Nanfang Caomu Zhuang
Ji Han was made prefect of Xiangcheng in 304, but when it was conquered, he had to escape south to Xiangyang (present-day Hebei), and at the recommendation of the official Liu Hong (劉弘), he was appointed governor of Guangdong in 306.
[3] In addition to writing the Nanfang caomu zhuang, the "first botanical treatise of all time", Ji Han was a prolific poet, particularly fu "rhapsody; poetic exposition", and deeply interested in botany.
Ji Han also wrote a fu on the fashionable "Cold-Food Powder" mixture of mineral and plant drugs, which says "it cured his ailing son when other treatments had failed".
[11] The ancient kingdom of Nanyue ("southern Yue") was located in parts of the present-day Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan; Jiaozhi was in northern Vietnam.
The first book in the "strange plants of the south" genre was the (early 3rd century) Yiwu zhi ("Record of Strange/Foreign Things"), by the Eastern Han official Yang Fu.
There are five cases of the same plant being described by both authors, and then the entries are generally quite different; but the Nanfang caowu zhi was never a flora, for it included marine animals and all kinds of natural products.
[18] Zuo Si's (c. 270) "Wudu fu" (吳都賦 "Rhapsody on the Wu capital", i.e., Suzhou) mentions jiāogé (蕉葛 "linen made from banana/plantain fibers") but not the fruit.
Needham, Lu, and Huang say that the banana was primarily a textile-producer, rather than cultivated for fruit, which could reasonably explain the origin of the name, for jiāo (焦) means "heat; burning; boiling", which was how the stems had to be treated with lime water to get the fibers.
[23] The Nanfang caomu zhuang has another entry (9) for an unidentified shuijiao (水蕉 "water banana") that "resembles the day-lily, and is either purple or yellow", which Li suggests might be Lycoris.
Wang Zhen explains that the frame is like a fá (筏 "[bamboo] raft"), and that fēng means the roots of the aquatic plant gū (箛 Zizania latifolia, Manchurian wild rice).
[30] The chinampas, which have been used by the Aztecs on shallow lakes in the Valley of Mexico since the Middle Postclassic period (1150-1350), are the best-known floating gardens (technically, artificial islands separated by canoe-width channels).
In the Huang-wu period of Wu (A.D. 222-229), Shih Hsieh 士燮, the Governor of Chiao-chih, once presented an orange specimen with seventeen fruits to one stalk, considered as a symbol of auspiciousness.
[34] Li notes[35] that the Yiwu Zhi (quoted in the Qimin yaoshu) may possibly be the original source for this Nanfang caomu zhuang entry: "the orange tree has white flowers and reddish fruits, which have fragrant peels and also sweet taste.
Ma says[37] the first few sentences appear Zhou Chu's (236-297) Fengtuji (風土記 "Record of Local Conditions"), which is the likely source for this Nanfang caomu zhuang entry.
In 1915, the United States Department of Agriculture sent plant physiologist Walter Tennyson Swingle to China for research in varieties of orange resistant to citrus canker.
In collaboration with George W. Groff and his students at Lingnan University in Guangzhou,[40] they became the first Western scientists to encounter the cultivated citrus ant of southern China.
In Nan-hai there are many fine wines, prepared not with yeast leaven but by pounding rice flour mixed with many kinds of herb leaves and soaked in the juice of Yeh-ko 冶葛.
[43] Needham and Huang suggest that since it took one month for the herbal rice-flour dough to become infected by fungi (presumably mycelia), the process was probably not easily reproducible in areas outside South China.
The first scholar to question the text's authenticity was Wen Dingshi (文廷式, 1856-1904), who said Ji Han could not have been the author because the theriac entry (19)[44] says the physician Liu Juanzi (劉涓子, fl.
410), "used this plant to prepare pills and after taking them, attained immortality"; which is likely a copyist's mistake for the Daoist Juanzi (涓子) mentioned in the (c. 1st century BCE) Liexian Zhuan.
The Nanfang caomu zhuang title is first recorded in Tang Shenwei's (唐慎微, 1108) Zhenglei bencao (證類本草) and You Mou's (尤袤, 1180) Suichutang shumu (遂初堂書目).
[47] First, Ji Han used archaic and unusual names for certain plants instead of those which later became standard in the Tang and Song, for instance (45), jishexiang (雞舌香) instead of dingxiang (丁香) for cloves, indicating the antiquity of the text.
Li concludes that although we cannot rule out the possibility of interpolations, we can be reasonably sure that the text, as it has come down to us in its present form since the late Song period, "represents on the whole a historically trustworthy account of the plants treated therein as they appeared in the southern regions around the third and fourth centuries".
Huang says the most reasonable hypothesis is that the Nanfang caomu zhuang appearance in a printed edition did not attract any special attention because it was common knowledge among the Song literati that Ji Han wrote the text in the 4th century.
In the second category of textual comparisons, there are numerous Nanfang caomu zhuang passages that are similar or identical to those on the same topics in other classical works about South China.
Symposium scholars who rejected this plagiarism hypothesis contended that it is more reasonable to conclude that the "sources" were themselves copied from the Nanfang caomu zhuang without acknowledgement, as early Chinese authors so often did.
In the Nanfang caomu zhuang the descriptions make botanical sense, but the corresponding entries in Lingbiao luyi, though almost identical in language, lack one or two key words needed to render them botanically meaningful, thus indicating that the Nanfang caomu zhuang author had an intimate knowledge of plants and knew what he was writing about, whereas the Lingbiao luyi compiler was copying blindly from the older text.
In the third category of philological considerations, several discrepancies in book titles, personal names, and historical events quoted in the Nanfang caomu zhuang have led scholars in China and the West to question its authenticity.
The symposium participants reached consensus that the extant text contains interpolations by later writers, and probably first appeared in its current form during the Southern Song dynasty.
Huang says,[53] "Based on what is known about Ji Han's life, his literary attainments, his love of plants, and his interest in alchemy, those opposed to the forgery thesis believe that he is a likely author for the Nanfang caomu zhuang."
