TWO    Textual Claims and Local Investigations

DEPARTING FROM EARLIER PHARMACOLOGICAL TEXTS

What we know about Kou Zongshi today comes primarily from his oeuvre. This includes Duke Lai’s Glorious Loyalty (Laigong xunlie), a collection of both imperial-issued and privately composed memorialized writings addressed to the grand councilor Kou Zhun (961–1023). Kou Zongshi reportedly proclaimed himself Kou Zhun’s great-grandson.² Unfortunately, Duke Lai’s Glorious Loyalty did not survive, and no corroborative evidence can prove that Kou Zongshi was Kou Zhun’s descendent. Another, and more solid, source of information about Kou Zongshi’s life comes from entries scattered throughout Elucidating the Meaning. According to these, Kou had traveled extensively during his official career: besides staying in Li Prefecture (in Hunan), he had been a magistrate of Wushan County (in present-day Long County, Shaanxi), and was once positioned in Kaifeng (in Henan) as well as Luoyang (in Henan) and Shun’an Military Prefecture (in Hebei).³ Over more than ten years of official travel, he observed medicinal substances and asked locals about them, which informed his work when he collected his investigations into Elucidating the Meaning.

The introduction to Elucidating the Meaning reveals that Kou composed this treatise in keeping with both a long-term practice, in which private authors wrote pharmacological collections, and a contemporaneous tendency in which Song private authors composed new works in response to state-commissioned pharmacological encyclopedias. The earliest recorded such encyclopedia was The Divine Farmer’s Classic, which dates to the late first or second century BCE and became the foundation for subsequent pharmacological collections. Its original text no longer exists but is partially preserved through a later annotated edition, Collected Annotations on the Classic of Materia Medica (Bencaojing jizhu, hereafter Collected Annotations). The author of Collected Annotations, Tao Hongjing (452–536), a prestigious figure in Daoist schools and officialdom, grew up in a family that practiced the administration of drugs for at least three generations.⁴ He compiled a pharmacological collection when staying at Mao Mountain (in Jiangsu) over two periods—ca. 492–504 and 514–36. Collected Annotations was frequently cited as a benchmark for pharmacological knowledge during later dynasties.

Between Tao Hongjing’s and Kou Zongshi’s times, both individuals and the Tang and Song courts compiled pharmacological collections. Between 657 and 659, the first government-compiled pharmacological encyclopedia in the world, Newly Revised Materia Medica (Xinxiu bencao) was produced. By mass-producing it, the Tang court conveyed a clear message that it had brought the natural and medicinal resources across the empire under control. The Song court compiled far more pharmacological encyclopedias than the Tang court did. After Kaibao Materia Medica (Kaibao chongding bencao) in the tenth century, the Song court conducted new compilation projects and produced Supplemented and Annotated Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica in the Jiayou Regime (Jiayou buzhu Shennong bencao, 1057–61, hereafter Jiayou Materia Medica) as well as Illustrated Materia Medica (Bencao tujing, 1058–62). Magnificent in scale, Jiayou Materia Medica introduced 1,082 medical substances and drew references from a wide collection of texts as a central persuasion strategy.⁵ Both it and Illustrated Materia Medica are now lost, coming to us only through quotations in other Song pharmacological collections.⁶

Based on Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica, Song readers soon began compiling commentaries and new pharmacological collections. For instance, a physician, Chen Cheng (fl. 11th century), combined and annotated them both to create The Expanded Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica (Chongguang buzhu Shennong bencao bing Tujing, 1092). Kou Zongshi’s compilation of Elucidating the Meaning is part of the Song authors’ response to the state-commissioned pharmacological encyclopedias. It is presented in two parts. The first includes the first three chapters of the treatise and presents Kou’s opinions on medical theories and healing cases. The second, which comprises the remaining seventeen chapters, contains some 473 items that introduce medicinal substances. Supplementing and correcting entries in Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica was the principal objective of Kou’s work.

While exemplifying both the abovementioned long-term practice and the contemporaneous tendency, Kou’s Elucidating the Meaning departs from earlier pharmacological works in four respects: its reliance on empirical strategy, the informal style of its entries, the conspicuousness of its argumentation, and the connection between pharmacological knowledge and “coherence” (li) .

The empirical strategy permeates Elucidating the Meaning. In Kou’s words, he “examined statements of numerous authors and compared them with the facts.”⁷ Kou does not specify to which “facts” he referred, but if we consider the entries that constitute Elucidating the Meaning, we can see that he was referring to his first-person narratives.

Before Elucidating the Meaning, even pharmacological treatises containing entries recording authors’ firsthand experience occupied only small portions of them. For instance, Tao Hongjing recorded his enquiry from “market people” (shiren) regarding drugs in Collected Annotations. No extant pharmacological treatises that preceded Tao’s work contained such information about authors’ firsthand experience. This thus marked the emergence of the empirical strategy in pharmacological texts as a medical subgenre (i.e., annotations). Later, Chen Cangqi (fl. 713–741) in his Collecting the Omissions of Materia Medica (Bencao shiyi, ca. 739, hereafter Collecting the Omissions) also accounted for his observations and inquiries by citing “dwellers on the mountain” (shanren) when describing local medicinal substances.⁸ Among the approximately 600 annotations that Tao wrote and the 970 entries in Chen’s work, however, only a handful of entries reflected the empirical strategy.⁹

In addition to the prominent visibility of its first-person narrations, Elucidating the Meaning is further distinguished from the great body of pharmacological works that had been completed before the twelfth century by the informal style of Kou Zongshi’s entries.¹⁰ Under the typical format, an entry provides information about a given medical substance in the following order: its “flavors” (wei), its “qualities” (xing or qi), whether it has “potency” or “toxicity” (du), its “main indications” (zhuzhi, important therapeutic usage), provenances, and seasons of collection. Other commentaries are then appended to the foregoing descriptions, often chronologically. These came from earlier pharmacological works produced over a period beginning during the Han dynasty and extending to the authors’ time. That there were layers of commentaries indicates the crucial role that textual sources played in producing drug-related knowledge. Although not all entries in pharmacological collections follow this format perfectly, they always include at least some of the abovementioned elements.

Consider, for example, Kou Zongshi’s entry on black ram’s horns, which varied considerably from the typical format. The entry first notes that black rams could be found in Shaanxi and “east of the Yellow River” (hedong), describes their external characteristics, and compares them with the horns of other kinds of sheep and rams. The entry then suddenly shifts to note that Zhang Zhongjing treated cold amassment with a decoction of fresh ginger and lamb meat and that anyone who had consumed it had recovered. This note is followed by the medical case translated at the opening of this chapter.¹¹

The format of this entry differs from typical formats in both pharmacological collections and formularies. Kou mentioned nothing about the quality or flavor of black ram’s horns, which were fundamental elements of pharmacological entries. Neither did he append the medical formula for the fresh ginger and lamb meat decoction, as Shen Kuo did in his formulary, Good Formulas. Kou also had no intention of explaining medical vocabulary for his readers. For instance, Zhang Zhongjing is the “style name” (zi, or courtesy name) of Zhang Ji (ca. 150?–219?), the author of Treatise on Cold Damage.¹² With no drug recipe or explanation, readers would have found it difficult to treat cold amassment by consulting this entry alone. It seems that Kou did not mind this.

Another illuminating entry that illustrates Kou’s informal style is an item on fishing cormorants (luci):

Fishing Cormorants. Tao Yinju [i.e., Tao Hongjing] said: “This bird does not produce eggs. It spits its brood out of its mouth. Today people call this bird ‘old water crow.’ It nests on big trees in large crowds. The cormorants have regular places where they rest, and after a long time the trees wither because the droppings of the birds are poisonous. Pregnant women do not dare to eat them because the birds spit their brood out of their mouth.” Chen Cangqi additionally said: “To achieve easy delivery, when the time has come, let the delivering woman hold one of the birds.” This contradicts Tao. I served as an official in Li Prefecture. Behind my office, a large tree stood. In its top there were some thirty or forty nests of these birds. Day and night, I observed them. Not only were they able to have intercourse, but also their eggshells, which were spread all over the place, were greenish in color. How could they spit their brood out of their mouths? This has never been questioned or investigated. Apparently, it was the mistake of listening to hearsay.¹³

This quote represents one of the typical narrative patterns in Elucidating the Meaning: Kou would first indicate discrepancies or unclear records involving medicinal substances that he found in earlier works (including pharmacological collections, formularies, works of literature, classics, and histories). He would then describe how he verified those records by observing something or asking locals about the substances in question, writing down what he found. Occasionally, he would add his own criticisms of earlier authors who had not examined what they had read or heard. As for this quotation, the text Kou criticized is Tao Hongjing’s Collected Annotations. In this entry, none of the abovementioned typical elements appears—only Kou’s assessment and verification. The absence of such typical components is common throughout Elucidating the Meaning. Even when some of Kou’s entries include them, they are not presented in the conventional sequence. In contrast, Tao Hongjing’s entry on fishing cormorants in Collected Annotations follows the typical format: his entry first introduces alternative names and main indications for the excreta, and then the cold quality and main indications of the cormorants’ heads, and finally methods of consuming the heads for therapeutic purposes.¹⁴

The absence of typical components from Kou’s work cannot be attributed to his unfamiliarity with them, given that the great number of pharmacological collections cited in Elucidating the Meaning attests to his awareness of them. This absence is better understood as a reflection of his preference for informal styles of documenting pharmacological knowledge.

The much wider range of genre-mixing in Elucidating the Meaning serves as another indication of its informal style. This is exemplified by its combination of medical cases and entries in pharmacological manuals. Before Elucidating the Meaning appeared, few pharmacological collections had incorporated medical cases. In contrast, Kou recorded a considerable number of his medical cases in both the “prefatory examples” (xuli) section and the main text of his manual, innovatively integrating the medical case subgenre into the pharmacological one as a persuasive strategy.¹⁵ This feature likewise reflects the atypical format and informal style of Elucidating the Meaning as a pharmacological treatise.

Such a departure from the typical format at first glance makes Kou Zongshi’s entries seem similar to Tao Hongjing’s annotations in Collected Annotations. However, a crucial difference between the two is that Kou’s entries make up an independent book, whereas Tao’s annotations are individually appended to each relevant entry taken from previous pharmacological collections. It is possible that Kou similarly meant to produce an exegetical work: when he submitted his manual to the court in 1116, he might have expected further work to be conducted to separate and align his commentaries in each entry with the corresponding entry in Jiayou Materia Medica.¹⁶ Unfortunately, we have no further textual evidence that would inform an assessment of this hypothesis. However, we know with certainty that Elucidating the Meaning was first printed as an independent book in 1119 by Kou Zongshi’s nephew, Kou Yue, the magistrate of Xie County in Xie Prefecture (in Shanxi).

Argumentation pervades most of Elucidating the Meaning. Issues subject to this practice include judging whether an accurate match has been made between an object or affair and its linguistic expression, ensuring that testimony is trustworthy, verifying the existence of a putative phenomenon, and providing the rationale behind the application of a substance. Judging terminological matches, corroborating testimony, and providing rationales were crucial elements of Kou’s findings, often determining what he calls the “coherence of a substance” (jueli, literally, “its coherence”).¹⁷ When Kou could establish the coherence of these three factors related to a given substance, the coherence of the substance was also established.

The entry on “jade spring water” (yuquan, reputedly a source of healing) illustrates Kou’s argumentation involving a match between an object or affair and its linguistic expression. In the first part of this lengthy entry, he juxtaposes textual collation with his puzzlement regarding earlier pharmacological entries on jade spring water. For instance, Kou notes, The Divine Farmer’s Classic said that jade spring water originated in a valley in the Lantian region (in Shaanxi) and can be “picked” (cai) in any season. Immediately following this citation, Kou is puzzled: no spring exists in the Lantian valley nowadays, and the verb “pick” never referred to collecting spring water either in antiquity or in the present day. The Divine Farmer’s Classic moreover mentioned consuming a five-jin dosage of jade spring water. Kou refuted this statement, claiming that neither ancient nor contemporary medical formulas used the term “jin” to characterize dosages of water. He furthermore indicated that numerous authors’ explanations of jade spring water focused on the character “jade” and circumvented the word “spring water.” Tao Hongjing said that it was called “jade spring water” because this type of jade could “turn into a watery form.” If that were the case, Kou wondered, the object should have been named “jade water” (yushui) instead of “jade spring water.” He comments that earlier understandings and explanations of jade spring water “after all did not rise to the coherence of a substance.” Here it was the seamless match between a substance and its name that warranted the finding of coherence.

Kou’s explanation of the meaning of “jade spring water” occupied the middle part of the entry. He opened this part with an assertive answer to the abovementioned puzzlement, declaring that the word “spring” should be rendered, in conventional vocabulary, a “thick fluid” (jiang). Kou then deployed various means of validating his declaration. For instance, he claimed that “five jin” did presumably refer to jade in the thick fluid. Picking jade and making it into thick fluid was what was “definitely without doubt.” He also argued that this vocabulary mistake stemmed from the fact that the names of a given medicinal substance were omitted or misconstrued during the long-term transmission of pharmacological texts from ancient times to what was then the present day. Kou offered textual evidence of such mistakes as examples. To prove that the term “jade-thick fluid” (yujiang) was actually used, Kou cited texts containing this term from Daoist Canons (Daozang jing) and sentences containing a similar term, “precious jade-thick fluid” (qiongjiang), from a poem written by the talented poet Li Shangyin (813–858).¹⁸

In the final part of this entry, Kou remarked on his two fruitless “field studies” regarding what jade spring water was. He visited the Jade Spring Temple in Jingmen Military Prefecture (in Hubei). In the temple, there was a spring whose water exhibited “no difference from normal spring water” and had no therapeutic efficacy. He also visited another Jade Spring Temple, which was located on Wan’an Mountain in Xiluo (Louyang City, Henan). He went to that mountain twice, asking monks at the temple about a jade spring. None could answer him. In front of the temple, though, there was a spring, which again exhibited “no difference from well water.” In this entry, Kou’s central method in supporting his argument was to collate textual sources, reason critically and logically, and present the results of his local investigations.

The entry on fishing cormorants illuminates arguments over the existence of a purported phenomenon as a subject of Kou’s discussion. In that entry, his observation served as the single piece of evidence against Tao Hongjing’s statement. The entries on fishing cormorants and jade spring water both demonstrate the centrality of the empirical strategy to establishing authorial reliability. This centrality is additionally evident in Kou’s criticism of Tao’s uncritical acceptance of received information.

Kou’s criticism of writers for accepting information uncritically is best seen in two entries. In the entry on stonecrops (jingtian, literally, high sky or making heaven luminescent), he indicates that, given that Tao used the phrase “it was said” (yun) to describe a stonecrop growing in Guang Prefecture (in Guangdong) that was “three to four times wider than the width of two arms around,” it was apparent that Tao did not “personally see” (qinjian) the stonecrop, but had merely heard about it. Kou commented that “it was [the product of] Tao’s relaxed listening.”¹⁹ Another example is the entry on moles (yanshu), in which Kou claimed that Tao believed moles lived in mountains and forests, were as big as buffaloes, looked like pigs, and produced their young through the dropping of seminal fluid on the ground. Kou wondered: even if the beasts Tao depicted were indeed moles, no one had ever seen moles producing their young in that manner. Kou concluded, “Tao recklessly trusted [the information] to this degree.”²⁰ The three entries together (on fishing cormorants, stonecrops, and moles) clearly emblematize not only Kou’s emphasis on witnessing purported phenomena but also his refutation of the practice of writing down hearsay as a persuasion strategy, one Tao used to his own satisfaction in Collected Annotations. This emphasis and refutation in turn justify Kou’s enthusiasm for conducting local verification of pharmacological information that he read and heard.

Regarding in-depth explanations of a phenomenon as a topic of Kou’s argumentation, one example comes from the entry mentioning “soil made of eastward walls” (dong bitu).²¹ Kou used this entry to illustrate how he established the coherence that previous authors had failed to establish. It begins with a medical formula that includes this substance and a citation drawn from Collecting the Omissions. The citation reads, “Collecting soil made of eastward walls, for the soil was often dry.” Kou then launched into a series of self-questions and answers. The first question was: because “soil made of southward walls” (nan bitu) was similar to soil made of eastward walls, insofar as both are exposed to sunlight and are often dry, why not take that soil? The answer was: soil made of eastward walls constantly received early sunlight first. Kou said, “Sunlight was the true fire of Great Yang.” The subsequent question was: why not take soil made of southward walls at noon, but take soil made of eastward walls in the early morning? The answer was that at the moment the fire ignited (i.e., the sun rose), its qi was strong. This is why soil made of eastward walls taken in the early morning was of higher therapeutic efficacy than soil made of southward walls taken at noon. Kou here additionally drew supporting evidence from Basic Questions (Suwen), a medical canon that was attributed to the ancient legendary sage-king Yellow Emperor, presumably compiled in the Han era, and later heavily edited, printed, and endorsed by the Song court in the eleventh century.

The final question was how one could know that “sunlight was the true fire of Great Yang.” Kou replied with an easy experiment: placing wormwood (ai) in the center of a beam of sunlight, which was reflected by water or by a bronze mirror with a sunken center, after which the wormwood would catch fire. Throughout this entry, the methods with which Kou validated his answer encompass logical reasoning (on a foundation of cosmological concepts, such as yin and yang), drawing on textual evidence, and verifying information empirically (burning wormwood with sunlight).

In contrast to Kou, whose argumentation pervades Elucidating the Meaning, not all of the authors of earlier pharmacological works felt comfortable putting forward their own arguments. Admittedly, some included explicit argumentation, for instance, by giving their opinions about the pronunciation and “flavor” (wei) of a given medicinal substance.²² Other authors of pharmacological works, however, preferred setting references drawn from multiple texts side by side under a given entry. Even when there were discrepancies in the references, the authors rarely judged which one was more accurate. A typical example of this propensity to present eclectic sources without judging their relative value is Illustrated Materia Medica, which was compiled by the Song court, which claimed that one of its aims was to provide guidelines for processing and applying medicinal substances. Nonetheless, the compilers of Illustrated Materia Medica explicitly stated that, when contemporaneous accounts of a given medical substance differed from records found in earlier pharmacological texts, they would keep both.²³ This policy of not judging which of two differing accounts should be trusted hindered Illustrated Materia Medica as an ultimate source for codifying pharmacological knowledge.

Empirically verifying received information, in addition to critically evaluating and reflecting that information, drawing textual evidence, and reasoning logically, constitute the four fundamental methods in Kou Zongshi’s practice of argumentation. Through them, Kou justified his findings. In certain entries, he depicted such findings as coherence (li), which was a common but polysemous word in Chinese intellectual narratives. In Elucidating the Meaning, li refers primarily to a penetrating understanding of a given medical substance. Such a thorough understanding, as shown in the entries on jade spring water and soil made of eastward walls, involved fathoming the rationale behind the naming of a medical substance as well as confirming its therapeutic efficacy and designing the corresponding prescription strategy. Kou claimed that, “without investigating and verifying the coherence of a substance, treating disorders would not only waste efforts but also eventually fail to save lives.”²⁴

Kou’s pursuit of coherence resulted from a very practical concern about therapeutic efficacy, but he had little interest in connecting coherence to moral reflections or in harmonizing it with li for other purposes. In this sense, Kou’s investigation into medicinal substances and his pursuit of coherence diverged from the neo-Confucianists’ intellectual agenda that drove explorations of li as a means of cultivating the qualities of a moral human being. Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and his brother Cheng Yi (1033–1107) characterized this agenda as “investigating things and attaining knowledge” (gewu zhizhi), conceptualizing li as a feature of all objects or affairs, which were connected with each other across the world. Therefore, all li is one li. A learner could continue investigating li in one object or affair and extending it to another. During the process of extending coherence in this way, the learner would eventually attain ultimate and unitary coherence and acquire the qualities of a moral person.²⁵ Kou never directly linked this agenda with his own pursuit of coherence.²⁶ The term jueli (its coherence) that Kou used was not his invention, as it had appeared frequently across earlier histories and literary works. During Kou’s time, the Cheng brothers’ teachings circulated primarily among their disciples. The central government even suppressed the brothers’ teachings during the Chongning reign (1102–1106). It was not until two hundred years later, when the government endorsed neo-Confucianism, that the synthesis of neo-Confucianism and medical theories emerged in the medical literature.²⁷

Four features thus distinguish Elucidating the Meaning from earlier pharmacological collections: the high degree of visibility of first-person narratives, the lack of the typical established components of pharmacological collections, the pervasiveness of a deliberate practice of argumentation, and the connection between pharmacological knowledge and li. Notably, the first three appear more frequently in notebooks that date to the late ninth century, especially in their authors’ entries on local investigations into regional phenomena about which they had read or heard.

LOCAL INVESTIGATIONS IN THE NINTH CENTURY

The innovations that distinguish Elucidating the Meaning were part of a far broader and longer-lasting trend in which scholar-officials from the late ninth to the twelfth centuries documented their local investigations into reported regional phenomena. During the Song dynasty, records of these investigations included notebooks, travel accounts, and inventories of things.²⁸ These three genres, owing to their item-by-item style and broad coverage of subject matter, allowed more room to account for new knowledge and, accordingly, became a popular written platform through which Song authors recorded their multifarious findings. Entries in these works unmistakably manifested their authors’ reliance on the empirical strategy in their accounts of regional phenomena.²⁹ Those works resembled Elucidating the Meaning to the extent that they combined reliance on empirical investigation with erudition. Like Kou Zongshi, the authors in these cases compared their empirical findings meticulously with previously published textual records.³⁰

The late ninth century, at the dusk of the Tang dynasty, witnessed a trend in which scholar-officials documented their empirical verifications of what they had previously read and heard about the Lingnan region (literally, “south of the Ling ranges”) in far southern China. Observers have attributed this trend to the Tang people’s curiosity about the far south, a remote and exotic region where the climate, creatures, local products, and customs all diverged from what was found in the central plains.³¹ Although the term already appears in sources before the Tang dynasty, Lingnan officially became the name of one of ten administrative circuits that the Tang court established in 627.³² The Lingnan circuit encompassed present-day Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan Island, most of Guangxi, the southeastern part of Yunnan, and the northern part of Vietnam. In the early Tianbao era (742–756), Fu and Zhang Prefectures (both in Fujian) were removed.³³ This change in effect defined the concept of Lingnan in later eras of imperial China. From that point on, “Lingnan” (or “Lingbiao” or “Liangwai”) as a term referred mainly to Chinese territory that was located south of the Nanling Mountains (also known as the Wuling Mountains), a major mountain range in southern China that separates the Pearl River Basin from the Yangzi Valley.³⁴

The emblem of this late Tang trend is Duan Gonglu’s Records of the Land of Northward-Facing Doors (Beihu lu, hereafter Northward-Facing Doors). The term “northward-facing doors” (beihu) comes from an ancient dictionary, Approaching Correctness (Erya, ca. 3rd century BCE), which used it in reference to the most remote region in the south.³⁵ Scholars between the Han and Qing dynasties had proposed various explanations as to why the region was so named. The famous Tang scholar Yan Shigu (581–645), for instance, explained that the name referred to a regional phenomenon; that is, the area was so far south that the sun shone only on its northern slopes and the locals thereby built their houses with the front doors facing the north to catch the sunlight.³⁶ Accordingly, imperial authors often used the term “northward-facing doors” to refer to the far south of China.

Duan resided in Xiang Prefecture (in Hubei) early in the Xiantong era (860–874), moving southward and living in Lingnan between 869 and 874. During this period in Lingnan, Duan resided in Gaoliang (in present-day Gaozhou city, Guangdong) in 869. He returned to Gaoliang from Pan Prefecture (Maoming city in Guangdong) in 870 and moved to the South Sea in 871. Sometime between 874 and 876, he met the regional military governor of the Lingnan East Circuit, Wei He, and very likely worked for him for a while. Duan’s known post was defender of Wannian County under the jurisdiction of the Tang capital Chang’an (in Shaanxi).³⁷ In the extant three-juan edition of Northward-Facing Doors, nine out of fifty-two entries (17%) use the empirical strategy.³⁸ When accounting for the strategy, Duan often referred to himself as “Gonglu,” “I” (yu), and “I, in my state of ignorance” (yu).

The written format of Northward-Facing Doors was devoted to a given region and presented a wide range of subject matter (including indigenous creatures, artifacts, disorders, and customs) in an item-by-item style, but it did not further systemize the subject matter by tying obvious threads together. These features can also be found in a literary corpus that emerged during the late Eastern Han era (25–220). That literature shared a common mark insofar as all of the works’ titles included the phrase “records of exceptional things” (yiwu zhi). This body of work comes down to us only in the form of fragmented entries that were cited in later Six Dynasties, Tang, and Song works across a variety of genres, such as pharmacological collections, agricultural manuals, and “classified books” (leishu).³⁹ On the one hand, no empirical strategy is discernible in the extant fragmented entries of these works. On the other, some book titles in this literary corpus, such as Records of Exceptional Things in Jiao Prefecture (Jiaozhou yiwu zhi), suggest that their authors were devoted to recording exceptional occurrences in a specific region.⁴⁰ Regardless of their common features, Duan’s strong emphasis on his empirical verification of Lingnan-related topics distinguishes Northward-Facing Doors from earlier writings on regional features.

Duan verified claims through observations and inquiries. We see evidence of this practice in the entry on “tong rhinoceros” (tongxi). This entry began with anecdotes about rhinoceroses that Duan collated from five works, which included Records of Exceptional Things in Southern Prefectures (Nanzhou yiwu zhi). Following these anecdotes, Duan described the remarkable efficacy of rhinoceros horns when treating wounds pierced by poisonous plants, and he argued that “I additionally translated it from natives. This thing is not bogus.” Duan then considered shells taken from live “hawksbill turtles” (daimao). Explaining their great efficacy when used to treat poisoning, he wrote “I, in my state of ignorance, had taken the shell to treat poison, and it immediately achieved the effect.”⁴¹

Although he cited pharmacological collections in Northward-Facing Doors, Duan exerted little effort to challenge them; he primarily transcribed their records alongside other textual references. Only in one entry did he raise doubts about records in a pharmacological manual. In it, he questions whether the purpose of burning “owls” (xiao) was not to enjoy those birds’ meat, an explanation that he cited from Chen Cangqi’s Collecting the Omissions, but simply to kill them.⁴² Duan provided no evidence in support of his alternative explanation.

The empirical strategy also appears in three other works that were written in the late Tang and early Five Dynasties (907–979) eras: Miscellany of the Wilderness in Which I Was Positioned (Touhuang zalu), by the regional inspector of Gao Prefecture (in Guangdong) in the early Dazhong era (847–860), Fang Qianli; Records of Wind and Land of Guilin (Guilin fengtu ji, 899), by the regional inspector of Rong Prefecture (in Guangxi), Mo Xiufu; and Liu Xun’s Recording the Extraordinary beyond the Ling Ranges (Lingbiao luyi).⁴³ Notably, those three works, all of which involved the empirical strategy, attended primarily to affairs in Lingnan. Along with Northward-Facing Doors, they were classified under the bibliographical section of “historiographies” in standard histories but shared the same common characteristics of Song works that modern scholars have identified as notebooks. Those characteristics adopt an item-by-item presentation style; a less systematic format for the size, structure, and contents of the items; no clear thematic thread organizing or sequencing an array of the items; and a wide range of subject matter. To underscore these characteristics shared by these four late-Tang works and Song notebooks, I classified them as notebooks instead of as historiographies.

Duan Gonglu’s family legacy presumably intensified his passion for verifying things and writing his verifications down. Duan Chengshi (ca. 800–863), who was presumably Duan Gonglu’s uncle, composed the famous Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang (Youyang zazu), which covers a broad range of topics, such as rituals, creatures, food, medicine, tales, architecture, and so forth.⁴⁴ It also shares an interest in the empirical strategy with Northward-Facing Doors. Duan Chengshi combined the experiences and verifications that he accumulated in various regions (including Shaanxi, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi) along with firsthand information, hearsay, and textual sources, to compose Miscellaneous Morsels. He used the empirical strategy, for instance, in an entry in which he described his observations of ants in Chang’an during the Yuanhe era (806–820).⁴⁵ In another entry on “tianniu insects” (tianniu chong, presumably black beetles), he recalled that, in the summer in Chang’an, whenever the beetles appeared, it would rain; he said that he confirmed this phenomenon as many as seven times.⁴⁶

The grand councilor Lu Xisheng (?–895) interpreted the rising visibility of the empirical strategy in Northward-Facing Doors as a counterbalance to the popularity of tales during that period, as shown in Lu’s preface to it, according to which Duan Gonglu asked Lu to write the preface because Duan believed that Lu’s having resided in Lingnan for years would have enabled him to “comprehensively examine facts that it [Northward-Facing Doors] recorded.” This rationale indicates Duan’s effort to vindicate the factuality of Northward-Facing Doors, especially considering that few authors in the Tang and Five Dynasties eras asked others to write prefaces for them.⁴⁷ Lu’s appreciation of Duan’s verification established the tone of his preface, which reads: “[Duan Gonglu] did not end his book merely with what he heard and saw, but furthermore linked it with similar cases, cited evidence, and compared and verified it with extraordinary books and exceptional statements. It is indeed broad and trustworthy.”⁴⁸ “Broadness” (bo), on my reading, recognizes the wide scope of textual references in Northward-Facing Doors.⁴⁹ “Trustworthiness” (xin) refers not only to Duan’s hearing and seeing but also to his critical skills in citing textual evidence and verifying exceptional statements.

Lu concluded his preface by drawing a contrast between Northward-Facing Doors and tales (xiaoshuo, literally, “small talks”). Novels, which were popular in the Tang era, especially in Lu’s and Duan’s day, were tales that varied widely in length and covered a broad range of themes, such as gossip, lore, romance, supernatural beings, and remarkable events.⁵⁰ Despite their popularity, though, Lu in the preface complains that many of them were either absurd and ridiculous or entertaining and humorous, meant to provoke laughter and merriment. Apart from those two types of work, Lu said that other tales “slandered earlier worthies, causing the multitude to take them as a subject of gossip.”⁵¹

Following this criticism, Lu drew a contrast: “This is the pervasive ailment of recent times. What you [Duan Gonglu] said has none of it. What Northward- Facing Doors recorded all can be examined and verified. It is an assistance of broad learning of things; how could it be merely talking materials?”⁵² Lu highlighted the scholarly value of Northward-Facing Doors by contrasting it with contemporary novels that in his opinion lacked factuality and were therefore suited only for gossip. Lu also described Northward-Facing Doors as a contribution to the “broad learning of things” (bowu).⁵³

The contrast shows that Lu, as a historical actor, consciously distinguished literary genres written for entertainment purposes from those that were intended to convey knowledge. The latter could be called “epistemic genres,” an analytic concept that the medical historian Gianna Pomata has developed.⁵⁴ Admittedly, Lu, like other historical actors in middle-period China, did not develop particular vocabularies to signify distinct epistemic genres. Nevertheless, his preface to Northward-Facing Doors, especially his description of the treatise’s empirical features and the contrast between it and other literary genres that were intended primarily for amusement, indicates his awareness and appreciation of epistemic genres, in particular texts based on thorough empirical investigation. It is a pity that Lu did not further elaborate on what he meant by referring to this “broad learning of things,” such as which texts would fall under this rubric and how the genre developed in the Tang era.

Lu Xisheng’s comments on Northward-Facing Doors here are reminiscent of the Southern Song appreciation of a notebook’s reliability and of the critical skills through which such reliability is achieved. Existing scholarship has found that it was not until the twelfth century that notebook authors began to value reliability and critical skills for their own sake; before then, the “dominant rhetoric for evaluating the credibility of a biji was to compare it to official histories.”⁵⁵ Lu’s preface demonstrated, however, the fledging consciousness of the idea of evaluating the credibility of notebook-style writing outside the framework of the historiographical tradition, hinting at the heightened value of the reliability and critical skills of notebooks since the late ninth century.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE SONG ERA

From the tenth to the twelfth century, the trend toward applying the empirical strategy to support authors’ statements about regional phenomena continued and intensified, appearing in notebooks and travel accounts.

Notebooks applying empirical strategy began to cover a wider range of topics than those in the late Tang era. This broader knowledge base can be seen in their titles, which were no longer devoted to specific regions. A case in point is Trifling Talks from Northern Dreams (Beimeng suoyan, hereafter Northern Dreams) by Sun Guangxian (?–968). Sun came from Ling Prefecture (in Sichuan), took refuge in Jingnan (in Hubei), worked for its ruler sometime between 926 and 963, and became a regional inspector in Huang Prefecture (in Hubei) after 963.

An existing but fragmented entry of Northern Dreams offers evidence of Sun’s use of the empirical strategy. He began with a citation drawn from Chen Cangqi’s Collecting the Omissions.⁵⁶ It said that shafu (literally, “captured by sand”) was called fuyu by the Shu people, and when incorporated into pillows, it could render husbands and wives more loving of each other. Sun then described the process through which he verified this record. While traveling in Chengdu (in Sichuan), he became familiar with a “Mountain Man Lee” (Li shanren), who sold herbs and drugs. He often saw young men in Chengdu visiting Lee joyfully and paying him a “good price.” Sun asked Lee what they were paying for. “Seduction drugs” (meiyao), Lee replied. Sun thereupon requested one of these drugs and discovered that it was the substance “captured by sand.” Sun concluded his description of the process by noting that “what Chen said is trustworthy and not empty words.” This entry was soon transcribed into an encyclopedia that the Song court compiled between 977 and 978, Extensive Accounts of the Reign of Great Peace (Taiping guangji).⁵⁷

No notebook better reflects the continuing trend in the Northern Song than Shen Kuo’s Brush Talks series.⁵⁸ In it, which modern scholars have analyzed in detail, Shen often recorded his hands-on experience in verifying topics ranging from musicology to astronomy to medicine to local affairs. He accounted for his witnessing of the appearance of the “thunder ax” in Sui Prefecture (in Hubei), his observations of “rainbow drinking water” on his diplomatic mission to the Liao (the northern neighbor of the Song), and his encounter with an “alligator” in Fujian.⁵⁹ In an entry about “black ghosts” (wugui), for instance, he wrote down what he witnessed to confirm the existence of a local custom about which he had once read.⁶⁰ Shen’s introduction to this custom started with a poem written by the preeminent poet Du Fu (712–770), which reads, “Every household raises black ghosts, at every meal they eat yellow fishes.” The Song scholar Liu Ke claimed that, according to The Kui Prefecture Map Guide (Kuizhou tujing), locals called fishing cormorants “black ghosts” and every household in the Shu area living next to water raised them, tying snares to the birds’ necks and commanding them to fish in rivers. Once a cormorant caught a fish, the fishers brought the bird back in its upside-down position so as to let it spit the fish up. Shen recalled that, when staying there, he saw households that raised cormorants to fish, saying, “Liu Ke’s words are trustworthy.”⁶¹

Another eleventh-century notebook reflecting this empirical trend is Mingdao’s Miscellany (Mingdao zazhi) by Zhang Lei (1054–1114, jinshi 1073), which was written between 1096 and 1102. A considerable number of entries in Mingdao’s Miscellany apply the empirical strategy to discuss various topics, such as diet, ways of making brushes, local customs, trips, and so forth. An entry on Huang Prefecture (in Hubei) merits special attention, given that it argues against conventional wisdom in pharmacological collections, as Elucidating the Meaning did. Zhang, as a loyal follower of Su Shi, was demoted to Huang Prefecture between 1097 and 1098 when the New Policies faction, which was hostile to Su Shi, returned to power and resolved to stamp out the opposition. The entry on Huang Prefecture introduces multiple dimensions of the place, including its location, landscape, popularity, city walls, and customs; its residents’ typical livelihoods and the vernacular accent; and products extracted from the mountains. At the very end of the entry, Zhang Lei mentioned pharmacological collections:

Things of the insect and reptile category are mainly snakes. The one known as White Flower [a snake] cures wind-inducing disorders. Those that come from the neighboring Qi Prefecture are very expensive. Even when those from Huang Prefecture are dead, they have eyes that gleam and have been shown to cure disorders. The natives are able to catch them; one is sent as an annual tribute to the imperial treasury. The Huang people say this snake does not pursue its prey. It lies coiled in the grass and eats those things that come to it. Its curative powers are not quite what is said in pharmacological collections. When I was ill with “scabies” (jiexian), I ate three whole snakes and saw no effect.⁶²

The quoted statement is strongly reminiscent of Kou Zongshi’s entries in Elucidating the Meaning. Both entries are first-person narratives. The two authors did not adopt typical components in their introductions to medicinal substances. More importantly, both disagreed with pharmacological collections on the basis of their local experience, although Zhang Lei registered his challenge in a milder tone.

Regarding travel accounts, “Account of a Trip to the Stone Bell Mountain” (Shizhongshan ji) by Su Shi (1037–1101, jinshi 1057) is an example of using empirical strategy to buttress authors’ opinions of regional phenomena. Modern scholarship has observed that Su was one of several eminent writers in the Northern Song era “who used travel records to advance particular arguments,” which was a novel approach.⁶³ His account of Stone Bell Mountain indeed shares features with entries in Elucidating the Meaning.

Su Shi opens this travel account by expressing doubt about conventional explanations of the name “Stone Bell Mountain” proposed by two famous writers: Li Daoyuan (ca. 470–527) and Li Bo (fl. early 9th century). Li Daoyuan’s Commentary on the Classic of Waterways (Shuijing zhu), Su stated, held that there was a deep pool next to the mountain, and that water in the pool tolled like bells when it struck rocks. Su noted that others had doubted Li Daoyuan’s explanation, because even if one placed a bell into the water, there was no wind or waves that were strong enough to make it ring. Su recounted that Li Bo once found a pair of rocks along the bank of a pool and knocked them, finding their sound clanking. “I very much doubted it [Li Bo’s claim],” Su commented. Su further pointed out that this claim could not explain why the mountain alone was named after a bell, given that the clanking sound made by rocks was supposed to be the same everywhere.

Su then noted that, in 1086, in the evening, when the moonlight was bright, he rode a small boat to the base of a steep precipice on Stone Bell Mountain with his son, Su Mai (1059–1119). They discovered rocky caves and fissures everywhere below the mountain. Any gentle waves that poured into the caves would knock the rocks and make sounds like gongs. When their boat on its return reached a point between two mountains, they saw a huge rock located in the middle of the channel. It was hollow in its center, with numerous apertures. When swallowed by or washed over by water and wind, the rock produced bangs and clanks that echoed the earlier sounds, as if musical bells were ringing.

Su concluded his travel account as follows:

Is it acceptable for someone who has not personally seen and heard something to have decided views on whether or not it exists? Li Daoyuan probably saw and heard the same things I did, yet he did not describe them in detail. Scholar-officials have always been unwilling to take a small boat and moor it beneath the steep precipice at night. This is why they were unable to know the facts. Although fishers and boatmen who lived around Stone Bell Mountain knew about it, they were unable to describe it in writing. This is the reason that [the truth] has not been passed down through the generations. Imbeciles sought the answer by using axes to strike the rocks. Then they held that they had found out the fact of the matter. I thereupon made a record of these events to sign over Li Daoyuan’s laconic explanation and Li Bo’s imbecilic claim.⁶⁴

The narrative structure of the record resembles some of Kou Zongshi’s entries in Elucidating the Meaning, such as the one on fishing cormorants. The structure of such a record is first to indicate discrepancies in existing texts, then to present the author’s personal verification, and finally to conclude with the author’s comments on those texts.

In the account of Stone Bell Mountain and the above quotation in particular, Su Shi proposes a new model of qualification among scholar-officials. He advocated that they should see or hear things in person before drawing their conclusions; this compared unfavorably with the practices of Li Bo and those who were unwilling to conduct local investigations. Similar advocacy also appears in Kou Zongshi’s criticism of Tao Hongjing. Su maintained that scholar-officials should, unlike Li Daoyuan, articulate their mode of verification, given that they had the capacity to write but others who knew the truth (such as the fishers and boatmen) did not. The same assessment of travel and personal investigation as an essential way of gaining knowledge appeared extensively in Song writings that immediately followed, including Elucidating the Meaning.⁶⁵

This trend toward documenting authors’ local investigations into purportedly regional phenomena continued well into the later Song period and proliferated in other written genres, such as local gazetteers.⁶⁶ Paralleling this trend, the number of notebooks produced after the mid-eleventh century increased similarly. Historians have considered this rising number a reflection of a new literati culture, which underlined the diversity and particularity of objects and affairs, contradicting the intellectual belief in one’s capacity to understand relationships between Confucian classics, humans, and the cosmos in a systematic way.⁶⁷

Notebooks constituted a prevalent written platform in which authors delivered their pharmacological knowledge in a relatively casual and informal style, as shown in abovementioned examples drawn from Northern Dreams and Mingdao’s Miscellany. Shen Kuo in Brush Talks even devoted an entire chapter (juan) to medicinal substances, entitled “Discussion of Medicinals” (Yaoyi).⁶⁸ Like entries in Elucidating the Meaning, those in this chapter addressed a rich variety of topics concerning medicinal substances without following the conventional formats that were typical of pharmacological collections. The topics encompassed matching names with the substances in question, articulating rationales for choosing the seasons in which to collect substances, introducing prescription strategies for a drug, and arguing against previous or contemporary “incorrect” drug applications. Brush Talks itself encompassed a broad range of topics, reflecting Shen Kuo’s interest in textual and experiential knowledge. The chapter “Discussion of Medicinals” manifests his familiarity with medical and pharmacological knowledge.⁶⁹

The expanding presence of informal styles of conveying pharmacological knowledge from the late Tang to the Northern Song period helps to explain Kou Zongshi’s confidence in writing up a considerable number of entries in an informal style (as many as 470) and even in collecting those entries into an independent book.

To be sure, Kou did not adduce every abovementioned text in Elucidating the Meaning. Nevertheless, the wide array of textual sources cited and collated in Elucidating the Meaning marks him as an educated man who was familiar with a considerable number of literary works produced before and during the Song dynasty. Those textual sources included Approaching Correctness, poems by famous Tang writers (including Li Bai [701–762], Du Fu [712–770], Han Yu [768–824], Bai Juyi [772–846], and Du Mu [803–852]), and renowned Buddhist travel accounts such as Accounts of the Western Regions During the Great Tang (Datang xiyuji, 646), Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, and an “inventory of things” written by Cai Xiang (1012–1067, jinshi 1030) and titled Inventories of Lychee (Lizhi pu).⁷⁰

Of the abovementioned notebooks and travel accounts, Shen Kuo’s Brush Talks is an important source for Elucidating the Meaning. On the one hand, Kou did not cite Brush Talks directly. On the other, six of Kou’s entries contained sentences that were almost identical to those preserved in the “Discussion of Medicinals” chapter of Brush Talks.⁷¹ Of those, fully half of the contexts in two entries bear striking similarities to items in Brush Talks.⁷² Kou’s use of Brush Talks without citing it as a reference is puzzling, considering that he mentioned Shen Kuo by name in other entries. Notwithstanding this unusual silence about a source, the inclusion of six entries renders Brush Talks the second most significant nonmedical textual source of Elucidating the Meaning, the first being Monthly Ordinances (Yueling), which is mentioned in eight entries. It is hard to explain Kou’s unattributed use of Brush Talks given that he explicitly cites other contemporaneous writers’ notebook-style works, such as Inventories of Lychee.

In addition to including the chapter “Discussion of Medicinals,” Brush Talks bears other points of resemblance to Elucidating the Meaning. Argumentation permeates Brush Talks. In it, Shen Kuo displayed a strong commitment to accurately matching an object or affair with its lexical expression when accounting for textual and empirical testimony (such as observation) related to a phenomenon (such as the aforementioned entry on “black ghosts”), and presenting a penetrating understanding of an object, affair, or phenomenon. Like Kou Zongshi, Shen also mentioned the term “coherence” (li) in Brush Talks but showed little interest in endorsing it as omnipresent in everything across the world.⁷³

The similarities between accounts of regional phenomena collected in notebooks, travel accounts, and Elucidating the Meaning—and the resemblance between it and Brush Talks—did not mean that those notebooks and travel accounts directly influenced the creation of Elucidating the Meaning. After all, there are too few surviving sources of information regarding Kou Zongshi to make it possible to reconstruct his intellectual inspiration with confidence. Instead, the similarities identify Elucidating the Meaning as part of a trend in which authors had, since the late ninth century, documented their local investigations into purported regional phenomena. Kou differed critically from those authors of notebooks and travel accounts, however, in the very act of submitting his work to the court.

EARNING STATE RECOGNITION

Kou Zongshi completed Elucidating the Meaning in 1116 and submitted it to the court that same year. Existing scholarship has attributed Kou’s action to an edict commissioned in 1027. It required anyone who planned to print “individual collected works” (wenji) to submit them to the government; only after undergoing censorship would the collections be granted permission to be printed.⁷⁴ The scholarship also claims that Kou’s status as an official and his use of Elucidating the Meaning to challenge the Song court–compiled pharmacological texts together prompted him to submit his work to the court as a response to the edict.⁷⁵ However, this claim does not take into account that the genres subject to the edict were literary collections, not medical treatises. Therefore, it cannot fully explain Kou’s submission.

A more direct impetus for Kou’s submission was a set of policies that elevated the status of medicine in Huizong’s reign. More importantly, it may have been due to his aspirations to ascend the bureaucratic ladder by submitting to the court a putatively trustworthy pharmacological collection that supplemented and rectified earlier ones. This aspiration can be observed both in Kou’s awareness of the Song government’s support of medical publication and education and also in his assertive declaration regarding how his work modified Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica; both appear in the first chapter of Elucidating the Meaning.⁷⁶

Kou began the first chapter by drawing an analogy between sages and Northern Song emperors who advocated for medicine. Kou placed the Song government’s medical policies in the context of the sages’ benevolence and desire to relieve the public of suffering. Kou first elaborated on how sages “regretted” (min) that the rest of humankind continuously suffered from disorders that were followed by death, offering medications and techniques designed to protect and preserve life. “This is why,” Kou declared, “the state compiled The Imperial Grace Formulary, edited Basic Questions, corrected pharmacological collections again, and additionally prepared Illustrated Materia Medica. Works such as Zhang Ji’s Treatise on Cold Damage, Essential Formulas, Golden Chest, and the Imperial Library Formulary are excellent and preserved in libraries.”⁷⁷ The project of “correcting pharmacological collections again” refers to Jiayou Materia Medica, which was compiled to correct errors in Kaibao Materia Medica, which the early Song court had composed. The long list of government-commissioned medical treatises attests to Kou’s awareness of the Song state’s sponsorship of medical publications.

Kou continued by reviewing the medical education reforms implemented by Huizong’s government. He remarked, “Nowadays, physicians under the heavens are selected by examination. Official titles and government offices are bestowed upon them. They are individually assigned to function-specific sections.”⁷⁸ This quotation refers to policies supporting a larger project in which Huizong’s government endeavored to raise the status of medicine and medical officials.⁷⁹ At the heart of this effort lay the reformation and expansion of medical education. The project began in 1103, when the Medical Academy (Yixue) was established under the Directorate of Education, a prestigious institution.⁸⁰ Other such academies were soon established in other cities. They were educational institutions operated by local and central governments to train well-educated men to become medical officials in government service.⁸¹ By raising the status of medicine, Huizong’s government aimed to attract students already educated in Confucian classics to attend medical academies, thus producing, in its term, “scholar-physicians” (ruyi, or literati physicians).⁸² Between 1103 and 1120, polices pertinent to Kou’s claim about physicians include those issued in 1115 that ordered the establishment of a medical academy in every prefecture and county and reregulated the examinations that determined the placement of students in such academies.⁸³ These policies, in Kou’s words, were all attributed to “noble rulers who possess consummate wisdom and the greatest virtue.”⁸⁴ The abolition of the Medical Academy in the capital in 1120 marked the diminishment of the endeavor.⁸⁵

Two other policies that Kou Zongshi did not mention but were relevant to his submission of Elucidating the Meaning merit our attention here. One concerns the government’s reaction when receiving unsolicited medical treatises during Huizong’s reign. In 1111, Zhu Gong (fl. ca. 11th century, jinshi 1088?), a retired civil official, sent his son to submit his formulary, One Hundred Questions on Cold Damage (Shanghan baiwen), to the court.⁸⁶ Its objective was to explicate the Treatise on Cold Damage. Like Jiayou Materia Medica, The Treatise on Cold Damage was printed by the court in the eleventh century and served as a textbook for students in medical academies under Huizong’s reign. Zhu perfectly fit the government’s policy of recruiting scholar-physicians to participate in medical academies. The court named Zhu the “erudite master of the medical academy” (yixue boshi) in 1114. Zhu’s return to officialdom (even though as a medical official) set the precedent for submitting medical treatises as a means of climbing the bureaucratic ladder.⁸⁷ This was an important element in the backdrop to Kou’s submission of Elucidating the Meaning.

Another policy that was relevant to Kou’s submission involved an “imperially brushed” (yubi) edict in 1114 that allowed individuals to “report and submit” “marvelous medical formulas and decent healing techniques” (qifang shanshu) to officials in their prefectures so as to pass them on to the court.⁸⁸ An imperially brushed directive was directly issued by the emperor to the agencies involved. During Huizong’s reign, such directives were not only issued more frequently than in earlier Song courts, but they were also written in “slender gold” (shoujin), a distinctive style of calligraphy created by Huizong. The higher frequency of directives and the unique style of calligraphy helped extend and highlight the presence of the emperorship in the operation of government business.⁸⁹ The imperially brushed edict of 1114 manifested Huizong’s determination to assemble remedies and healing techniques across China as comprehensively as possible. Although pharmacological collections did not directly fall within the parameter of the texts to be assembled, the edict nevertheless reiterated the government’s openness to receiving unsolicited medical works.

Returning to the first chapter in Elucidating the Meaning, after praising medical policies under earlier Song emperors and Huizong, Kou Zongshi took up critiquing the compliers of Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica. The weight of Kou’s criticism was proportional to the significance of these titles in Song medical education. The Song court had treated the compilation of the two pharmacological encyclopedias seriously, having issued an edict in 1058 calling for the collection of information regarding medicinal substances that originated across and beyond China. The edict ordered each circuit, prefecture, and district not only to report the locations where their indigenous medicinal substances originated but also to submit information on and illustrations of them. With respect to medicinal substances that originated in foreign lands, it was up to local governors to assign someone to interview merchants in official border markets and seaborne traders and to submit one or two specimens of each foreign substance to the capital. On the basis of all of the information, illustrations, and specimens collected from localities at great effort, Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica were compiled.⁹⁰ The former then served as the textbook for all students in medical academies from as early as 1103.⁹¹ The government’s expansion of medical education from the capital across the prefectures in 1115 rapidly multiplied the number of its readers.

In spite of the thorough process through which Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica were compiled, Kou Zongshi harshly criticized them. He commented that the compilers of the two pharmacological encyclopedias primarily expressed their personal opinions and failed to consult other authors or compare their own work with theirs; as a result, medical “learners” (xuezhe) were not able to consult the two sources “without confusion” (wuhuo).⁹²

Kou then shifted the narrative focus to the advantages of his own work over medical learning:

I have now examined the statements of numerous authors and compared them with the facts. With regard to statements that do not elaborate the coherence [jueli] of a healing substance, I have elucidated them to establish that they meet the criteria of coherence, as in the case of [1] soil made of eastward walls, [2] water not flowing downward, and [3] winter ashes. With regard to those where meanings are hidden and evasive and are not easily discerned, I have expanded on them to expose their conditions [qing], as in the case of [4] water passing beneath chrysanthemum flowers that becomes aromatic and in the case of [5] the mole’s essence of urine that drops onto the earth and thereby engenders offspring. With regard to those which are mistaken and omitted in characters and manuscripts, I have proven this by means of clarifying their meanings, as in the case of [6] jade spring water and [7] stone honey. As far as the name of some drugs that had been changed to avoid mentioning the names of emperors are concerned, I have traced them back to the original source to preserve their names, as in the case of [8] yam [shanyao, literally, “mountain drugs”], whose character falls under a taboo of the present dynasty; during the Tang period, the name of Emperor Daizong was banned. Thereby I have rendered the right and wrong to become one; therapies have a basis; in the moment when medical learners consulted and applied pharmacological collections, they are enlightened without confusion.⁹³

By listing four types of corrections to the Jiayou Materia Medica textbook, and by helping medical students consult pharmacological collections without confusion, Kou demonstrated the potential and pragmatic usefulness of his dedication to expanding government-sponsored medical education in his day. He concluded the first section of the first chapter with a declaration that the creation of Elucidating the Meaning was offered to “match our sage dynasty’s virtue of loving life.”

It is noteworthy that, in the proceeding quotation, Kou offers no novel term or expression to characterize his findings that he gained through his empirical investigations. Instead, he invested ink to describe his corrections to Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica. The descriptive nature of Kou’s view of empirical knowledge echoed Shen Kuo’s rich description of his findings in Brush Talks. The high proportion of entries using the empirical strategy occupy the eight entry examples in this quotation. Of these, two refer to entries employing the empirical strategy (the fourth and sixth examples). This attests to Kou’s emphasis on his empirical verification.

After advertising the advantages of his Elucidating the Meaning, Kou declared that the classifications of drug entries in his work all followed Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica.⁹⁴ He did not further explain the rationale for duplicating the classifications. One advantage of the duplication may be that it allowed medical learners to conveniently compare differences between drug entries in Elucidating the Meaning and those in the two Song court–compiled pharmacological encyclopedias.

Kou submitted Elucidating the Meaning to the Department of State Affairs (Shangshu Sheng) in 1116. The central government soon reviewed it. The manual was then sent to the Imperial Medical Academy (Taiyi Xue). The erudite master there, Li Kang, examined it, commenting that Elucidating the Meaning “is indeed a book whose author studied hard. Its meaning could be adopted.” In February 1117, an imperial decree ordered the promotion of Kou Zongshi to the next higher official rank and assigned him an additional administrative task: examining the quality and authenticity of medicinal substances purchased by the central government, at the Institute for Collecting and Purchasing Drugs (Shoumai Yaocaisuo), an institution established in Kaifeng during the Chongning reign (1102–1106).⁹⁵ The new assignment moved Kou from the remote Li Prefecture to the prosperous Song capital. Li Kang’s comments and Kou’s new administrative assignment both indicate the Song court’s recognition of the pharmacological value of Elucidating the Meaning and Kou’s expertise in pharmacology.

State recognition was, nonetheless, far from demonstrating that Huizong’s government aimed to advocate for the application of the empirical strategy in medical treatises. In fact, the government paid much more attention to a pharmacological encyclopedia that differed considerably from Elucidating the Meaning. It relied heavily on textual testimony and lacked argumentation. This heightened attention may imply that the government (or Huizong) preferred pharmacological collections based on textual testimony over those based on the empirical strategy. The original version of that encyclopedia was titled Materia Medica Validated and Classified from the Classics and Histories for Emergency Preparedness (Jingshi zhenglei beiji bencao, hereafter Validated and Classified). Its author, Tang Shenwei, was a famous physician in Sichuan and compiled his encyclopedia sometime between 1080 and 1094. Its aim was to revise Jiayou Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica, the same objective as that of Elucidating the Meaning. As a renowned physician with numerous clients, Tang was assumed to have accumulated a vast storehouse of pharmacological knowledge from his healing encounters. In contrast, however, to Kou Zongshi, who documented his empirical investigations and medical cases, Tang rested the knowledge claims in his work predominantly on textual evidence, as noted in the title of his encyclopedia.

The scope of Tang’s textual references actually went far beyond classics and historiographies, extending to Daoist and Buddhist works, medical genres, and literary works, including as many as 220 titles.⁹⁶ The sheer number and wide range of the references are owed in part to Tang’s “reimbursement” from his literate patients. In exchange for his medical services, Tang requested that they give him not money but pieces of writing that contained information about medical formulas or medicinal substances. It is likely that these pieces formed the main body of Tang’s textual references.⁹⁷

In addition to citing textual references as its central persuasion strategy, the information-management style in Validated and Classified likewise differs markedly from Elucidating the Meaning. Entries in Validated and Classified perfectly follow the typical format of introducing medicinal substances by referring to their flavors, qualities, main indications, and so forth. When juxtaposing separate textual sources under a given item, Tang rarely judged which sources were more accurate. This reluctance to judge indicates that he did not aim to provide accurate pharmacological information about individual medicinal substances. The absence of argumentation in Validated and Classified meanwhile obscures the presence and epistemic authority of Tang as its author. All of these features—preferred persuasion strategies, the information- management style, the attention to accuracy, and the visibility of authors’ epistemic authority—contrast starkly with Elucidating the Meaning.

Later, Song officials and the court edited and expanded Tang’s work. Ai Sheng (fl. 11th century), a “defender of the subprefecture” (xianwei) in Renhe County in Hang Prefecture (in Hangzhou city), noticed Tang’s work and expanded on it by adding Chen Cheng’s Expanded Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica and Illustrated Materia Medica. Ai entitled this extended version Materia Medica Validated and Classified from the Classics and Histories of the Daguan Reign (Jingshi zhenglei daguan bencao, hereafter Daguan Materia Medica), printing it in 1108.⁹⁸ Eight years later, Huizong commissioned his favorite medical official, Cao Xiaozhong, to edit Daguan Materia Medica.⁹⁹ Cao accomplished the editing project in one month and submitted the book in 1116 under a new title, Materia Medica Validated and Classified from the Classics and Histories for Practices, Newly Edited in the Zhenghe Reign (Zhenghe xinxiu jingshi zhenglei beiyong bencao, hereafter Zhenghe Materia Medica). The editing project that involved Zhenghe Materia Medica suggested greater imperial appreciation of this pharmacological work than of Elucidating the Meaning. The Song empire fell in 1127 to its northern invaders, the Jurchen, who confiscated almost all the woodblocks with which books that were stored in the court were printed, in all likelihood including those for Zhenghe Materia Medica, which thereby did not stand a chance of being printed or circulating in the newly reconstituted Southern Song China.

For its part, Elucidating the Meaning was printed at least four times during the Southern Song era. The Fiscal Commission in Longxing Fu (in Nanchang) printed it in 1185, revising and reprinting it in 1195.¹⁰⁰ A private publisher in Fujian also printed Elucidating the Meaning, presumably in pursuit of financial gain.¹⁰¹ The commercial publisher in Jianyang (in northern Fujian), “Yu Yanguo from the Hall of Encouraging Scholarly Worthies” (Yu Yanguo Lixian Tang, hereafter Yu Yanguo), integrated Elucidating the Meaning with Daguan Materia Medica, titling the new version Newly Compiled and Edited Materia Medica with Illustrations and Commentaries (Xinbian zhenglei tuzhu bencao) and printing it sometime between 1208 and 1241.¹⁰² (Jianyang, by the way, had been one of the most significant centers of printing and the book trade in imperial China since the Song dynasty.¹⁰³) Yu Yanguo abridged the contents of the two pharmacological texts and inserted the contents of drug entries from Elucidating the Meaning into corresponding drug entries in Daguan Materia Medica. This mode of integration renders Elucidating the Meaning one of many layers of commentaries involving drug entries in Daguan Materia Medica (fig. 2). This combined and abbreviated version not only allowed readers to consult the two texts at once but also made it more affordable when compared with the cost of purchasing complete versions of both Elucidating the Meaning and Daguan Materia Medica. These advantages may have facilitated sales of this version, subsequently expanding the circulation of Elucidating the Meaning.

DEPARTING FROM HIS PREDECESSORS, Kou Zongshi spurned typical formats for introducing medicinal substances that were established in pharmacological collections. Instead, he devoted many entries to argumentation, incorporating his medical cases and local investigations into Elucidating the Meaning. These features of his work bear similarities to some notebooks from the late Tang period and travel accounts under the Song. Beginning in the late ninth century, a growing number of scholar-officials began documenting their own investigations into regional phenomena about which they had read or heard, including information regarding medicinal substances. This intellectual legacy of the late Tang and Five Dynasties eras survived into the Song era and further thrived. By the late eleventh century, authors’ investigations alone provided sufficient support for their criticism of conventional understandings of certain regional phenomena. Their enhanced evidential value that this reflects appeared in both notebooks and travel accounts from the Song era. Meanwhile, the rising number of notebook-style writings since the mid-eleventh century meant that conveying knowledge in such informal styles became an increasingly acceptable option. This trend—the rising persuasive power of local investigations and the greater acceptability of informality—laid the foundation not only of Kou’s reliance on empirical strategy but also of his confidence in criticizing court-commissioned pharmacological encyclopedias and submitting Elucidating the Meaning to Huizong’s government. Findings yielded by Kou’s method of empirical verification served as supporting evidence of the improvement that his work brought to pharmacological knowledge. After submitting his work, Kou received an administrative assignment in the capital, reflecting state recognition of his efforts.

Many Southern Song literary and medical works cited and mentioned Elucidating the Meaning. The first formulary devoted to treating women, Comprehensive Good Medical Formulas for Women (Furen daquan liangfang, 1237), records the medical case and formula for lamb soup that opens this chapter.¹⁰⁴ Authors of Southern Song notebooks, when discussing medicinal substances and plants, often drew on entries from Elucidating the Meaning.¹⁰⁵ The famous Song-dynasty bibliographer Chen Zhensun, in his bibliographical treatise Zhizhai’s Annotated Catalog, openly praises the “evidence drawing, discernment, and validation” in Elucidating the Meaning and argues that it “richly deserved to be read and adopted.” In contrast, Chen commented unfavorably on Edited Materia Medica in the Shaoxing Regime (Shaoxing jiaoding bencao, 1159), a pharmacological encyclopedia that the Southern Song court compiled. Chen said that its language was vulgar and its statements were rather commonplace.¹⁰⁶ This contrast exemplifies Southern Song authors’ approval of Elucidating the Meaning.

The Song development of documenting contemporary experience into pharmacological collections furthermore enhances our understanding of the long-term trajectory of the empirical strategy in this genre, helping us to identify two remarkable differences that characterized the application of this persuasion strategy between the Song and early Qing periods. The first is the growing frequency of names of ordinary people who contributed their materia medica knowledge to a pharmacological collection author. The Tang and Song authors discussed in this chapter did not record names of the people they asked about medicinal substances. “Local folks” are the only title the informants enjoyed. In contrast, Zhao Xuemin (fl. 1753–1803), a sojourning private secretary, in his Supplement to Systematic Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu shiyi), recorded names of persons in lowbrow circles from whom he learned about medicinal substances.¹⁰⁷ The second feature is the wider geographical scope of information and material exchange via letters between pharmacological collection authors staying and traveling across the Qing empire and their informants. Although Song literati often exchanged goods and gifts via letters, they rarely used them as means of gaining new pharmacological information. Instead, as shown in this chapter, the Song authors preferred “field study.”

Interestingly, although Shen Kuo and Kou Zhongshi had included ample medical cases in their treatises, the civil official and physician Xu Shuwei, in the mid-twelfth century, still claimed his treatise as the pioneering formulary appending medical formulas to cases. The claim and Xu’s treatise are the subject of the next chapter.