Suíxījū yǐnshí pǔ 隨息居飲食譜
Dietary Manual of the Studio of Following-One’s-Breath by 王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (1808–1868, zì Mèngyīng 孟英, the principal late-Qīng Wēnbìng (Warm-Disease) master).
About the work
A one-juan dietary-therapy manual composed during the Tàipíng war refugee period, after Wáng Mèngyīng had been driven from his Hángzhōu base. The work is a classified dietary pharmacopoeia keyed to the Wēnbìng school’s understanding of qīngrè yǎngyīn 清熱養陰 (clearing heat, nourishing yīn) — opposed to the widespread late-Qīng warming-tonifying prescribing fashion. It catalogues hundreds of food items by category — water, grains, condiments, vegetables, fruits, eggs and dairy, fish, shellfish, fowl, mammals — with the nature, taste, therapeutic application, and contraindications of each.
Prefaces
Two prefaces are transmitted. The front xù by Wáng himself (under the hào Shuìxiāng sǎnrén 睡鄉散人), dated Xiánfēng 11 = 1861 seventh lunar month, narrates the composition’s circumstances: “Alas! The state takes the people as foundation, but the people losing their education — some thereby disorder the realm. Persons take food as nourishment, but eating-and-drinking losing its propriety — some thereby harm their lives. To preserve the state and to preserve life — the principle has no two paths. Therefore the sage put illness and warfare on the same level of caution, and joined nourishment and education in equal weight.” Wáng cites the Zhōngyōng: “No person is without eating-and-drinking, but few can know the taste.” He observes that “in the present summer the price of stone-measured rice is 8000 and the price of a jīn of pickles is 40 [cash]. Vast in the jié (kalpa-disaster), with no one to whom one might appeal.”
Wáng goes on: “Mr. 呂慎庵 Lǚ Shènān, knowing I should become a starveling, invited me to wander to Méijīng, lodging at the Guǎngchuān’s Bùkuīyuán — no work to be done, no road to walk — long endless nights, an empty belly idle. Begging from a Withered Daoist a single bald brush, painting a cake and longing for the plums, I have compiled this draft, naming it the Yǐnshí pǔ. May connoisseurs of taste judge it: or that I have neglected the large in cultivating the small, and might be instructed.”
The after xù is more autobiographical: Wáng narrates losing his father at age 14, being supported through his early career by his uncle Yú of Jīnhuá who employed him as bookkeeper in the salt-trade; the death of his mother; the Tàipíng disaster.
Abstract
The Suíxījū yǐnshí pǔ is one of the most-cited Qīng dietary works and the foundational dietary text of the late-Qīng Wēnbìng school. Its compositional circumstances — written by an internally-displaced Tàipíng-era physician at the Bùkuīyuán lodge in Méijīng during the summer of 1861, when rice prices were eight thousand cash per shí, while reflecting on hunger — give it a documentary historical value beyond its medical content: it is a major source for the personal experience of the Tàipíng war for the Jiāngzhè literati-physician class.
The work’s medical doctrine emphasises the Wēnbìng clearing-heat / nourishing-yīn principles in dietary form: cooling foods (water-vegetable congees, qīngbǔ nourishments) are favoured; warming-tonifying foods (especially the ginseng-and-cinnamon combinations widely popular in late-Qīng warming-school practice) are sharply criticised. Wáng Mèngyīng’s polemic against the ginseng cult is one of the principal late-Qīng critiques of pharmaceutical excess.
The dating is precise: 1861.
Translations and research
- 王士雄, Suí-xī-jū yǐn-shí pǔ, ed. 朱亞峰 et al. (Běijīng: Zhōng-guó zhōng-yī-yào chū-bǎn-shè, 2008).
- 王士雄, Wáng Mèng-yīng yī-xué quán-shū 王孟英醫學全書, ed. 盛增秀 (Běijīng: Zhōng-guó zhōng-yī-yào chū-bǎn-shè, 1999).
- Marta E. Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (London: Routledge, 2011), index s.v. Wang Mengying — the standard English-language treatment.
- Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Chicago, 2014).
- Bridie J. Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014) — for the post-Wáng late-Qīng / Republican context.
Other points of interest
The work is double-pivoted: it is both a major medical text and a primary source for the social history of the Tàipíng war. The opening xù’s account of Hángzhōu rice prices in summer 1861 — jīnxià shímǐ bāqiān, jīn jī sìshí 今夏石米八千、斤齏四十 — is one of the more frequently cited contemporary documents of Tàipíng-era inflation and famine.
Wáng’s Wēnbìng corpus: see his person note.