Economic plants of ancient North China as mentioned inShih Ching (Book of Poetry)

Abstract

Bretschneider (2) once commented that most of the plants mentioned in the Chinese classics could safely be regarded as native to China. Unfortunately, he furmlished a list of classics including such works as Sheng-Lung Herbal and Er Yah; the former is attributed to Sheng-Lung, a Chinese mythological king who was regarded as the founder of Chinese Agriculture; the latter is a sort of dictionary to the classics, said to have been compiled by a student of Confucius, Tzu Shah. The credibility of both books is highly questionable. The present article is limited to an account of plants of economic importance, the names of which are recorded in Shih Ching, a classic said to have been edited by Confucius, and frequently quoted in his Analects. It had been translated into the English language under the titles, 'Book of Poetry' (9), 'Book of Songs' (15), 'Book of Odes' (6), and so forth. The transliteration of the Chinese ideographs of plant names into English in this article (see Tables I & II) follows Karlgren's "Book of Odes" (6), so are all the quotations of the original poems. The Latin and common names of the plants are all based on Bailey's Manual of cultivated plants (1). This article is an English summation of a paper written by the author (7) in Chinese, with full documentation from various Chinese and other sources, and only selected references are given at the end of this article. Controversial points such as the interpretation of certain plant names, homonymy and synonymy in Chinese nomenclature, etc., are not elaborated in this English version. When the tyrannical Emperor of the Ch'in dynasty, Shih Huang Ti, issued his edict for the destruction of classic works (around 213 B.C.), Shih Ching shared the calamity with all the others. However, the poems collected in the book, 305 in all, were fortunately very nearly recovered decades later, and one of the plausible explanations is that their preservation depended on the memory of scholars more than on their inscription upon tablets and silks. The late Dr. Hu Shih, a celebrated Chinese historian, philosopher and statesman, observed (5) that the only book which preserved the most reliable ancient Chinese historical materials is Shih Ching. He cited the following well-known stanza from a poem (193. Shi Yue chi kiao or 'At the conjunction in the tenth month') in the book as an example.