Shòushì qīngbiān 壽世青編
The Green Compendium for Prolonging the Generations by 尤乘 Yóu Chéng (zì Shēngzhōu 生洲, fl. Kāngxī era, disciple of 李中梓 Lǐ Zhōngzǐ; see also the Shìcái sān shū / KR3eh023 Bìngjī shāzhuàn).
About the work
A two-juan post-illness recuperation and dietary-therapy manual, formally a yǎngshēng compendium but in practice oriented to the more specific problem of regaining strength after major illness (bìnghòu tiáolǐ 病後調理). The work opens with an extended preamble on “Methods of Diet and Medication after Recovery from Illness” (病後調理服食法) and proceeds through topically organised entries covering: weather/clothing adjustment in convalescence; gradient feeding (clear vegetable broth → aged-rice broth → light congee → grilled river-fish soup); category-specific cautions for the principal disease classes (cold-damage and seasonal epidemic, post-stroke, post-childbirth, post-suppurative-back-abscess, post-malaria-and-dysentery, post-cough-and-emaciation); and a large Shízhì mìfāng 食治秘方 section of food-therapy recipes for daily convalescent maintenance.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw reprint preserves no separate xù; the work opens with the principal first-person essay 病後調理服食法 (“Methods of Diet and Medication after Recovery from Illness”). The opening reasoning runs as follows: “for any illness about to resolve, the qì and blood of exterior and interior have been depleted on the outside, the essence and shén of the viscera depleted on the inside, the bodily form weakened and the strength reduced — this is the normal state. One must settle the mind and rest tranquilly, regulate spleen and stomach as the first priority, avoid wind and cold, take care in qǐjū 起居, guard against vexation and anger, regulate food and drink, abjure sexual exertion, expel deluded thoughts — these are the essentials. If one transgresses them, even a good physician will hardly succeed.” A Kèyuē 客曰 (“a guest objects”) dialogue passage opens the Shízhì mìfāng with the central theoretical move: “herbs and minerals receive the partial qì of the Five Phases, just as the human body, when diseased, has partial dominance of one or another viscus, leading to partial leaning of qì-and-blood. We therefore use partial-qì drugs to treat partial-dominance qì-and-blood, returning it to centre. Food, by contrast, receives the centre-qì of the Five Phases — and is therefore the proper means of long-term sustenance, not partial intervention.” The textual logic deliberately rehearses the Sòng dietary-therapy framework derived from Chén Zhí’s Yǎnglǎo fèngqīn shū (KR3eo001).
Abstract
Yóu Chéng (active publishing 1666 onwards — his major editorial project, the supplementation of Lǐ Zhōngzǐ’s Bìngjī shāzhuàn with his own appendices, is dated to Kāngxī bǐngwǔ = 1666) compiled the Shòushì qīngbiān in his maturity, probably in the period c. 1670–1690. The work is the third element of his small personal medical bibliography — the others being the Shìcái sān shū editorial project (preserving 李中梓 Lǐ Zhōngzǐ’s Yīzōng bìdú, Zhěnjiā zhèngyǎn, and Bìngjī shāzhuàn) and an independent Yǐnshí pǔ 飲食譜 (飲食譜) of household dietary classification. Together these document Yóu’s transition from his master’s clinical orientation to the more practical-popular concerns of late-Kāngxī Jiāngnán household medicine.
The title’s qīngbiān 青編 (“green compilation”) alludes to Hànshū · Wáng Gēng zhuàn on Wáng Gēng’s prized “green-cord book”. The work was widely reprinted in the Yōngzhèng and Qiánlóng periods, often under the variant title Shòushì qīngbiān shízhì 壽世青編食治. The jicheng.tw reprint follows the earliest Kāngxī Sūzhōu print.
Translations and research
- Zhōng-guó yī-jí dà-cí-diǎn, s.v. 壽世青編.
- 馬烈光, Zhōng-yī yǎng-shēng kāng-fù xué cí-diǎn (Běijīng, 2007).
- Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: UC Press, 2010) — for the post-partum recovery framework that Yóu’s chapter on women’s convalescence develops.
- Hinrichs and Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing, ch. 8 (late-imperial dietary therapy).
Other points of interest
The work’s emphasis on gradient feeding in convalescence — strict sequence from thinnest to thickest food — is the most systematic 17th-century articulation of a clinical practice that remains widely taught in modern Zhōngyī recuperation pedagogy.
Links
- Related: KR3eh023 病機沙篆 (Yóu Chéng’s principal editorial work on his teacher Lǐ Zhōngzǐ).
- Kanseki DB
- 壽世青編