In Our Time - Li Shizhen

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of Li Shizhen (1518-1593) whose compendium of natural medicines is celebrated in China as the most complete survey of natural remedies of its time. He trained as a doctor and worked at the Ming court before spending almost 30 years travelling in China, inspecting local plants and animals for their properties, trying them out on himself and then describing his findings in his Compendium of Materia Medica or Bencao Gangmu, in 53 volumes. He's been called the uncrowned king of Chinese naturalists, and became a scientific hero in the 20th century after the revolution.With Craig Clunas Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at the University of OxfordAnne Gerritsen Professor in History at the University of WarwickAnd Roel Sterckx Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in China, the name of Li Shu-Jun, 1518 to 1593, is as famous as Isaac Newton's name is here. He was a medical doctor, and he scarred his country for thousands of natural remedies

for almost 30 years, classifying them, compiling them into a great work of two million characters. His compendium set a standard for centuries, and even as modern medicine was spreading after the revolution, Mao celebrated him as the learned, barefoot doctor offering treatment from door to door, an example to others from the age of the Ming. We made to discuss Li Shu Juhn are Rul Sturkes,

Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History at the University of Cambridge, Anna Gerritsen, Professor in History at the University of Warwick, and Craig Clunis, Professor Emeritus in the History of Art, at the University of Oxford. Craig Coonis, what was the Ming Empire? So the Ming Empire is the period of Chinese history from 1368 to 1644. So if we're thinking of that in terms of British history, you can think about the black death to the civil wars. It's the period of Chinese history that comes immediately after the Mongol hegemony, when China is part of the vast Eurasian empire

formed by Jenghis Khan and his descendants from Mongolia and it's a period when the Han majority, that is the Chinese people themselves, took back the control over the empire from the Mongols, and the Ming was founded by a man called Zhu Yuan Jiang, who had come from very, very humble beginnings,

but created this very long-lasting, dynasty, which at the time, at its height in the 16th century and during Leesha Jun's lifetime, was the largest single state on the planet at that time and probably the largest single state that the planet had ever seen. And its populations, I understand it, from your notes, it was more than the population of Europe and the Ottoman Empire combined. Yes, it had a population of about 150 million, which is the same. So, in a way, rather than thinking about a country, it's helpful to think about a country.

continent. China is on a continental scale. And so the distances from one side to the other, the population and the density of population in the most populous parts of the empire in the lower Yangtze Valley, very much analogous to the whole of Europe plus the Ottoman Empire, including the Ottoman Empire at that time. How outward looking was it? Well, it used to be thought that it was very much a place where they pushed the Mongols out and pulled the shutters down. That used to be the image of the Ming, but much more recent scholarship sees the Ming as being much more widely connected, both with the rest of Eurasia, so with the Islamic world, a Timorid empire in what's now Persia and Afghanistan, but also, of course, through in

the very early Ming, the sending out of these great imperial voyages into the Indian Ocean. So the Ming was not the shuttered, closed-off empire. that used to be thought it was much more engaged with the rest of the world. If it were possible to characterize what the Ming Empire stood for, a big ask, how would you do that? Well, of course, it was, it very much saw itself as part of a long tradition of imperial rule. So the elites that rule in the Ming Empire are very much thinking of themselves as an instance of the kind of ideologically, state that has been going on in China for thousands and thousands of years. So there's a great consciousness of that history.

And also a great consciousness of themselves is in some sense a centre of civilization. They're conscious that there are other civilizations. But the idea that the world revolves around us is very much part of the way the elites think. Now, of course, most of what we know about the Ming is from what the literate minority thought, what ordinary people out in the fields? thought is much harder to know. This massive empire, how closely was it controlled from what we're not called

Beijing? Yes, well, there's a Chinese proverb which existed in the Ming period which goes, heaven is high and the emperor is far away, which means that, you know, out here we're doing our own thing. So, and it's kind of interesting that the Ming

had this population of 150 million, but it's divided into only about 1,300 counties. So actually the chances of the average peasant ever seeing an official of the imperial government are quite slight. So the Ming Empire is not held together from the top down. It's also held together by a shared consciousness of a cultural heritage, a language, a set of texts. There are all kinds of things that hold it together. And certainly there are lots of things going on out there that the court in Beijing knows nothing about. But the most people,

Is there no sort of military control, police, as we would use the word, police control of holding it together? Oh, yes, yes, yes. I mean, the state will come down on you like a ton of bricks if there's any kind of organised resistance. But also a lot of the control at the local level is, if you like, subcontracted by the state to the landlord class, to the gentry, as they're sometimes called, who own the land, who run the land, and who, by dint of their education, are part of an empire-wide idea. They're an imagined community, if you like. Thank you very much, Anna Gerritsen.

Who was Lee Schojean? An extraordinary man, by all accounts. So he was born in the provinces. So many of the illustrious figures of the Ming that we know about were born or were part of the imperial state. He was a provincial figure. Born in Hubei, in 1518, as you say, in a family of medics. So he had a grandfather who was a medic. He had a father who was a medic.

Quite a difference between what kind of doctors they were, but there was the hope that Liechogen would become a scholar, that he would pass the examinations and would become part of the imperial bureaucracy. So he spent his time studying. Why was it so important to be a scholar? Status has been mentioned, I think. status was enormously important. Can you just dwell on that for a moment? So yes, absolutely. So the scholars were the people who were literate and who had mastered the body of texts associated with Confucianism.

And if they were lucky, had passed the exams. I mean, it was a vast minority. But if they passed the examinations, they would then be admitted to this high bureaucratic class, the group of people who led this state. the people who were appointed to administrative office, both in the capital and in the provinces. And if you were lucky enough to pass those exams, and if you were successful in passing into that career straight, then you had enormous status. So this was a desirable for most of the literate population. But as I understand it, Li Xiong, sat them three times, got through the first lot, sat the second lot three times. Is that the second lot three times, failed three times to our benefit? To our benefit, exactly, because after he had failed comprehensively three times,

he decided to change outlook and to dedicate his life to becoming a doctor. So he became an apprentice of his father. He started to study instead of the general Confucian texts, to focus on medical texts and to read everything that came within his reach, and then devoted his life to this compilation that we already mentioned before. So, any reason, he went on to be such a brilliant intellectual, brilliant scholar? Any reason why he was 17 years old? Any reason we know of that he didn't pass that exam?

Well, it is a very particular kind of examination that tests a certain kind of knowledge and reproducing information and writing in a certain style. And the percentages that passed are so small that it can be no reflection on anyone's intelligence, more perhaps to do with his, either his, in fact, so intelligent that learning that kind of material may have been somewhat restrictive to him, but also ill health. So we have some evidence that he was struggling with ill health. He had problems with his eyesight. So he wasn't a well man. And I think for whatever reason, the examinations didn't suit him. It wasn't for him. What was the status of a doctor then? Status changed quite a bit, so a doctor didn't always mean the same thing.

So his grandfather was quite a humble kind of doctor, basically a peddler of medicines. He traveled. He was an itinerant. He had to offer his treatment and his medicines to anyone who wanted to take them from him. And he had therefore a fairly low status precisely because he was an itinerant figure. But his father made the transition into this scholarly world. So he mastered the texts. he became more of a scholarly doctor and because of the high reputation of textual tradition,

that meant he had a far higher status as a doctor and that is certainly the kind of doctor that Li Shajan became. Thank you, Rul Sturks. What would me have been the prevailing idea about the relationship between human beings and the natural world? Well, in pre-modern China, people generally had a very organic view of the world around him. So one overarching idea was that everything,

around us is interconnected, interdependent, and networked together. And that in other words, rather than thinking of the natural world as that bit of the world around us, that's untouched by humans, the Chinese planted human beings right in the middle of it. Now, a second main underlying idea there is that therefore in order to understand the natural world, rather than trying to identify biophysically what things are, it is much more important to try to and explain how things relate to each other. So describe the relationship of various beings, objects, plants, animals with each other. A second underlying idea was that everything around us in the natural world is constantly subject to change. The only certainty we have, ironically,

about what happens around us is that things are constantly changing. And so everything is subject to transformations, to metamorphosis. And so the, I suppose, the sage or the observation observer or the scholar needs to put his finger on explaining why changes happen and how they happen. Now, to do that, you need a conceptual toolbox and the Chinese developed that, you know, over the century. One is to think of everything in the world is consisting of complementary opposites. You know, the Chinese call it yin and yang, you know, the shadowy side of a hill versus the sunny side of a hill so that you can think of things in terms of hot, cold, high, low, black, white and so on. That's one toolbox they had.

A second model that was applied to the understanding of the natural world was the idea that everything somehow can be classified into a group of five or following a sequence of five phases. These were natural elements identified as early as the fourth century BC, fire, wood, metal, earth. And I left one out here, water, I think. And so the whole purpose of it is basically to just describe the pattern of change and describe ways of sequencing of how things follow on from each other.

The result of that is that, you know, for the right or the wrong reasons, people who categorize nature in pre-modern China seem to be always impelled to have to do this in groups of five and categories of five. And a final not insignificant feature really about the way in which the Chinese and pre-modern China handled nature or saw that relationship is that they used a language which drew substantially on figurative language. They used analogies to talk about nature, comparisons, metaphors, rather than a highly technical sort of language.

And that sometimes sticks getting used to. We know that he read immensely and that he corrected, included and corrected a lot of previous works in his own spectacularly colossal work. At that time, was there more of a premium on preserving tradition than going out and finding new stuff? Well, preserving tradition has always been a very important thing on the sort of intellectual menu of any scholar or any literators.

And certainly in the Ming, too, the idea that you collect knowledge from the past and that you play out opinions from previous text against your own ideas, that was certainly a very prevalent way of looking at it. Lee Shajan, however, did more than simply that. He did more than simply looking at past traditions, at, you know, text from the past. He actually went out and experimented. And so he... What sort of experiments?

He was interested in touching the objects, in touching the plants, the animals, the stones, the rocks, the jakes. He was describing... He is known to have done dissections, a moment. notable one is that he's elected to have dissected a pangolin because he was curious to he was curious about the quantity of ants he might find in the stomach of a pangolin and so he certainly went out to do that we know that he dissected snakes for example so there was a scholar who on the one hand operated in a textual universe trying to explain information by going back to text that came before him but at the other

hand he was also somebody who was out there and actually almost sends the world himself, you know, like by, by travelling around and experimenting with things. Thank you very much. Craig Clunis, can we get an idea of this man now? He's come into the middle of the programme. Is he wandering around? Is he, how much we say going all over China, goodness me, what does that mean? And so on.

Just what's he like and what's he at in those 30 years when he's collecting material? After his initial training as a doctor as his father, we know that he worked briefly at the regional court of an aristocrat in his native province in Hubei. So this is a relative of the emperor, a minor member of the imperial family. And this man would have a court. He would have professional doctors. And Leisurejohn is believed to have worked as one of these doctors. That would presumably have given him access to a library,

which was an important part of putting together his work. We believe also that he spent some time in the imperialist, medical college in Beijing. There's a great court apparatus of physicians to look after the emperor and his immediate family. So he's had experience there. We also know from the people that he knew that he's moving up the social scale because when he writes poetry, for example, which is the thing that educated people are supposed to do. And he knows people who know some of the most important poets and intellectuals of the Ming period. So although he comes from this relatively modest provincial background,

he certainly quite rapidly moves up the social scale, and therefore by the time that he's finishing this great compendium of medical and botanical information, he's not an isolated or a remote figure, I think. Was there a tradition of gathering masses of information and putting it together? Was he in that tradition of gathering in Norse- He was, and indeed the kind of medical, pharmaceutical, botanical text that he's doing

is a very long tradition in China. These so-called Bunzhao, which means something like basic herbs, texts, go back a very long way. But interestingly, they had almost always been put together by large teams, and they'd been put together by large teams under at direct imperial orders. What's original and different and unusual about Leish O'N is that he purely as a personal and private project sets out to write one of these compendia

and to write one that is larger and more comprehensive and more rigorous and more accurate than all the ones which came before it. Does he go to places that previous scholars haven't reached? Well, we don't really know everywhere that he went. I don't mean literally... I don't mean it's in geographical places. I mean, he went into areas of study. Yes, he certainly does.

The book itself has a vast bibliography. What it begins with is a huge account of these are all the books I read. And he boasts that a very large proportion of these books are books which have never before been used. And what's interesting is that a lot, he draws a lot of medical information from non-medical texts. So he doesn't just look at the existing medical text. He reads a lot of poise.

and he reads religious texts and he reads historical texts. So he's clearly omnivorously gathering what you might call medical, pharmaceutical, botanical information from a range of texts which aren't predominantly about that. And he also draws on the idea of food being part of this study. Yes, but that was entirely to be expected. So food and medicine... Had this been done before?

Yes, yes, because the substances that people consumed for medical purposes and the food, the dietary practices that they maintained were a very closed network. So they were used, dietary practices were used for health reasons and medical substances were taken in combination with certain foods. So that distinction between food and drugs or medicines doesn't exist in the same way.

It's part of an entire complex of substances that for Alicia Jen were part of a wholesome treatment of the human body. There are big figures relating to how many plant seed. Can you give us some of the figures in this book, 11,000 of this and this? Can we just swing a few statistics around the studio? Everybody else is doing it. We'll do it quickly get it over with. Right.

So the book, the big volumes that he puts together are 52 separate chapters in that or volumes. Within that there are about 60 subcategories that are again divided into, I think, 1,892 separate substances that are described. And then each of those have numerous different applications and descriptions. That comes up to about 11,000 different remedies that are included in this volume. And there are other things in it besides the remedies, aren't that? Huge numbers of information background on where the plants grew, what other texts have been written about the substance, how errors were included, what kind of stories were in circulation,

quite structured, so these were following certain kind of secret. But the attempt was to be as comprehensive for each of these substances, which is how you get from 1,892 individual substances to 11,000 different remedies. So a huge amount of information for each of these plants and other, herbal plants but also body elements, animal products, all kinds of things were included. It's a survey of the entire natural world. Ruel, was his compilation, richer, thicker, bigger than anything that had gone before? I think it was in the sense that, at least if we follow his own claim, he said he adds at

he's 350 or something drugs that he's never found in any of the previous literature. So he clearly does add new information and he feels he's adding new information. But he doesn't necessarily always does this,

do this, in a sort of a, in a medical context. Sometimes he adds information that has little medical relevance. For example, he talks about crickets because people fight them and people play with them, not because they have a medicinal use.

Other times, he will talk about local folklore. He will go at length into the discussions of how a certain thing is named, because of course, naming plants, naming animals and linking them to particular localities is very problematic.

Very often we do not name what the, we do not know what a particular name stands for. So, sorting out these names is a very sort of confusion concept as well, sort of making sure that you control whatever whatever substance you're dealing with by giving you the name seems to be very important

for him. Sorry, up to you. If you look at a lemma, if you look at an entry now in the text, you can follow the man's pattern of thought almost from the beginning to the end. He will name the thing. Then he will offer a discussion as to what the other names are,

what he's found in other text about it. Then he will add a section which he calls something like combined interpretations in which he goes through every single text that he's read

listed together and then he moves on to how to make a recipe from this particular drug what is it what's it's working and then finally what are the symptoms

the illness symptoms that might be treated by it and sometimes he will readily admit well I've read this I've read that I'm not quite sure you know

about the origins of this but my conclusion is that you know it possibly could be used for that particular purpose. Craig, Clunis, is he always drawing towards a recipe and medicine that would cure people? Is it the basic idea of being a doctor run through this work of scholarship? I think it does.

I mean, it's, but it, but it, it does extend beyond that. It is, it is a work of erudition about the natural world, always remembering, as Rawls says, that the natural world is not something that is separate from human, So in a way, it is always, the knowledge is always applied knowledge. It's always for something. I don't think there's a sense there of just knowing it for the sake of knowing it. There is a sense that this has a benefit and that it's going to be a benefit to people. And so the medical thing, yes, I don't think he ever forgets that.

Do we have any evidence that these treatments, these new, I think we said over 300 years, that they were trying on people, that they worked? He talks about trying certain things on himself. And of course, the popularity of his book, it goes through eight editions throughout the 17th century, suggests that both what you might call the medical establishment and just people who bought books more generally felt that this was a book they wanted to have.

To cure an infection or that was useful. So yes, I think, I don't think, I don't think, I think that applied or practical side of it is very much part of the book's reception, at least. Do you draw on information and knowledge outside China? He's very conscious that some things come from abroad. So, for example, he writes about almonds, and he says, this is a Persian thing, and he gives them, and he knows that they have a Persian name, he quotes the name from West New Asia. But also, interestingly, he's working.

at the time of one of the great first globalisations of botanical material when material from the New World is first becoming available. So although he's not the first person in China to write about maize, he describes maize, he talks about pumpkins, which come from the New World, a sweet potato. These are all foodstuffs. And as Anna said, there's not a difference between food and medicine for him. So he's very conscious that these are things that have just appeared

on the scene that don't exist in the earlier text. And he's certainly aware of them and of other things as having in some way an origin that is outside the boundaries of the Ming Empire or at the farthest edges of human existence. Anna, Anna, Gheison, can we just have a few more examples of these treatments? I'm sure the listeners would know he did this and therefore you could be cured or may be cured by that. Is that possible? Sure, there are some wonderful ones.

I was thinking of one that is applied for someone who wants to become more intelligent, something we might all be quite interested in. And what he suggests to do is to take one-tenth of ginseng, the ginseng root, and nine-tenth you add pigs, lard, and well-old wine, well-stored wine. And you make a drink out of this, and you have a small cup in the morning and a small cup in the evening, and you do this for 100 days. And if you do that, then you will have better eyesight, stronger hearing, your bones will be strengthened, your skin will be radiant,

all the kind of things that, of course, everyone would be terribly interested in, but including a kind of wholesome sense of what it is to be intelligent. Is it, did it work? I think it did. I think that those centuries of people using ginseng to improve their general health and focus, I think it's not for nothing that it's still all over the shelves, even in small town England too. Have you got another treatment that you can delight us with?

So he talks, for example, about how to... I mean, not all of them you were asking before about whether everything is focused on becoming better. There's also information about toxins, for example. And arsenic, which was widely available at the time, could be used added to some urine or ground up bugs and used as a poison, or it could be used as an insecticide or as a fumigation. So he often had numerous different applications,

which for us seem quite wide-ranging, not necessarily all health improving. How did he classify all this information? He uses various systems. He classifies drugs. drugs according to... Have you tried any of these drugs? I have... We have experimented with some of the recipes, you know, some years ago

in a workshop, but it's not very easy to get hold of all of them and the idea of... Did they work? Well, I mean, introducing Rappoo into a classroom at a university is problematic, but, you know, that's one of the ingredients that he did did use.

But he classifies, you know, according to the five elements, he classifies, he puts things together according to various models. based on the flavor, based on where he's found something, based on how things reproduce, based on how they sound. And interestingly, he goes through these 52 chapters, and the final chapter is about human beings.

Because, of course, the logical consequence of seeing human beings as part of nature should be that, of course, bodily parts of humans might have a pharmaceutical or a therapeutical use. And there he, you know, he runs into trouble because on the one hand, he is very much, you know, okay with the use of things like hair and nail clippings and blood and even, even placenta as a medicine. But where he stops is the consumption of human flesh and human meat. And we do know from pharmacopoeia that preceded him that, you know, this, this was certainly not unheard of. So there is the confusion scholar all of a sudden sort of drawing the boundary between,

human beings and the rest of the world around him when it comes down to his recipes. But its main aim in all of these is basically to make the claim that in order to understand the natural history behind everything we see, we need to think about its use. So there is a practical orientation there behind it that in a way still survives. Today, I mean, the notion that animal means edible in the context of China is something that you see in a pharmacopoeia like this. So nothing is out of reach as long as you can classify it,

you know, as fitting a specific system. Great, great, Clunis. What was the demand for information in books like these or in need books like these? Well, there's a huge commercial book market in Ming China. Printing is an industry.

There are huge numbers of publishers. They're in violent competition with one another. There's plagiarism. There is, stealing one another's, there is fraudulent naming of famous people who've claimed to have written things. So there's clearly, there's a very large, even though only a minority of the population is literate, the population is so large that even that that small percentage is an absolutely large number, a number well into the millions. And so publishing is big business.

And one of the things that is big business is the publishing of, of encyclopedias. Now, this isn't really an encyclopedia because it has a particular focus, but the 16th century is a period in China when there's a great deal of publishing of encyclopedias, which are often about making previously elite information available to new kinds of readers, probably from merchant backgrounds who aren't maybe fully into the whole kind of Confucian classics things, but they want to know a little bit about medicine, a little bit about the arts, a little bit about religion, a little bit about the natural world.

So there's lots of encyclopedias being published. And when his book is finally published, in 1596, it's published just after he dies by his sons and grandsons. It's published by a commercial publisher who presumably believes that there's an audience out there who want to buy a book like this. Anna, Anna Gerardson,

How would this approach of his compared with that in the West at the time? It's a very tempting comparison. So if you put it, for example, next to 16th century Europe, there too is a huge interest in botany, in trying to classify the natural world, in trying to establish the authority of the ancients, but also testing the knowledge about medicine and about plants that had been transmitted from ancient scholarship

and applying it and investigating exactly its worth and adjusting it to accommodate a new world which included plants from new worlds. And using print technology to circulate that knowledge, to add new additions to illustrate the material. So, for example, a Flemish, almost contemporary of his dodoons produces the Krautbook in the middle of the 16th century, which has a comprehensive overview of plants

and medicinal knowledge and herbles, around the same sort of time. It's much smaller, it has far fewer entries, it has far fewer illustrations, but nonetheless, there is some sense in the challenge to knowledge from the past, the investigation of new materials that are arriving, the popularization of that knowledge

and distributing it to a world, wider public and the commercialization of these products that seem very tempting to compare. I mean, there are undoubtedly also differences and one could question whether comparison is really the thing to do because the temptation is always then to say, here's a European standard. And look, they were doing it too in China. In fact, you know, you could argue we should investigate him for his own worth and within his own particularly intellectual context. But there are tempting comparisons to make that suggests that.

that if we're thinking about what is changing in terms of science in the early modern world, we shouldn't just look at what's happening in Europe. We should also take account of these very significant contributions made by someone like Le Schojen. But it's also tempting to say, did ideas transfer from the West to the East in ways that we haven't really discovered yet? Well, the East to the West. Absolutely. So I think we continue to look for texts that have clarifications. and that show the smoking gun of those connections. What we know from Liya-Jen is that he was reading texts that certainly came medical compendia from the Middle East,

but also texts that included travelogs from people who'd been in the South China Sea or into the Indian Ocean and brought information about this with them. So I don't think we quite know that texts were exchanged, you know, with the whole text available within China from the 16th century Europe. We certainly know, don't we, that Christian missionaries in China in the 16th century were interested in buying these kinds of books, and there are accounts of them being shipped from China to the Philippines,

which that term was a Spanish colony, and some of these texts ending up in the library in the Escorial. So there's certainly an idea that Europeans at this period think that there may well be interesting forms of knowledge about the natural world which are available within the Chinese textual tradition. Was his book predominantly meant to be practical, rule?

Well, that's a very difficult question. I think, I mean, he's certainly meant to be certain elements of the book to be practical. It's hard to imagine, though, that, you know, all of it, you know, was practical. And one of the earliest criticisms the book gets, you know, as quickly as a century after its publication, is that,

It's not practical for several reasons. First of all, it's simply too big. It's too large an encyclopedia. It contains too much information that no individual physician could possibly absorb all of this and put it into practice. So that was one criticism. A second criticism of him was that, you know,

Liechten now and then tends to veer off into folklore or into details of very quint exotic ingredients in certain parts of the world that nobody would have heard of. it's certainly been presented then later on the 19th century early 20th century as a text that is practical and that is in various forms being taught

as part of a curriculum in traditional Chinese medicine and there has been a time especially during the 20th century that people have tried to identify or to associate biophysical even Linnaean taxonomy to the ingredients in his particular in Lysra Jens text in order to show a look at his scientific it works and so on.

But I tend to think of it sort of as a combination of both. That tend to think that for people who had an interest in medicine or had an interest in the natural world, having Lyshrgen, so to speak, in your study or on your bookshelf, would have been the equivalent of a scholar now who is interested in literature in the English language of having the collected works of Shakespeare on his shelf without necessarily, obviously, making direct connections all the time

between what one is doing and the text one is referring to. The Ming period is closed. It's the bright period, the brilliant period, in China history. How much did his reputation and his position add to that? Certainly in the 20th century, he becomes one of the sort of glories of the period. So after the founding of the people's, Republic. There's a great deal of attention paid him. So, for example, it's only in

1954 that scholars work out what his birth and death dates were. He's a known figure, but the exact dates have only worked out then. And then in 1955, he's on a postage stamp, and there's a biopic, a movie made about him in 1957 with a very famous actor in it. And a lot of this is constructing a usable past. I mean, we have no idea what Leisure John looked like. There are no contemporary pictures of him. We don't know. know if he was tall and thin or short and fat. But in a way, we all know what he looked like now because we're thinking about how he's portrayed in this film

and how he looks on the stamp. How do they make him look? Sort of thin and ascetic and kind of noble. Definitely noble. He's a heroic and a noble figure. And in the film, he's portrayed as heroically fighting against hide-bound feudal attitude. So he becomes, he becomes,

very much a precursor of the modern, heroic, self-effacing, but serving the people's scientist. Someone for Mao Zetong to lean on that? Absolutely, yes, yes. He becomes, his mythology becomes part of that. So, yes, so he becomes a usable past, because of course there are all sorts of bits of the Ming Dynasty that the People's Republic doesn't want to celebrate. You know, famous, people who were famous, but who were landlords or oppressive figures or seen as now as part of a feudal history we want to get rid of.

This is a history that can be celebrated and promoted and encouraged under the new regime. And even more recently in 2012, I believe, the text got heritage status, UNESCO heritage status, which was something the Chinese were very, you know, very proud about. In 2015, a Chinese pharmacologist gets a Nobel Prize and declares in Stockholm that, of course, traditional Chinese medicine and licogen is something that the whole world should be looking at more carefully. And the fame of liegean is not just established within China. This is also Korea and Japan already in the 17th century. The text spreads to Japan is translated there, is annotated, is illustrated,

is re-illustrated. So in Korea and in Japan, there's a venerable tradition of studying Leishajan's text and the fame of the Ming in a way spreads through those kind of well-established volumes of the Ming that were famous

in other collections too. Are any of the recipes or conclusions that it came to in his book still useful now? Or used now? Absolutely, yes. I mean, useful. It depends a little bit on where you're you stand on Chinese medicine.

But so for Mao, the interest was in trying to bring his, you know, this ideological vision of the barefoot doctors who go out in the villages and who gather remedies. It's an ordinary, you know, the ordinary doctor who gets elevated. And he created something that he called traditional Chinese medicine, which was really a communist invention, which captured the tradition. of medicine that was very common and very widespread and diffuse throughout China and turned it into something that was an official curriculum and that had official institutional accreditation, as it were.

But Chinese medicine is a very widely practiced range of approaches, of thinking about the body, about holistic healing. And those practices are extremely widespread still, and people claim to have huge benefit from it. So in Germany, for example, you can, trained to be, you can be trained in traditional Chinese medicine and establish yourself as a Chinese medic using this tradition. Thank you very much, Hannah Gerritsen, Ruth Sturkes and Craig Clunis. Next week, it's our listener week when we'll be discussing one of the many ideas

you suggested this autumn. It's to be revealed next Thursday and we hope to discuss more of these over the coming year. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. We didn't talk about the illustrations. Yeah, that was something I was thinking about when Craig was talking about commerce and print and then...

I mean, I went and looked at the first edition, I went and looked at a facsimile of the first edition, which is, you know, the first edition is really quite rare. And these are really rubbish illustrations. I mean, by the standards of being, and the text is too, the characters, the cutting of the

characters. It's not a super luxem. I mean, in terms of the range of Ming book production, that struck me a lot. But I thought that was also that so they did it in a rush in those three years after he died. They were carving them almost as he died. And I think it was pushed through

quickly and then the sons were the ones who decided they should have the illustration. And then it gets redone in the 17th century with much nicer illustrations and that's the version that everybody thinks about. But I was kind of shocked by how kind of scuzzy the Bustadish it is.

Yeah. And he said himself, you know, was not very confident of the use of illustrations. He actually didn't believe they could match, they could match the kind of information that you could transmit through text. And there's no evidence that he wanted those illustrations to accompany the text. He never mentions the illustrations. So the illustrations were not necessarily part of what he thought of as central to the book. And yet with hindsight, they become the thing that people always know. They're the thing that people conjure up and they think about the Bunzaa.

Is there any truth in the idea of him, anything like the barefoot doctor going around? Shaking him head is going on across the table. Is that evidence of it? I mean, he's sort of, he's not super posh, but he's not a man of, there's no evidence for this kind of man of the people thing. That comes from the movie and the kind of hagiographies of the, and the political propaganda. Of the 1950s, yes.

But I think he did gather information in different ways than people had done before. So he went well beyond the just the books on the shelf. And he was interested in talking to people that until then hadn't necessarily been considered a source of information. So that included other texts. But also people are very different daily, existing, daily professions. But that goes back to the very ancient Chinese idea that the people may be the recipient of sort of truth, like in the book of songs, which is one of the kind of very early Chinese classics. So, so he did, his field work is, is, is kind of, you know, he did go out

and talk to people and what do you call this thing here? What's the name you give it? You give it. So he was, he was interested in that, but he's not, he's not, I think, interested in, you know, he's not serving the people. And there's no way, I mean, we just don't, we just don't know. I mean, there are limits to what we know about. But it is extraordinary what he was able to get out of the books he had available to him. So we know that he had some travel records of people who had been right through Southeast Asia. But he also teased information out of volumes that didn't include the whole of the text, but fragments of this knowledge that must have come from travellers.

Because he never left the Ming regime. He never traveled outside. But he had information about, for example, the pepper plant and how the pepper plant, how it produces peppercorns and how the colours of the plant and the berry change, which only could have come from someone who would have seen the plant on the Malabar coast and had experience of seeing the process of that plant growing and being harvested, as opposed to the dry peppercorns that are always black and always, you know, the way they appeared in the market.

So he teased out information from sources, from people, from materials that no one had considered worthy of that kind of investigation before. And that's probably where he does differ a little bit from the image we have of the Chinese naturalist before him, who is a bookish scholar, who is somebody who doesn't open the window of his study, who is, you know, as one famous philosopher, you know, a few centuries earlier, who is somebody who's riding a horse while not knowing whether the horse one is riding as a mare or a stallion, because one is too engrossed, you know, in the books.

And Lisa Zend, you know, obviously is somebody who did come out of his study. and that's much more pronounced, I think, in his story than that of anybody who came before him, really. You were very coy about these treatments that you tasted. Do you want to give us a bit more of it? Well, there is another rather curious drug that he talks about, and he gets his information from an earlier text that talks about, you know, the southern seas, you know, his realm.

The sea is obviously another unexplored part of the world for him. And that's turtle sperm that has been vomited up by sharks, which was supposedly... Why did you get hold of that? Well, he admits that it is... Well, he says, I've heard it, is very curative. But he also admits freely there, I am sure that I will never get my hands on anything like this.

But he feels that these kind of pieces of knowledge... And we did toy with the idea. some of the very mainstream herbal remedies like Huang Lien or whatever I don't know even I don't know what that's called I mean that's very much part of you know I've been given that in hospital in China alongside you know for when I had a kind of

very bad stomach you know gastroids arthritis you know I had antibiotics and I had Wanglian and Wanglian is kind of famous in China because there's a proverb about it as being the most horrible tasting thing in the world and it really is the most horrible tasting horrible tasting thing at the world.

But, you know, I mean, what part it played in my recovery from this? I don't know. But it didn't seem a ridiculous thing to, that a herbal concoction as well as antibiotics would be a good thing to take. In that way of thinking about what you eat and what you drink and what temperature of the food is you eat, whether you have hot food or cold food. I mean, those things have their base in Chinese medicine, but they're very much part of how people think about what they eat. journey's culture.

Exactly. You can explain the working of the same drug from different perspectives and that's what Leisha Jen also does. He talks about cinnamon, cinnamon bark. And he actually talks about the flavor of it, he talks about the scent of it, using poetry, he talks about the medicinal

use of it, he talks about it being good for treating swellings in the groin, and then he talks about it being a good condiment. And then the reader is sort of meant to think of cinnamon is something which is both tasty, also is medicinally very efficient

and is actually something that is fragrant. I wouldn't recommend though his recipes his anesthetics. They seem to be a little bit far-fetched. I mean, it's what's saying that we know that he wrote a whole load of books before he wrote this about pulse diagnosis. This is clearly the medical tradition

that his father specialised in. So an important part of diagnosis, in Chinese medicine is feeling the pulse not just once, but in different parts of the body and comparing the strength of the pulse in different areas and so on. So he'd written a number of books on this topic which don't survive. These books are lost now. We just have their titles, and their titles

mean that they must have been about this pulse diagnosis. So it's not just about his grasp of the human body and so on is also to do with other aspects of Chinese medicine. of which that was the bit he specialised in this pulse taking. And in a way not very new. I mean, if you look at the models of illness, pathology, much of what he has to say builds on, you know, what was there 1,500 years earlier.

The idea that, you know, illness comes either from the inside, you know, it's a disbalance of the body, or it's an external factor, you know, wind or even demonic influences. So that whole aspect is still there. So he doesn't give you a medical theory, but what he does is he instead suggests, well, anything we see around us has medical, has potentially medical usage. And that's how he tries to.

I don't think he feels that he is theoretically innovating grand theories of the body and communicating with sort of high medicine. Well, I was going to say, but things did change during his time in the use of Pepper, for example, which was very common in the north. and he attributed his eyesight problems to that. So he advocated using less pepper, and it was part of a sort of culinary shift of people moving away from very spiced hot food

to more neutral and bland flavours. I think we're about to be offered something from the producers, Simon Tellison. Can we treat you to some tea or coffee or tree with it? Tea with that. Tea, a coffee would be placed. If you have coffee and I would have tea. Tea, please. Three teas and coffee.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, everybody. I'm Caitlin Jenner, and I am a guest on Simon Mondays Don't Tell Me the Score podcast. We talked about everything. The Olympics, trans issues, and all the lessons that I have learned along the way. I really enjoyed recording the podcast, and I hope you enjoy listening to it. You can hear it on BBC Sounds. Just search for Don't Tell Me the Score.