[7] In total, some 850 drugs are listed in the text,[1] including thirty foreign ingredients that were imported into China via the Silk Road, such as benzoin, oak galls, and peppercorn.
[12] According to the Tang huiyao, the Xinxiu bencao was completed on the 17th day of the first lunar month of the fourth year of the Xianqing era (656–661).
[5] It was designated by the Tang government as the "official standard with regard to drug usage", although it is unclear how widespread its readership was, given the lack of a printing press then.
[1] By the Song dynasty,[14] the text had become lost in China, although at least one copy still exists in Japan, where it had been transmitted to in 721,[3] and fully translated into Japanese as Honzō wamyō in 1918 by palace doctor Fukane no Sukehito.
[10] In the modern era, fragments of the Xinxiu bencao have also been discovered from a book depository in a cave in Dunhuang, Gansu.