Zēngdìng Tú Zhù Běncǎo Bèiyào 增訂圖註本草備要
Expanded and Illustrated Annotated Essentials of the Materia Medica by 汪昂 (Wāng Áng, 1615–1694, 清) as the base text; expanded and illustrated by anonymous Qīng editors
About the work
The Zēngdìng tú zhù běncǎo bèiyào is the expanded-and-illustrated late-Qīng / Mínguó-era edition of Wāng Áng’s Běncǎo bèiyào (KR3ec038). The base text remains Wāng Áng’s 1694 Bèiyào; the late-Qīng editor(s) have added (a) substantive expansion of substance entries from the Běncǎo congxīn (KR3ec045) of Wú Yílù and from Zhào Xuémǐn’s Běncǎo gāngmù shíyí (KR3ec049); (b) systematic woodblock illustrations of each substance, drawn from the Gāngmù and Zhènglèi traditions; (c) updated processing notes reflecting late-Qīng pharmacy practice.
This is the late-Qīng / Mínguó standard reading edition — the zēngdìng (expanded and illustrated) format is the version most readers of Bèiyào used through the early 20th century.
Prefaces
The local repository preserves only a header file. The standard zēngdìng edition preserves Wāng Áng’s original prefaces (from KR3ec038) together with the late-Qīng editor’s preface explaining the expansion and the addition of illustrations.
Abstract
The work’s relation to the original is that of zēngdìng tú zhù — expanded annotation with illustrations added. The expansion brings the substance corpus from Wāng’s original 478 substances to approximately 600, and the illustrations make the work usable as a visual drug-identification reference rather than purely textual. The dating range (1694–1900) covers the period from the parent edition’s printing to the late-Qīng zēngdìng editions; the most common surviving zēngdìng imprints date from the late Tóngzhì-Guāngxù era (1860s–1890s).
The work is the de facto standard format in which Wāng Áng’s Bèiyào circulated in the late 19th century, and serves as the bridge between Qīng commercial publishing and the early-Mínguó republican-era zhōngyī textbook market.
Translations and research
- See KR3ec038 for the parent work and bibliography. Specific studies of the zēngdìng tradition are scarce; see Bian (2020), Know Your Remedies, ch. 6 on Qīng pharmacological imprints.
Links
- Wikidata: not yet assigned.
- 增訂圖註本草備要 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB