Féngshì jǐnnáng mìlù 馮氏錦囊秘錄
Master Féng’s Secret Records in a Brocade Pouch by 馮兆張 Féng Zhàozhāng (zì Chǔzhān 楚瞻, fl. late 17th – early 18th c., Wǔyuán 武原 / Hǎiyán 海鹽, Zhèjiāng).
About the work
A fifty-juǎn early-Qīng comprehensive medical encyclopaedia — one of the principal bridges between the late-Míng gāngmù synthesis (Wáng Kěntáng, Wǔ Zhīwàng) and the imperially-sponsored Yīzōng jīnjiàn 醫宗金鑑 of 1742. The work is organised by sub-discipline: internal medicine, paediatrics, gynecology, shānghán 傷寒, wàikē 外科 (surgery), pulse-diagnosis, and materia medica. Féng’s clinical-doctrinal positioning is explicitly synthetic: he combines the late-Míng Xuē Jǐ / Zhào Xiànkě Mìngmén warming-tonifying tradition with Lǐ Dōngyuán’s Píwèi doctrine and Zhū Dānxī’s zīyīn (yin-supplementing) approach, framing the synthesis under the Nèijīng’s authority. The gynecology section was extracted and separately circulated as the Nǚkē jīngyào 女科精要 (KR3ei018).
The title-metaphor — “brocade pouch” (jǐnnáng 錦囊) — alludes to the literary topos of the strategist’s brocade-pouch containing emergency contingency plans (cf. Zhūgě Liàng 諸葛亮’s jǐnnáng miàojì 錦囊妙計) and is here transferred to the physician’s strategically-organised reference resource.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries: (i) the publication preface of 張士甄 Zhāng Shìzhēn of Lùhé 潞河 (the Tōngzhōu 通州 / Běijīng region), dated Kāngxī bǐngyín 康熙丙寅 = 1686, mid-autumn, written from his Yāntái 燕臺 (Běijīng) residence; Zhāng narrates that Féng came to him at the capital in the summer of yǐchǒu 乙丑 = 1685, after a successful itinerant practice through eastern and western Zhèjiāng, and showed him the manuscript — which Zhāng then commissioned to print under his patronage. Zhāng frames his preface as a defence of medical learning against the dictum “yī zhě yì yě” 醫者意也 (“medicine is a matter of intuition”) attributed to Xǔ Sìzōng 許嗣宗, arguing that intuition must rest on full textual mastery; (ii) Féng’s own self-preface, which lays out the work’s doctrinal scope and clinical genealogy.
Abstract
The work’s composition was a multi-decade undertaking — drafts circulated as early as 1685–86 (the date of Zhāng Shìzhēn’s preface and Féng’s first capital visit), with the full 50-juǎn version conventionally dated to Kāngxī 41 / 1702 in modern Chinese reference works. We bracket the work 1686–1702. The work was extensively reprinted in the Qīng (the 1702 editio princeps was followed by numerous Qiánlóng-era reprintings) and was a standard reference in the late-Imperial jiāchuán 家傳 medical-family practice. The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese (Edo-period) reprinting.
Féng Zhàozhāng is not in CBDB; his Hǎiyán origin and clinical career are known only through Zhāng Shìzhēn’s preface and the work’s internal evidence. CBDB has no record. The fifty-juǎn scope, the synthesis of multiple doctrinal traditions, and the systematic by-discipline organisation make this one of the most ambitious individually-authored medical encyclopaedias of the early Qīng.
Translations and research
No European-language translation of the Féng-shì jǐn-náng mì-lù located. For the early-Qīng medical encyclopaedic tradition and its synthesis of late-Míng materials see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition (Eastland, 2007); Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics (Routledge, 2011).