Lìyàn Zàishòu Biān 歷驗再壽編
A Collection of Tested Recipes for a Second Life-Span collected by 童月軒 (Tóng Yuèxuān, fl. late 19th–early 20th c.)
About the work
The Lìyàn zàishòu biān is a 1-juǎn collection of more than 200 jīngyàn fāng (tested recipes), assembled over decades by the Húnán Xiāngxī 湘西 literatus-collector Tóng Yuèxuān 童月軒 from a network of relatives and friends. The catalog dates the materials to the late Qīng but the work as printed is Republican-era (1923).
Prefaces
The work carries two prefaces:
- Cài Lùqiū 蔡鹿秋 (hào Mèngjiāo yěrén 夢蕉埜人), preface dated Mínguó 12, guǐhài, summer 4th month (= April 1923), written at the Yuányě cǎotáng 緣野草堂. Cài explains his role as editor: Tóng had assembled the manuscript over many decades from family papers and friends’ contributions, testing each recipe many times. As Tóng’s resources were limited and printing-runs would be modest, Cài proposed that the work be printed in small batches and distributed through nearby charitable halls (shàntáng 善堂) and gōngyì jīguān (public-welfare institutions), with copies sent to every provincial capital’s císhàntáng 慈善堂 and Tóngshànshè 同善社, who would then re-print and re-distribute to county and town halls. This cascading reprint model is characteristic of late-Qīng and Republican charitable-medical publishing.
- The author’s own preface (Lìyàn zàishòu biān xù), immediately following Cài’s. This explains the title (zàishòu “second life-span” — recipes that have actually restored health) and lists the recipe categories. Undated.
Abstract
The work belongs to the substantial charitable-print medical literature genre that proliferated in the late Qīng and early Republican period, organized around lodge-style benevolent halls (shàntáng, Tóngshànshè) for free distribution to the rural and urban poor. Cài Lùqiū’s framing-preface explicitly articulates the cascading reprint distribution model that defines the genre. The work covers internal medicine, external medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, and emergency formulas — the standard 5-fold division of practical late-imperial formularies — with a strong empirical bent (only “tested” recipes are admitted).
The catalog meta places the work under the Qīng dynasty, presumably on the basis that Tóng’s collection-activity falls late-Qīng even if the 1923 printing falls under the Republic. We follow this dating but note the discrepancy.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. The work survives in late-Republican and post-1949 reprints in popular-medical anthologies.
Other points of interest
The work’s cascading-reprint publication model — provincial halls receive master copies, re-print and re-distribute to county halls, who re-print again to the village-fortress level — is a particularly clear example of the lodge-network medical publishing that supplied much of the medical-print infrastructure of late-imperial and early-Republican rural China. Cài’s preface is one of the most explicit programmatic statements of this distribution mechanism in the surviving sources.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- 歷驗再壽編 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB