China's Most Beautiful Imperial Illustration-Colored Manuscript :A History of the Overseas Dissemination and Global Circulation of Ben Cao Pin Hui Jing Yao (《本草品汇精要》Collected Essentials of Species of Materia Medica)

Vollständiger Abstract

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Abstract: Ben Cao Pin Hui Jing Yao (《本草品汇精要》 Collected Essentials of Species of Materia Medica ) is an official materia medica text that was compiled and revised by Tai Yi Yuan (太医院the Imperial Academy of Medicine), completed in the eighteenth year of the Hongzhi era (1505 AD) under Emperor Xiaozong (孝宗) in Ming Dynasty. As the last pharmacopoeia in ancient China, it was even earlier than the Nuremberg Pharmacopoeia issued by the European Nuremberg Senate in 1546 AD. However, the book was not published, because Emperor Xiaozong died only two months after its completion, and the work was further constrained by its courtly purpose and the limitations of color printing at the time. It consequently remained in the Imperial Palace and was little known to later generations. Therefore, from 1505 when Ben Cao Pin Hui Jing Yao was compiled, to 1936 when the lead-type edition was published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, the name of the book was changed four times, and two times that it was published. How exactly did these copies come down to us? How did they get lost overseas after being copied from the Palace? From the damage extent of more than 20 existing manuscripts, there are only a few incomplete manuscripts in mainland China. This paper makes a historical investigation into how Ben Cao Pin Hui Jing Yao in the Imperial Palace spread into the folk and how only some complete illustration-colored manuscripts were lost overseas and achieved global circulation.