Where to Find Food When Crops Failed
Jiuhuang Bencao addressed shortages of grain. When drought or flooding caused cereal harvests to fail, people searched field margins, the countryside, and watersides for plants that could relieve hunger. Experience of gathering and eating such plants was dispersed among localities and households, and names were not standardized: one plant might have several names, while plants that looked similar were easily confused.
Zhu Su, the Ming Prince of Zhou, directed the compilation in Kaifeng. Bian Tong’s original preface is dated to the eighth lunar month of the fourth year of Yongle, corresponding to the year 1406, and describes the aim of organizing knowledge of plants to supplement regular food reserves. The title’s term bencao followed an established tradition of materia medica writing, while the compilation focused on food sources in times of famine.
From Field Collection to Observation in a Garden
The original preface records that the compilers obtained plants from farmers and rural elders and cultivated more than four hundred kinds together in a garden. Zhu Su took part in examining them, waiting for the plants to mature before summoning artists to draw them and organizing information on the uses of their flowers, fruits, roots, stems, bark, and leaves. Local expertise in identification, observation of living specimens, and written and visual records were brought together.
The garden offered opportunities for repeated checks. A plant looks different when it first sprouts and after it flowers and bears fruit; observing only one stage can overlook features useful for identifying it. Waiting for growth, then describing and illustrating its form clearly, preserved more information than merely copying a name.
Finding Particular Plants through Words and Images
Surviving editions contain 414 kinds of plants, arranged in divisions including herbs, woody plants, grains, fruits, and vegetables. Herbs, with 245 entries, and woody plants, with eighty, form the two largest divisions. The general contents preserved in Nongzheng Quanshu further classify plants by edible parts, with categories for leaves, fruits, roots, flowers, shoots, and others.
A typical plant entry gives its name and alternative names, where it grows, and the forms of its stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits, before explaining which part is used. The entry for cheluncai also records the materia medica name cheqianzi, describing leaves emerging near the ground and long, slender flower spikes. This format brings local names and visible characteristics together to help readers compare specimens.
Later catalogues and summaries distinguished 138 plants already recorded in earlier materia medica from 276 newly recorded plants. The compilation both drew on existing knowledge and added local observations to the written record.
Recording Plant Parts and Preparation
A plant’s appearance in the book involved more than an illustration. Entries distinguish young leaves, roots, fruits, or seeds and describe preparation methods such as cooking, soaking, and washing. Some also specify flavor and restrictions on consumption. Readers can thus see how people at the time turned a plant into a temporary source of food.
These accounts of preparation also preserve the circumstances in which experience was acquired: which part was used, the plant’s stage of growth, and where it was gathered. They break a general statement that a plant could relieve hunger into information that could be identified and checked item by item.
References: [1]
Continued Circulation through Reprints and Agricultural Books
Jiuhuang Bencao was reprinted several times during the Ming dynasty. Surviving editions preserve a preface to a reprinting during the Jiajing reign, explaining that the earlier printing blocks had been lost and that compilers and local officials sought good copies and promoted republication. Reprinting brought a work originally associated with the household of the Prince of Zhou to a wider readership.
Xu Guangqi’s Nongzheng Quanshu incorporated the materials on famine plants into its division on famine administration, alongside preceding discussions of grain storage, granaries, and preparations for scarcity. Plant investigations were thereby placed in the same book as agricultural production, water management, and relief arrangements. When grain supplies were inadequate, people had to manage stored food while also identifying other usable resources growing on the land.
Transmission also left changes in the attribution of authorship. Some editions named Prince Xian of Zhou, while the summary in the Siku Quanshu edition corrected this on the basis of the succession of titles held by Zhu Su and his descendants. The book’s circulation involved both the preservation of content and later textual correction.
Old Records as Material for Later Research
Historical plant names must be matched individually with modern botanical classifications. In 2013, Wang Jing, Li Wanchang, and Gao Mingqian examined entries including madouling, zeqi, xixian, dalan, and baiqucai using surviving editions, and pointed out that the five plants they identified had significant toxic effects. Their research checked the names and descriptions in the old book against later botanical knowledge.
The value left by Jiuhuang Bencao lies above all in records that can be consulted repeatedly: local names, growing locations, plant forms, and past uses can be compared with one another. The investigation directed by Zhu Su was preserved through the work of artists, compilers, and printers, then entered agricultural books and later research, turning one locality’s experience of food into a continually organized body of knowledge.