Wǔwēi Hàndài Yījiǎn · Dì Yī Lèi Jiǎn 武威漢代醫簡‧第一類簡
Wuwei Han Medical Slips — Category One Slips
Anonymous (excavated from Hantanpo site, Wuwei, Gansu, 1972)
About the work
The Wǔwēi Hàndài Yījiǎn 武威漢代醫簡 (“Wuwei Han Medical Slips”) is a corpus of 92 wooden and bamboo slips discovered in 1972 at the Hantanpo 旱灘坡 site in Wuwei 武威, Gansu, in a Later Han (Hòu Hàn 後漢) tomb. The KR2p numbering divides the corpus into three categories. Category One (第一類簡, KR2p0098) is the primary collection of inscribed wooden slips containing medical prescriptions for a range of diseases, along with a section on acupuncture and moxibustion technique (including the earliest textual attestation of the sānlǐ 三里 and fèishū 肺輸 acupoints), and a “Yellow Emperor’s Taboos for Treating Disease” section. The slips are inscribed in clerical script (lìshū 隸書) with numerous tōngjiǎ 通假 phonetic loans.
Abstract
The Wuwei slips were excavated in November 1972 from a Later Han tomb at Hantanpo 旱灘坡, Wuwei County (now Liangzhou District), Gansu Province. The excavation was conducted by the Gansu Provincial Museum (甘肅省博物館) and the Wuwei County Cultural Center (武威縣文化館). The corpus was published in 甘肅省博物館、武威縣文化館 (eds.), 《武威漢代醫簡》 (文物出版社, 1975), which remains the standard primary publication. The standard scholarly English study and translation is Yang, Yong, and Miranda Brown, “The Wuwei Medical Manuscripts: A Brief Introduction and Translation,” Early China 40 (2017): 241–301.
Category One slips contain the largest and most diverse set of medical prescriptions in the Wuwei corpus. The text opens with a prescription for chronic cough (jiǔ ké 久咳):
“□治久咳上气喉中如百虫鳴狀卅歲以上方：茈胡、桔梗、蜀椒各二分，桂、烏喙、薑各一分，凡六物冶合，和丸以白密大如嬰桃，晝夜含三丸，消。咽其汁甚良” — “[For] treating chronic cough with counterflow qi, the throat [sounding] like a hundred insects crying, for those thirty years of age and above: Bupleurum (zǐhú 茈胡), Platycodon (jiégěng 桔梗), Sichuan pepper (shǔjiāo 蜀椒) — each 2 fēn; cinnamon (guì 桂), aconite (wūhuì 烏喙), ginger (jiāng 薑) — each 1 fēn. Total six ingredients: pulverize and combine; form pills with white honey, large as a baby peach; day and night dissolve three pills [in the mouth]. Swallowing their juice is excellent.”
Other prescriptions address: traumatic injury from cold (shānghán suí fēng 傷寒遂風); urinary conditions (五𤵸, “five stone-strangury types”); trauma surgery including bowel prolapse after abdominal wounds (腸出); eye pain; a general “hundred ailments ointment” using pork fat, aconite, and Sichuan pepper; and acupuncture-moxibustion for abdominal constriction (mǎn). The acupuncture section specifies needling at points below the knee (“膝下五寸分閒榮深三分”, “five cùn below the knee, in the interstice of the ying[-spring] point, depth three fēn”) identified as “三里” (sānlǐ, ST-36) and at the back (“頸從上下十一椎俠椎兩㓨榮深四分”, “the eleventh vertebra counting downward from the neck, flanking the spine, depth four fēn”) identified as “肺輸” (fèishū, BL-13, the lung transport point). The text also attributes a moxibustion taboo scheme to the Yellow Emperor (黃帝治病神魂忌): it lists the body parts that should not be moxibustion-treated in each year of a person’s life, with severe penalties (death within 2–30 days) for transgression.
The slips show numerous tōngjiǎ substitutions: 𤵸 for 淋 (strangury), 恿 for 痛 (pain), 𢠚 for 愈 (recover), 付子 for 附子 (aconite), 茈胡 for 柴胡 (Bupleurum), etc. These orthographic features are important for the history of medical Chinese lexicography.
Dating the Wuwei slips is based on the tomb stratigraphy and the script style; the slips are securely dated to the Later Han period (25–220 CE), with a probable deposition date in the first or second century CE.
Translations and research
- Yang, Yong, and Miranda Brown. “The Wuwei Medical Manuscripts: A Brief Introduction and Translation.” Early China 40 (2017): 241–301. — Standard English translation and study.
- 甘肅省博物館、武威縣文化館 (eds.). 《武威漢代醫簡》. 北京: 文物出版社, 1975. — Primary publication.
- 張延昌. 《武威漢代醫簡注解》. 北京: 中醫古籍出版社, 2006. — Annotated edition.
- Hinrichs, T.J., and Linda L. Barnes (eds.). Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. — Contextual reference.
- 馬繼興. 《馬王堆古醫書考釋》. 長沙: 湖南科學技術出版社, 1992. — Comparative study of Mawangdui and Wuwei materials.
Other points of interest
The acupuncture section of the Category One slips is one of the earliest extant texts providing named acupoint locations with needle depth specifications, preceding the systematic acupoint literature of texts like the Zhēnjiǔ jiǎyǐjīng 針灸甲乙經. The sānlǐ 三里 acupoint named here (ST-36 on the lower leg) would become one of the most frequently cited points in the entire Chinese acumoxa tradition. The “Yellow Emperor’s Moxibustion Taboos” section reveals the integration of age-based prohibitions into early clinical practice.