Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu

Li Shizhen (1518 to 1593) was a physician of the Ming dynasty. Over 27 years he compiled an encyclopedia of the plants, animals, minerals and other objects believed to have medicinal properties, summing up the pharmacology of East Asia before the 16th century and adding the results of his own fieldwork. He completed the first draft in 1578, at the age of 60.

The first edition, which names Li Jianzhong and Li Jianyuan as revisers, was carved in woodblocks by Hu Chenglong at Jinling, now Nanjing, and appeared in 1593, the 21st year of the Wanli reign; the Wellcome Collection dates the engraving to 1590. This Jinling edition runs to 52 volumes of text and two volumes of illustrations with 1,109 pictures, about 1.9 million Chinese words in all. It records 1,892 kinds of medicines and 11,096 prescriptions.

The opening volumes survey earlier pharmacological books and the theory of traditional medicine, including cautions on drugs in pregnancy and on diet, and then list remedies by disease. The individual substances follow in categories that run from water, fire, earth and metals through the grasses and on to birds, beasts and parts of the human body. Each entry gives the name, processing, flavor, known uses, observation notes and prescriptions. Among them, Li recorded his own practice in treating periodic fevers and chills with qinghao, the herb from which artemisinin was extracted almost four centuries later.

According to China's nomination of the Jinling edition to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, which inscribed it in 2011, the compendium has been reprinted more than 100 times and translated in whole or in part into more than 20 languages, among them Japanese, Korean, Latin, French, German, English and Russian. The nomination adds that Charles Darwin called it an ancient Chinese encyclopedia.