When a hundred books say a hundred different things about the same herb, who decides what's true?
After the Han, Chinese medicine grew like a great tree branching out.
During the Southern Qi and Liang dynasties, a remarkable man appeared – Tao Hongjing. He was a Daoist philosopher and a physician. He thought the Shennong Materia Medica was good but not enough. So he annotated it and added 365 new drugs, creating the Collected Annotations to the Materia Medica – effectively doubling the number of known drugs.
But a one‑man project can only go so far.
In the Tang dynasty, the imperial court stepped in. Emperor Gaozong ordered a state‑sponsored revision. In the end, Su Jing and his team compiled the Newly Revised Materia Medica, which listed 844 drugs, included illustrations, and was stamped with the emperor's seal for nationwide distribution.
This was the first official pharmacopoeia in Chinese history – nearly 900 years before Europe's earliest pharmacopoeia!
After that, every dynasty treated pharmacopoeia compilation as a major undertaking. Meng Chang, the Later Shu emperor, commissioned the Shu Materia Medica. Emperor Taizu of the Song issued the Kaibao Materia Medica. Emperor Renzong of the Song produced the Jiayou Supplemented Materia Medica. By the mid‑Ming, there were over 30 different works on materia medica.
Sounds prosperous, right?
But prosperity has its troubles. Different authors disagreed, even contradicted each other. For example, on the effect of cuttlefish bone: one book said eating it would boost male virility; another said it would make you sterile. Who do you believe?
The confusion was begging for someone to step in and sort everything out.
That someone was a man from Hubei province. His name was Li Shizhen.
👉 Next: One man, 27 years, and half of China – the impossible mission to “correct” Chinese medicine.
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