Jīfēng Pǔjì Fāng 雞峰普濟方
Cock-Peak Recipes for Universal Relief by 張銳 (Zhāng Ruì, zì Zǐgāng 子剛, fl. late Northern – early Southern Sòng, c. 1100–1133, 宋) — physician of Chéngdū 成都, named after the Jīfēngshān 雞峰山 of his retreat
About the work
The Jīfēng pǔjì fāng in 30 juǎn is a Northern-Sòng / early Southern-Sòng general formulary covering the full spectrum of internal medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, traumatology, and bencao materia medica. Zhāng Ruì 張銳 was a contemporary of the Sòng-Jin transition, working primarily in Sìchuān, whose work survived in scant copies and was rediscovered by the late-Qīng antiquarian cángshūjiā tradition. The catalog meta places the work in 宋 with Zhāng Ruì as author. The bracket 1100–1133 reflects Zhāng’s working life on conventional reckoning.
Prefaces
The hxwd transmission carries a single late-Qīng reprint preface:
- 顧千里 撰 序 (1828) by Gù Qiānlǐ 顧千里 (1766–1835), zì Lánbó 蘭伯, the famous bibliographer-collator of the BǎiSòngyīchàn circle. Dated 道光八年歲在戊子夏五月 (= summer 1828). Gù — who modestly disavows medical expertise (“予不知醫”) — frames the project as a textual-philological intervention against the late-imperial degeneration of medical practice into rhymed tāngtóu gējué 湯頭歌訣 (recipe-mnemonic jingles) recited from chap-book digests. He invokes the Shǐjì anecdote of Chúnyú Yì 淳于意 being told by his master Gōngshèng Yángqìng 公乘陽慶 to “throw away all your recipe books, they are not correct” and receive instead the master’s jìnfāng 禁方 (secret recipes). Gù presents Zhāng Ruì’s surviving work, now reprinted by the guānchá (Surveillance Commissioner) Lángyuán 閬原 of his personal collection, as a recovery of the kind of jìnfāng that Gōngshèng Yángqìng had once represented.
Abstract
Zhāng Ruì 張銳 (zì Zǐgāng 子剛, fl. late Northern Sòng – early Southern Sòng) was a physician of Chéngdū 成都 (Sìchuān). The “Jīfēng” 雞峰 name comes from his retreat at Jīfēngshān, a small mountain in Chéngdū prefecture; the pǔjì “universal relief” of the title positions the work alongside other Sòng-era pǔjì formularies (see KR3ed036 Pǔjì fāng of Zhū Sù 朱橚). The work is structured around 218 disease categories distributed across 30 juǎn; each section opens with a lùn 論 theoretical discussion (often paraphrasing the Sùwèn or Língshū) before listing recipes. Internal references to the SòngYuán political-military situation, and Zhāng’s mention of Cài Jīng’s medical procurement programme, anchor the work to the 1100–1133 period.
The work was little circulated in its own time — Sòng catalogs do not record it — but survived in a Yuán Jíxiánshūyuàn 集賢書院 copy that reached the late-Qīng book collector Lángyuán 閬原 (the addressee of Gù Qiānlǐ’s preface). Its distinctive features: (i) a strong focus on Shǔ (Sìchuān) regional materia medica and Sìchuān-specific disease conditions (瘴, 蠱, 食慣); (ii) detailed paediatric formulae attributed to family transmission; (iii) preservation of recipes otherwise lost from the formulary tradition. Modern Chinese medical-historical scholarship (Hé Shíxī 1992) treats it as one of the most valuable secondary-tier Sòng physician’s formularies, supplementing the imperial-commission compilations.
The 1828 Gù Qiānlǐ-prefaced print, the textual basis for the modern hxwd recension, is also the earliest surviving printed witness; manuscripts of the work in the BǎiSòngyīchàn collection differ in detail from this print but follow the same 30-juǎn structure.
Translations and research
- Hé Shíxī 何時希 (coll.). 1992. Jīfēng pǔjì fāng 雞峰普濟方 (punctuated edition). Beijing.
- Goldschmidt, Asaf. 2009. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960–1200. Routledge. — touches on Zhāng Ruì as a Sòng-Jin transitional physician.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §41.3.2.
Other points of interest
Gù Qiānlǐ’s preface — disavowing medical expertise but engaging seriously with the diagnostic-philological structure of late-imperial popular medicine — is a classic late-Qīng evidential-scholarship statement of the relationship between kǎojù 考據 textual-critical method and the recovery of pre-modern technical knowledge.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- Late-Qīng print: 道光八年 (1828) Lángyuánguānchá 閬原觀察 reprint, prefaced by Gù Qiānlǐ.
- 雞峰普濟方 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB