The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic

Chinese tradition credits the Inner Classic to Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, honored as the father of Chinese civilization. The book was in fact the work of many physicians. China's nomination of the text to UNESCO's Memory of the World describes it as compiled mainly during the Warring States period, 475 to 221 BCE, with additions and revisions under the Qin and Han dynasties.

It has two parts of 81 chapters each. The Plain Questions (Suwen) covers the preservation of health, physiology, the causes and course of disease, diagnosis and the principles of treatment, including the circulation of qi, all within the idea that the body and nature form one whole. The Miraculous Pivot (Lingshu) describes the structure of the body and its organs, the channels, the location of acupuncture points and the methods of acupuncture and moxibustion. Chinese medicine as a whole rested on the pairing of yin and yang; health, as the National Library of Medicine puts it, was believed to come from a balance between them.

The title appears in the bibliography of the official history of the Han dynasty, which lists seven medical classics; the Inner Classic is the only one that survives. In 1057 the Northern Song government set up a bureau to revise medical works, and its scholars, among them Lin Yi, Gao Baoheng and Sun Qi, edited the text.

The copy registered by UNESCO was printed from carved wooden blocks in 1339 by Hu's Gulin Sanctum and has been in the National Library of China since 1954. The nomination calls the book the origin of Japanese Kampo, traditional Korean medicine and Vietnamese medicine, and since the mid-20th century it has been translated into English and other languages.