Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts

Abstract

Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen (eds), Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts , London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. Pp. 472. £85. ISBN 0415342953. Dunhuang in the seventh to tenth centuries was an outpost in China's far northwest, a town that everyone heading into or out of Central Asia passed through. In the hills outside the town grew up a vast array of Buddhist cave monasteries. One of these caves, built in the 860s, held a host of manuscripts, paintings and artifacts. Unknown persons sealed it up for unknown reasons c . 1035. It preserved its contents until, at the turn of the twentieth century, a monk sold them to archeologists and explorers who carried them off to England, France, Russia, Japan and other countries, with the remainder going to Chinese private and government collections. Although the largest portion is Buddhist devotional writing, 74 of those that survive cover health care topics from various medical, pharmacognostic, religious and mantic perspectives.