this idea, see SCC Volume 6, Part i, pp. 440–3); Fung Yu-lan (1952–3, Volume 1, pp. 362 ff., Volume 2, pp. 629 ff.); Lau (1967); Peterson (1975); Cheng (1997, pp. 503–4, 508–9 and 452–4, 490–1).

17 English version of author’s French translation, Chen Jingyi (1982), pp. 9–10.

18 19 See Couvreur (1949, p. 266); Legge(1969, p. 383).

English version of author’s translation.

20 Xun zi 22, cf Zhang Shitong (1974, pp. 275–6), runs as follows: ‘Men of discernment established principles of partition and distinction and introduced names to designate realities, their primary aim being to distinguish the

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INTRODUCTION

text, along with that of the Da xue, cited above, and a firm belief in the importance of correct names,21 really do constitute the basis upon which, in ancient China, all thought on natural living objects was founded. Echoes of it are to be found in virtually all later texts; and in the course of the present work, we shall repeatedly see the extent to which, especially from the Song dynasty onward, those few words fundamentally affected the way in which Chinese literati apprehended anything to do with nature and how they wrote about it. To cite but one example, even though Li Shizhen (1518–93) writes that he composed his Ben cao gang mu (+1596) specifically for doctors, he nevertheless states that his work also belongs to the study involving ‘the investigation into things’, ge wu zhi xue 格物之學,22 and all the entries in his book are defined by a zheng ming, a correct name. And so it is with all other authors. The way in which this investigation should be conducted is not always explained and, on this account, the task undertaken by those authors may seem similar to that of modern botanists, namely to apprehend the plant world and explain it. However, on one point it differs radically, namely the moral purpose of this enterprise, which is expressed clearly by the context of the passage from the Da xue, the Great Study, mentioned above. Another scholar who wrote a Ge zhi jing yuan 格致鏡元 (Mirror of the Origin of the Investigation of Things), dated 1735, Chen Yuanlong 陳元龍, provides precious information regarding the way to tackle this study of living things. Right at the beginning of his Introduction, he writes as follows: There is an infinity of things that fill Heaven and Earth. We must know them all without exception. This knowledge is what fulfils my mind. If he omits a single thing, a decent man is ashamed. That is why he scrutinises [the nature of things] in depth (ge zhi 格致).23

He goes on to say that the three domains in which this quest should be pursued are the reality of things, shi 實; names, ming 名; and categorisations, lei 類. This is simply his way of making more explicit the method recommended by the theory of the rectification of names, which consists in matching names to reality, for to know is ‘in fact to recognise the pre-existing distinctions between qualitative categories’.24 It was thus that, bearing in mind on the one hand Greene’s remarks and, on the other, the importance that should be ascribed to real objects, their names and their classifications, I decided, through an analysis of texts of widely varying content, to give an account of Chinese knowledge about plants and to analyse the naturalist aspect of the efforts of the authors and compilers involved. As my work proceeded, I became increasingly aware that Greene’s ethnobotanic approach was perfectly suited to what I discovered in the texts. This confirmed my conviction that ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ ‘Chinese botany’ should be studied from an anthropological noble from the vile, but also between what was similar and what was different’. From the French translation and citation in Cheng (1997, p. 216).

21 On this subject, see the articles collected by Karine Chemla and François Martin (1993).

22 23 In his introduction fan li (Li Shizhen 1975–81, Volume 1, p. 34).

Ge zhi jing yuan, 1a.

24 Cheng (1997, p. 216).

INTRODUCTION

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point of view rather than, a priori, as a stage in a process that led to modern botany.

My rejection of a teleological approach was to make it possible for me to consider the content of all the Chinese sources, not in comparison to post-Linnaean texts but within their own context. If a comparison with modern science turned out to be necessary, it would come only after this prior independent investigation. By so doing, I realised that I was bringing into question one of the axioms of Joseph Needham’s historiographical approach that he had expressed, for example, in his ‘Address to the Opening Session of the XV International Congress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, 11 August 1977’: I suppose we all generally agree that there is only one unitary science of nature, approached more or less closely and built up more or less successfully and continuously, even if very slowly, by the several groups of mankind from age to age. This means that we could expect to trace an absolute continuity between the first beginnings of astronomy and medicine in ancient Babylonia or ancient Egypt, through the advancing natural knowledge of mediaeval China, India, Islam and the classical Western world, to the break-through of late Renaissance Europe when, as has been said, the most effective method of discovery was itself discovered . . .

Of course we must not see in the traditional sciences of China or India simply ‘failed prototypes’ of modern science; we must get inside the minds of those who cultivated them and understand how it was that they came to their conclusions. But we must never deny the fundamental continuity and universality of all science.

All the ancient and mediaeval systems before the coming of modern science need to be studied and defined in contrast with our present-day pattern of ideas, which is itself of course not final . . . Modern ecumenical science was indeed their common end, but their appearance can only be explained in the context of the various possibilities open or closed within the totality of ideas, values and social attitudes of their times and places.25

In accordance with this line of reasoning, Joseph Needham presented ancient Chinese botanical knowledge by comparing it systematically with modern botany.

In his concluding remarks on the subject of Chinese botany, he writes that ‘Li ShihChen (1518–1593), building on the Liu Wen-Thai’s foundation,26 brought classification in botany to a Magnolian or Tournefortian level’. In Volume 6, Part i, he had already written, ‘We find that indigenous Chinese botany reached a Magnolian or Tournefortian level rather than a Linnaean one’, and in the same volume (p. 177), we find, So one again acquires the impression that traditional Chinese botany attained a Magnolian or Tournefortian level, not an Adansonian one. To speak in this way is not to imply that the Chinese felt the need for a formalised system in the manner of Tournefort, but they perceived very clearly the relationship between plant genera, even though these were often ‘submerged’ within their oecological and physiological classification.

25

Needham (1978, pp. 110, 111).

The main editor of the Bencao pin hui jing yao, a great work on materia medica achieved in 1505 that remained as a manuscript in the imperial library. This text will be discussed along with works of materia medica, see section (f )(2)ii in this volume.

26

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INTRODUCTION

Fig. 1. Six plants all belonging to the Brassicaceae family, bordered by drawings of hu suan 葫蒜 or tian suan 天蒜 (Allium sp.) (top right), and ginger (bottom left). This is an example of what Joseph Needham refers to as a ‘submerged family’. From Ben cao gang mu, reproduction of the 1885 edition (Li Shizhen, 1965, Volume 1, p. 68).

To appreciate this declaration, we must bear in mind the classification of plants proposed by Li Shizhen, which is the most sophisticated of all those to be found in Chinese texts.27 But it is important to remember that it concerns only about 1,095 medicinal plants. Li Shizhen indicates, in an introductory chapter, Fan li 範例, that he is arranging them, from the smallest to the largest, in five principal sections called bu 部, subdivided into thirty categories, lei 類. The five sections, in order, are: cao 草 grasses, gu 穀 grains, cai 菜 vegetables, guo 果 fruits and mu 木 trees. These categories are defined by a variety of criteria. For the grasses these are ecology, morphology, taste, toxicity; for the grains, the different kinds that are cultivated; for the vegetables, taste, texture, form and ecology. Ecology, taste and form are also the criteria for fruits, while trees are distinguished by their perfume, their bearing and their nature. Alongside this apparent distribution clearly explained by Li Shizhen, in several cases we notice, within the same category, that whole lists of the names of plants belonging to the same botanical family are enumerated. For example, seven plants belonging to the Brassicaceae family are cited successively in the category of ‘sweet and slippery’ plants (rou hua lei 柔滑類, juan 27) (Fig. 1). This is an example of what Joseph Needham calls ‘submerged families’ that correspond to the ‘covert categories’ of anthropological literature. In truth, categories of this type are to be found in nearly all folk taxonomies. Their convergence with the taxa of scientific taxonomies generally seems to be quite limited. Furthermore, this same book also contains taxa grouped in a way that seems altogether strange to a modern taxonomist. In Volume 6, Part i, pp. 170–6, Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen mention the example of plants that belong to what they call ‘the ma 麻 group’, i.e. plants that have a plurisyllabic name ending in ma, a term that may be translated minimally as ‘hemp’.

27

This will be developed in detail at pp. 77–99.

INTRODUCTION

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More than twenty plants and trees have this character in their names, though belonging in terms of modern botany to more than a dozen families . . . The resemblances were perfectly real, whether in fibres fit for textiles, in oil extractable from the seeds, or in the shapes of leaves, the polygonal character of the stem cross-section, the position of the seeds in the capsules, etc.

(Volume 6, Part i, p. 170)

Given the criteria listed above, one can understand how it was that these plants were all considered kinds of ma, in that this refers to hemp, Cannabis sativa L. Also understandable is why they do not belong to the same genus or the same botanical family. Indeed, the principal criteria for associating textile fibres and oleaginous seeds are not recognised in botanical systematisation, and the shapes of leaves and stems and the manner in which seeds are arranged in their capsules are considered by botanists to be distinctive criteria of secondary importance.

Now let us turn to Pierre Magnol (1638–1715) and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708). Magnol was the first French botanist to take an interest in natural classification, ‘who, inspired by Ray’s [‘most natural and philosophical’] method, had proposed the family as natural taxonomic grouping and had discussed the criteria for defining them with extreme acumen’ in his Prodromus Historiae Plantarum in quo Familiae Plantarum per Tabulas Disponuntur (1689).28 Tournefort, for his part, proposed an artificial system of ‘attractive simplicity’,29 ‘principally on the basis of the characters of the corolla and the fructification’,30 in his Institutiones Res Herbariae (1700), in which 698 genera are defined and illustrated. When we turn to consider the work of Li Shizhen, it seems that his classification has nothing in common with the methods proposed by Magnol and Tournefort. For his principal categories, bu, he follows the model presented by Tao Hongqing (456–536) in his Shen nong bencao jizhu 神農本草集注 (Collected Commentaries to the Shen nong bencao jing 神農本草 經 (late 6th century). As for his categories, lei, far from being deductive, they are fundamentally subjective, taking account of a variety of factors such as ecology, taste and toxicity, and even including artefacts such as products derived from soya seeds and old pieces of wood that have served for a variety of uses. The teleological approach leads to another comparison between Li Shizhen and Tournefort in order to justify the level attained by traditional Chinese botany. Volume 6, Part i, pp. 176–7, runs as follows: Perhaps the most striking comment that can be made concerning the Chinese knowledge of the hemp plant is that while they preceded everyone else in the appreciation of its dioeceous character, Chinese botany did not, down to the end of its time of independence, range hemp in the same family as the mulberry (Moraceae). But how many of us realise the lateness of this appreciation in Europe? De Tournefort (+1700, +1719) had them as far apart as Li Shizhen, the former (Cannabis) a genus 5 of section 6 of class 15 (herbs and suffruticose plants with apetalous or staminate flowers), the latter (Morus) as genus 4 of section 4 of class 19 (trees and fruit-trees with amentaceous flowers). By +1763, however, Adanson is placing them together in his chestnut family, Castaneae (no. 47). So one again acquires the 28

Morton (1981, p. 294).

29

Morton (1981, p. 295).

30

Morton (1981, p. 228, n. 42).

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INTRODUCTION

impression that traditional Chinese botany attained a Magnolian or Tournefortian level, not an Adansonian one. [Needham’s original footnote: Where the taxonomy of natural families is concerned, it is better to avoid the term ‘Linnaean’. To speak in this way is not to imply that the Chinese felt the need for a formalised system in the manner of Tournefort, but they perceived very clearly the relationships between plant genera, even though these were often ‘submerged’ within their oecological and physiological classification.]

By adopting an anthropological point of view of the history of botanical knowledge, one can supply a response to those two examples. Before the 20th century, Chinese doctors and literati gardeners drew a fundamental separation in the plant world between grasses and trees, just as Tournefort did; and the notion of botanical families existed no more for them than it did for Tournefort. Nevertheless, one crucial difference between Tournefort or Magnol and Li Shizhen is that the former two had both proposed a method that made it possible to classify plants – that is to say, position them in one place and one place only – within a whole collection by rigorously following the hierarchy of criteria on which their methods were founded.

In the case of Li Shizhen and some of his European contemporaries (as we shall see later on), their classifications were essentially subjective and not at all deductive.

The ways in which Li Shizhen and Tournefort each present hemp provide a good illustration of the difference between their respective approaches.

Li Shizhen: Ben cao gang mu (1975–81, Volume 3, p. 1444) grain section, gu bu 穀部.

Hemp/barley/wheat/rice category – ma-mai-dao lei 麻麥稻類.

Correct name: ma 麻.

Next comes a list of seven synonyms and references to their sources. Then Li Shizhen cites several authors to indicate that hemp is widely cultivated, that the plant is peeled and its seeds are harvested. He adds, There are a female and a male. The male is called xi 枲, the female ju 苴. A thick stem, like sesame, long, narrow leaves like those of yi mu cao 益母草 [Chinese motherwort, Leonurus sp.], seven or eight to a branch. In the fifth and sixth months, delicate yellow flowers open and form ears, then the fruits are formed, resembling coriander seeds. They can be used to make oil. The skin is peeled to make hemp. The stem is white with parts that bulge. Can be used as candlewick.

There then follows a lengthy explanation to distinguish male and female seeds.

Then comes a long chapter devoted to the medicinal uses of the various parts of the plant (Fig. 2).

Now let us consider what Tournefort writes (1719, Volume 1, pp. 501–35): Classis xv. De Herbis et Suffruticibus, Flore Apetalo seu Stamino.

Sectio vi: De Herbis flore apetalo, quarum aliae in eodem genere floribus, aliae vero fructibus plerumque donantur.

Genus v. Cannabis. Hemp [see Fig. 3].

INTRODUCTION

11

Fig. 2. Hemp (da ma 大麻, Cannabis sativa L.), from Ben cao gang mu: (a) from the first edition (1596); (b) from the reproduction of the 1885 edition (1965).

Fig. 3. Hemp, from Institutiones Res Herbariæ (1719), by de Tournefort (Volume 3, Tab. 309).

Cannabis est plantae genus, flore A apetalo, plurimis scilicet staminibus B calyci C insidentibus constante, & sterili, ut monet Caesalpinus: Embryones enim E, D iis speciebus Cannabis innasci solent quae flore carent, abeuntque deinde in capsulam G semine foetam subrotondo F.

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INTRODUCTION

Cannabis species sunt Cannabis sativa C. B. Pin. 320. Cannabis mas J. B. 3. 447. Cannabis saecunda Dod. Pmpt. 535.

Cannabis erratica C. B. Pin. 320. Cannabis faemina J. B. 3. 447. Cannabis sterilis Dod. Pmpt. 535.

Cannabis Africana, procerior, semine minori.

To my mind, these examples speak for themselves. Between Tournefort and Li Shizhen there is no difference of level within the same scientific domain, rather a difference in the nature of two different concepts for the study of plants.

My realisation of this logically led me to consider another important element in Joseph Needham’s thinking. This was what he called ‘the fusion point’, which he defined as follows: ‘when, in history, a particular science in its Western form fuses with its Chinese form so that all ethnic characteristics melted into the universality of modern science’.31 This is a particularly delicate problem. Joseph Needham writes as follows: The fusion point in botany did not occur until about 1880 . . . then there began to be Chinese botanists who could speak the language, could talk about Linnaean families and natural families, men who understood, like European naturalists, the function of the flower and what the microscope could reveal of plant morphology. This was the time too at which centred the great effort of many investigators, indispensable for further development, to establish correlation as complete as possible between the Chinese traditional plant names and the Linnaean binomials. Thus one might say that it was not before 1880 that the fusion point took place in botany, and a decade or so later might be a better guess.32

In 1858, a book entitled Zhiwuxue 植物學 (Botany) was published in Shanghai by the London Missionary Society Press (Shanghai mohai shuguan上海墨海書館). This book in eight chapters had been written by a famous mathematician, Li Shanlan 李 善蘭 (1811–82), in collaboration with two missionaries, Alexander Williamson (1829–90) for the first seven chapters, and John Edkins (1823–1905) for the last chapter. The book was a Chinese adaptation of An Outline of the First Principles of Botany by the famous English botanist John Lindley (1799–1865).33 An investigation into the books on botany published in China in the wake of Lindley’s reveals that most are the work of foreigners and the first to be written by a Chinese author, Ye Lan 葉瀾, was a rhymed text of popularisation, probably published after 1895.

However, none of those texts, all written by non-botanists, could enable anyone to practise botany or even simply to identify plants. In truth, the first Chinese botanists were former students who had been educated abroad, mostly in Japan, the United States or Europe, who began working in their own country after 1910. As one of them, Professor Hu Xiansu 胡先驌, wrote in 1937, ‘the development of modern botany came about after the Republic . . . In truth, only after 1916 did botanical research and collections progressively get under way’.34 31

See Needham (1976, p. 202).

See Needham (1967, pp. 85–6; 1971, pp. 400–1); SCC Volume 7, Part ii, p. 35.

34 See Métailié (2001c, p. 329).

32

33

See Pan Jixing (1984).

INTRODUCTION

13

Taking this situation partially into consideration, Joseph Needham wrote, Down to that time [1880] Chinese botany continued on its classical way. The naming, classifying and describing of plants went on along traditional lines. Even as late as 1848 the indigenous style persisted in the important work of Wu Qijun 吳其濬 called the Zhiwu ming shi tu kao 植物名實圖考 (Researches on the Illustrations, Realities and Names of Plants).

Though written at such a recent date, this splendid and well-illustrated treatise was entirely traditional in character and did not take any account of the advance in botany which had been made by Camerarius and Linnaeus.35

It is hard to see what kind of fusion would have been possible between the contents of such a book, a great work of traditional botany that was remarkable in many respects, and modern botany. The earliest young Chinese botanists, all trained abroad, had learned a new discipline that broke away from the works of traditional pharmacology on materia medica, ben cao 本草. The only partial continuity was of a linguistic nature, for botanical terminology and nomenclature were to a large extent derived from whatever the ancient texts had to offer, and in the process a pioneering and fundamental role was played by Japanese scholars.36 To sum up: I consider the ancient Chinese texts relating to plants to constitute a corpus representative of a particular scientific domain but not clearly formalised by those working in this field. The study that I have produced is that of something unnamed but abundantly practised; and I have carried it out in the manner of an ethnobotanical anthropologist whose informants were not living people but texts that were equally rich sources of information. With the obvious exception of my recourse to botanical identifications using Linnaean binomes, which I have indicated where possible, the present work will not be referring to modern botany, so as to avoid any distortion in the grasp of all the different elements that have enabled me to reveal what I regard to be an autonomous and original domain that may be called ‘traditional Chinese botany’.

Finally, conscious of continuing the groundwork on a vast domain in the wake of the considerable achievements of Emil Bretschneider in the late 19th century and, one hundred years later, those of Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, my method has been to favour the presentation of sources and to include many translations, so as to offer information on both the content and the form of these texts. To me, it seems important for non-sinological readers to be able to appreciate the development of the thought of the literati, the crucial role that citation plays in their reasoning, as does their way of delivering evidence by constantly comparing contemporary experience and references to those of the past. As a result, the present book no doubt has an encyclopaedic aspect that I in no way regret. It does not claim to present a definitive history of the relations between human society and the plant world in China. Rather, thanks to the richness and diversity of the documents that it introduces, it aims to encourage ongoing research. I regard my work that is reflected in the pages that follow as an essay on ethnobotanical history.

35

See Hu Xiansu (1937, p. 192).

36

See the analysis of this text in the Conclusion to this volume.