Jiuhuang bencao
[2] Zhu Xiao studied botany when he lived in Kaifeng, which is located on the flood plains of the Yellow River and has historically suffered from natural disasters.
Zhu Xiao wrote the Jiuhuang bencao from 1403 to 1406 after many years of careful research, presumably "in an effort to alleviate the sufferings and death that too frequently occur in China as a result of famine.
The German sinologist Emil Bretschneider praised the Jiuhuang bencao woodcuts as "tolerably true to nature" and "certainly superior to some European wood-cuts of the 17th century".
[3] There is no regular English translation of Jiuhuang bencao, and it has been translated as: In 1406, Zhu Xiao published the first edition Jiuhuang bencao in Kaifeng, with a preface written by a scholar in the prince's household, Bian Tong (卞同), who explained: The Prince of [Zhou] set up private nursery gardens ([pu] 圃) where he experimented with the planting and utilisation of more than four hundred kinds of plants, collected from fields, ditches and wildernesses.
Engaging special artists ([huagong] 畫工) to make pictures of each of the plants and trees, he himself set down details of all the edible parts, whether flowers, fruits, roots, stems, bark or leaves, and digested the whole into a book with the title [Jiuhuang bencao].
Human nature is such that in times when food and clothing is plentiful nobody takes a thought for those who are, or may be, freezing and starving; then when the day comes that they meet with this themselves, they have not the slightest idea what to do and can only wring their hands.
[15] In 1525, Bi Mengzhai (畢蒙齋), the governor Shanxi, ordered a second edition; the physician Li Lian (李譧) wrote the preface and Lu Dong (陸東) engraved the woodblocks.
In each case the writer first states where the plant grows, then be gives its synonyms and speaks of its Yang properties, whether refrigerant or calefacient, and its Yin sapidities, whether sweet or bitter; finally he says whether one must wash the part to be used (and for how long), soak it, fry it lightly, boil it, steam it, sun-dry it, and so on, with details of whatever method of seasoning is necessary....
Owing to frequent content revisions of the text, the number of chapters and plants in some editions no longer corresponded with the 1st-edition Jiuhuang bencao.
In 1639, Hu Wenhuan (胡文焕) published Xu Guangqi's Nongzheng quanshu (農政全書) collection, reprinted the Jiuhuang bencao with 413 plants.
[17] According to Read, at least 73 of Zhu Xiao's new food plants entered Chinese domesticated horticulture (e.g., taro, water-chestnut, bamboo shoot) and 16 more were adopted in the diet of Japan or Europe (watercress, wasabi, burdock).
[19] Needham remarks on the high degree of precision in 14th-century Chinese phytographic language (gūtū 蓇葖 for "fruit follicle" generally – Sagittaria has many carpels – rather than the modern specification of "one-carpelled unilocular ovary").
However, Zhu Xiao did not warn that exclusively eating poisonous marsh peas (as during a famine) can result in lathyrism "a neurological disease causing paralysis of the legs".
[23] The Jiuhuang bencao originated what Joseph Needham[24][9] called the "Esculentist Movement"—from the word esculent "edible; comestible"—of medieval Chinese botanical research into wild food plants safe to eat in an emergency.
"[28] The first similar work in a European language was Charles Bryant's (1783) Flora Diaetetica, or History of Esculent Plants, both Domestic and Foreign.
The comparatively few Western scholars who have analyzed the Jiuhuang bencao have enthusiastically praised prince Zhu Xiao's 700-year-old famine herbal.
