Antiquarian Recipes: The Qing Reconstruction of Medieval Therapeutics

About this event

Abstract: This talk outlines the last chapter of my ongoing book project on formulaic knowledge and the social history of medical recipe books in late imperial China. High Qing medical classicism has often demonstrated affinity to "Han learning" scholarship that emphasized philological investigation into "authentic" versions of ancient texts. What goes neglected in this narrative is that book collectors, antiquarians, and classical scholars in the eighteenth century demonstrated a shared fascination with Tang-Song formula books and went into extreme lengths in bringing these medieval texts back to print circulation. The most extreme example is the reconstruction, from the Ming encyclopedia Yongle dadian, of multiple early medical formularies then republished in the Siku quanshu at the Qing court. This talk invites us to rethink how medical knowledge and formulaic texts in particular mediated eighteenth-century actors' imagination of the distant or more recent past, and how their reconstructed medical libraries provided important references for the emergent modern historiography of medicine in East Asia.Bio: He BIAN is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her research explores authority and variation in early modern Chinese knowledge culture, particularly in medicine, and foregrounds knowledge within its institutional, social, and economic contexts. She is the author of Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Early Modern Culture in China, 1500-1800 (Princeton University Press, 2020) and co-author of The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China (Harvard Asia Center, 2025). She is currently working on a social history of medical recipes in late imperial China. East Asia.

Bio:

He BIAN is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her research explores authority and variation in early modern Chinese knowledge culture, particularly in medicine, and foregrounds knowledge within its institutional, social, and economic contexts. She is the author of

Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Early Modern Culture in China, 1500-1800

(Princeton University Press, 2020) and co-author of

The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China

(Harvard Asia Center, 2025). She is currently working on a social history of medical recipes in late imperial China.