Chuànyǎ Nèi Wài Biān 串雅內外編
The Refined Pedlar’s Manual: Inner and Outer Compilations by 趙學敏 (Zhào Xuémǐn, zì Shùxuān 恕軒, ca. 1719–1805; Qiántáng 錢唐, Hángzhōu)
About the work
The principal Qīng record of itinerant-healer medicine — the practice of the chuànyī 串醫 / zǒufāngyī 走方醫, the wandering doctors who travelled the rural circuits of late-Imperial China dispensing recipes from their portable medicine-chests. Zhào Xuémǐn was an unusually open-minded literati pharmacologist (better known to modern scholarship as the compiler of the Běncǎo gāngmù shíyí 本草綱目拾遺, see KR3ec049) who systematically interviewed an itinerant healer over many months and recorded the fāng (formulas), fǎ (methods), and jué (mnemonic verses) of the zǒufāng tradition — material that the standard SòngMíng formularies excluded as beneath their dignity. The combined work is conventionally divided into:
- Nèi biān 內編 (“Inner Compilation”), 4 juǎn — pulmonary purgatives (dǐng, the “topping” emetics), pulmonary attacks (chuàn, the “stringing-through” purgatives), counter-currents (dǐ), and theatrical/showy treatments (sè) — i.e. the four sub-disciplines of itinerant practice;
- Wài biān 外編 (“Outer Compilation”), 4 juǎn — broader supplementary material: jìnyào mén (taboo / charm-formulas), zhēnfǎ mén (acupuncture), jiǔfǎ mén (moxibustion), and the cumulative zǒufāng corpus of folk recipes that did not fit the four-fold inner scheme.
The KR text presents the work as the conjoined Nèi Wài Biān, with the Wài Biān beginning at juǎn 5.
Prefaces
The KR source contains the body of the work in five juǎn-files (KR3ed105_000 through _004). The KR digital text begins directly with Juǎn 1: Jìnyào mén (a Wài Biān heading) — suggesting the printer-binding-order of the KR base text differed from the conventional nèi → wài sequence, beginning with the Wài Biān’s charm-pharmacy section. The standard Zhào Xuémǐn self-preface is dated qiánlóng 24 jǐmǎo 乾隆二十四年己卯 = 1759.
Abstract
The Chuànyǎ is among the most important Qīng works of medical anthropology: it is the single most-cited Qīng record of folk and itinerant medical practice, preserving prescriptions and procedures that the standard Sìkù formulary canon excluded. Zhào explains in his preface that he met the itinerant healer Zhōu Yong 周永 (周文一 Zhōu Wényī) in 1754 and over five years extracted from him the corpus that constitutes the present work. Zhào’s framing concept — yǎ (refined, elegant) — is deliberately polemical: he is claiming literary-refined status for chuàn (itinerant-pedlar) medicine, which the conventional medical establishment dismissed as vulgar. The title’s elegance is thus a programmatic statement: the zǒufāng tradition, properly preserved, has its own yǎ (canonical refinement).
The doctrinal organisation of the Nèi Biān into four categories (dǐng 頂 / chuàn 串 / dǐ 抵 / sè 色) — “upward-purging emetics”, “downward-purging cathartics”, “counter-prescribed exotic substances”, and “physical-display treatments such as tooth-extraction, mole-removal, cautery and cupping” — is itself a record of the itinerant healer’s professional self-organisation, preserved by Zhào with anthropological accuracy. The supplementary 1825 Chuànyǎ bǔ of Lǔ Zhào (KR3ed106) preserves additional material in the same four categories.
The work was widely reprinted in the late Qīng and early Republic. The principal modern annotated editions are by the Rénmín wèishēng chūbǎnshè (Beijing, 1956 first edition, with subsequent reprints).
Translations and research
- Bian, He. Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton, 2020) — sustained treatment of Zhào Xuémǐn’s pharmacology, including the Chuànyǎ.
- Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007) — for the social-historical context of zǒufāng practice in 18th-century Jiāngnán.
- Chuànyǎ nèi wài biān, modern annotated editions: Beijing: Rénmín wèishēng chūbǎnshè, 1956; Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi kēxué jìshù chūbǎnshè, 1988.
Other points of interest
The work’s preface relates how Zhào first met the itinerant Zhōu Yong (Zhōu Wényī) at a temple-fair in Hángzhōu in 1754. Their five-year intermittent collaboration is one of the most well-documented cases of scholar-folk-practitioner knowledge transfer in late-Imperial Chinese medicine. Zhōu Wényī himself remains a shadowy figure: he is known almost entirely through Zhào’s Chuànyǎ and is not separately recorded in any other Qīng source.
Links
- See 趙學敏 for biography and other works.
- For supplementary material in the same tradition: KR3ed106 Chuànyǎ bǔ (Lǔ Zhào, 1825), KR3ed107 Chuànyǎ wài biān (Zhào Xuémǐn, the outer compilation as a separate publication).
- 串雅內外編 (jicheng.tw)
- Kanseki DB