Cold-Food Powder
[21] His Lun Hanshisan fang (論寒食散方 "On the Recipe for Cold-Food Powder"; Cao Xi wrote another book with the same title) records his disastrous self-medication that resulted in "pain and a general numbness and weakness of the body".
"[24] Huangfu said that the vogue for consuming Cold-Food Powder began with the Cao Wei state (220–265) scholar and politician He Yan (c. 195–249), who used the drug to achieve greater spiritual clarity and physical strength.
The French sinologist Paul Demiéville's described He Yan: "He was reckoned a paragon of beauty, elegance, and refinement, a floating flower (fou-hua) as his enemies used to say, or a dandy.
[25] Livia Kohn describes Ruan Ji's artistic expression, His friends and fellow poets induced ecstatic experiences through music, wine, and drugs, especially the notorious Cold Food Powder which created psychedelic states and made the body feel very hot, causing people to take off their clothes and jump into pools.
When back in their ordinary selves, they wrote poetry of freedom and escape, applying the Zhuangzi concept of free and easy wandering in the sense of getting away from it all and continuing the text's tradition in their desperate search for a better world within.
[27]The extant calligraphic writings attributed to Wang Xizhi mention taking hanshisan, for instance, two letters to his friend Zhou Fu (周撫, d. 365), Regional Inspector of Yizhou prefecture.
"[28] The Jin dynasty Daoist scholar Ge Hong's (c. 320) Baopuzi ("[Book of the] Master Who Embraces Simplicity") contains invaluable details about the drug powders.
Various ingredients are mixed and fired separately with each of the five minerals, cinnabar, realgar, arsenolite, laminar malachite, and magnetite [五石者, 丹砂, 雄黃, 白礜, 曾青, 慈石也].
"[33]Compared with the previous Baopuzi list of the Five Minerals, this one replaces "arsenolite" (白礜) with "orpiment" (雌黃) and "magnetite" (慈石) with the logographically similar "alum" (礬石).
[34]Ge Hong's friend Ji Han (嵇含 c. 262–306) wrote a fu "rhapsody; poetic exposition" on Cold-Food Powder, which claims "it cured his ailing son when other treatments had failed".
The Shishuo xinyu only directly refers to wushisan in quoting He Yan (see above), "Whenever I take a five-mineral powder, not only does it heal any illness I may have, but I am also aware of my spirit and intelligence becoming receptive and lucid" [服五石散, 非唯治病, 亦覺神明開朗].
[39] The commentary of Liu Xun (劉峻, 462–521) explains, Although the prescription for the cold-food powder (han-shih san) originated during the Han period, its users were few and there are no accounts handed down concerning them.
It was the Wei president of the Board of Civil Office, Ho Yen, who first discovered its divine properties, and from his time on it enjoyed a wide currency in the world, and those who used it sought each other out.
"When Yin Chi's illness became critical [bingkun 病困], when he looked at a person, he only saw half of his face",[45] citing Yu Jixia[46] that "temporary impairment of vision" was one harmful effect.
[48] Sun Simiao attributed one formula, the cishi hanshisan (紫石寒食散 "purple mineral cold powder") to the Han dynasty doctor Zhang Zhongjing, and remarked, "There have also been those who have acquired an addiction to the Five-Mineral preparations on account of their avidity for the pleasures of the bedchamber", namely Daoist sexual practices.
Then in the Southern Sung came the regular isolation of mixtures of steroid sex hormones (chiu shih, hung chhien), much used in Yuan and Ming, while the Chhing afterwards succumbed to opium (yaphien).
[50]While Chinese historians have traditionally believed the practice of consuming hanshisan persisted into the Tang dynasty and almost disappeared afterwards, Obringer thinks, "it may be more accurate to say that the name of the drug has been eclipsed, but not the habit of taking it.
Dikötter et ll says that "From the Song onwards, mineral powders became more varied, including increasing quantities of medical herbs, ginger, ginseng and oyster extract, thus changing in character from alchemical substances to formal medicines (yao).
… Perhaps the greatest problem of all, though, is the fact that drug-makers have traditionally guarded their secrets well, and references to major ingredients by color lead the reader to the inevitable conclusion that an esoteric formula is being used, hinting at, rather than explicitly stating, the contents of the mixture.
Compared with chapter 4's list of the Five Minerals, this version rearranges three ingredients (cinnabar, realgar, and stratified malachite) and replaces two: baifan (白礬 "arsenolite") with cihuang (雌黃 "orpiment") and cishi (慈石 "magnetite") with the graphically similar fanshi (礬石 "alum").
In traditional wuxing "five phases/elements" theory, the correlating wuse (五色 "five colors") are blue, yellow, red, white, and black (青, 赤, 黄, 白, and 黑).
Needham says, The [chapter 4] series cinnabar, realgar, alum, malachite and magnetite would be most consonant with the colours (red, yellow, white, caerulean and black) required in the traditional five-element symbolic correlations, so it may have been one of the earliest.
[52] Mather translates the five mineral substances as: stalactite (shih-chung-ju [石鐘乳]), sulphur (shih-liuhuang [石硫磺]), milky quartz (pai-shih-ying [白石英]), amethyst (tzu-shih-ying [紫石英]), and red bole or ochre (ch'ih-shih-chih [赤石脂]).
"[2] Based upon numerous hanshisan recipes, Wagner's "Das Rezept des Ho Yen" lists 13 ingredients: First, 2.5 liang (兩 "tael") of six ingredients: zhongru (鐘乳 "stalactite"), baishiying (白石英 "milky quartz"), haige (海蛤 "oyster shell"), zishiying (紫石英 "amethyst"), fangfeng (防風 "Saposhnikovia divaricata"), and gualou (栝樓 "Trichosanthes kirilowii fruit").
The Dutch historian Frank Dikötter suggests, "Resembling fresh blood, the realgar was probably an early ingredient in alchemical attempts at creating an elixir of immortality.
But if one made a mistake in the dose or the timing, or if one was not in a good psychological frame of mind (that is, too nervous, worried, sad, et cetera), the drug "rose" too fast, bringing on not only a depression, but also intolerable pain.
Only the "rich and powerful" could afford the rare Chinese alchemy ingredients for dan (丹 "cinnabar") elixirs of immortality – "Common folk instead took drugs that were easier to get, like cold-food powder (which, though actually less toxic, would cause a greater number of deaths).
We hear scholars condemn the use of the drug only for two reasons: its danger to health, and, as in the case of Ko Hung, its use during the mourning period and at times when the taking of stimulants is inappropriate or disrespectful.
In Ge Hong's time, "there must have been an association between the drug on the one hand and the Northerners' image as occupiers who discriminated against the scholars of the South with regard to holding high office on the other."
Huang Junjie and Erik Zürcher say that when the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove took wushisan, "they had to drink cold liquor and take walking excursions in order to avoid arsenic poisoning.
