Liúqiú wèndá qíbìng lùn 琉球問答奇病論
Q&A on Strange Diseases of the Ryūkyū
About the work
A one-juǎn exchange-text recording the diagnostic-therapeutic dialogue between Ryūkyūan physicians and Chinese physicians on the characteristic disease-presentations of the Ryūkyū 琉球 (Liúqiú / Okinawa) island kingdom. The work is structured as a series of wèn–dá 問答 (question-and-answer) pairs in which the Ryūkyūan side (signing as “bìguó” 敝國 — “our humble country”) describes the predominantly humid-spleen presentations endemic to the Ryūkyū islands and asks for Chinese diagnostic and therapeutic guidance, with the Chinese side responding with citations from the Nèijīng, Jīnguì, the liùjūnzǐtāng 六君子湯 / língguìzhúgāntāng 苓桂朮甘湯 formula tradition, and the fēnxiāo / dǎoshuǐ / kuānzhōng shènshī formulary lineage.
The opening Q makes the Ryūkyūan side’s clinical-geographical situation explicit: “Bìguó pìjū dōngnán hǎiyú, fāngwèi zài xià, gù rén duō yǒu píshī zhī bìng” 敝國僻居東南海隅方位在下故人多有脾濕之病 (“our country lies remote in the southeast sea corner, geographically located ‘below’, therefore our people frequently suffer from spleen-damp disease”). The opening A is signed implicitly by a Chinese physician citing the standard SòngYuánMíng fēnxiāo shīrè doctrinal framework.
Prefaces
No separate front-matter preface in the jicheng.tw exemplar. The work opens directly with the first wèn–dá pair.
Abstract
The Ryūkyū kingdom (1429–1879) maintained tribute relations with Ming and Qīng China and sent regular missions to the Fuzhou Liúqiúguǎn 琉球館, where Ryūkyūan students received medical training and Ryūkyūan diplomatic envoys consulted Chinese physicians. The present Liúqiú wèndá qíbìng lùn is one of the textual products of this medical exchange — recording the Chinese-physician advice on a specific clinical question raised by a Ryūkyūan side. The catalog meta records no author; internal evidence — the use of standard SòngYuánMíng formulary terms (六君子湯, 苓桂朮甘湯, 養胃湯, 大健脾湯, 五苓散, 分消湯, 導水茯苓湯, 分心氣飲, 三和散), the absence of any Wēnbìng or kǎojù-medical specialized vocabulary, and the explicit Ryūkyūan voice — places the work in the eighteenth or first half of the nineteenth century, before the 1879 annexation of Ryūkyū by Meiji Japan. The work is preserved digitally at jicheng.tw.
Historiographical significance: the Liúqiú wèndá qíbìng lùn is one of the most useful single texts for studying the Qīng-period Chinese-Ryūkyūan medical exchange through the Fuzhou Liúqiúguǎn — and for the broader question of how Chinese physicians adapted the classical Sùwèn / Jīnguì diagnostic-therapeutic framework to a Pacific-island clinical environment with characteristic humid-tropical disease presentations. Comparable Korean-Chinese (e.g. via Liáodōng tōngshì) and Vietnamese-Chinese medical exchange texts have received more scholarly attention; the Ryūkyū vector is less-studied.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Liú-qiú wèn-dá qí-bìng lùn located. For Ryūkyūan-Chinese medical exchange see Watanabe Miki 渡邊美季, Kinsei Ryūkyū to Chū-Nichi kankei 近世琉球と中日關係 (Tōkyō: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2012); Gregory Smits, Visions of Ryukyu (Hawaii, 1999); on the Fuzhou Liúqiú-guǎn see Mizuno Norihito 水野紀仁, Ryūkyū-Min kankei-shi no kenkyū.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the very few primary Sino-Ryūkyūan medical exchange texts preserved in the jicheng.tw digital corpus — and the most substantively medical (as opposed to diplomatic-administrative) of these.
Links
- No identifiable individual authors.
- Kanseki DB
- 琉球問答奇病論 (jicheng.tw)