It is much easier to say what Carla Nappi's The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China is not than trying to describe what it is. It is definitely not—and thank goodness for that—a traditional biographical essay on Li Shizhen, probably the greatest pharmacologist of premodern Chinese history. Neither is it a detailed philological analysis of the Bencao gangmu, or “Systematic Materia Medica,” Li Shizhen's magnum opus and since its publication in Nanjing in 1596 the most influential encyclopedia of natural knowledge in East Asia until the affirmation of Western science in the second half of the nineteenth century.

True, The Monkey and the Inkpot focuses on Li Shizhen's life and work. As such, it is a much-awaited monograph that fills a gap in the historiography of East Asian science in the premodern period. The importance of Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu and its impact on East Asian cultural history was enormous. It constituted the basis of all subsequent pharmacological treaties produced in East Asia and inspired the development of a flourishing field of natural history in early modern Japan. It claimed to include “all that is known,” including all plants, animals, minerals, and monsters, whether or not they had practical value as pharmacological substances. “The book,” wrote Needham, “is a pandectal treatise on mineralogy, metallurgy, mycology, botany, zoology, physiology and other sciences in its own right” (Joseph Needham, Lu Gwei-djen, and Huang Hsing-Tsung, Botany, in Science and Civilization in China, Volume VI.1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], p. 312).

Nappi's The Monkey and the Inkpot pays due respect to the legacy of Li Shizhen's scholarship. It offers a lively portrait of the social trajectory of Master Li: after failing the civil examination—“like 95 percent of the candidates empirewide,” as Elman reminds us in his fundamental On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 30)—Li dedicated his life to the study of medicine and wanted his Bencao gangmu to prevail against “the confusion which persisted in the pandects of pharmaceutical natural history.” From 1556 he began traveling to the most important drug-producing provinces to collect and study specimens and medicaments. Bencao gangmu was completed in 1587 with a total of 1895 entries (275 minerals, 446 animals, 1094 plants). Thirty years of research, experiments, observations and exchanges with field physicians, agriculturalists, and wealthy literati did not only produce the most comprehensive encyclopedia of natural knowledge in the world: as Nappi explains in Chapter 1, they also contributed to make of Li Shizhen a naturalist who created new ways of conceptualizing and manipulating natural species.

With Borgesian flare, Nappi gives us a taste of Li Shizhen's opus by teaching us what to make of dragon's bones and the healing powers of bezoar stones. But she does not intend to merely titillate our curiosity of the strange and the exotic: a much more ambitious plan lies behind the agile and witty narrative of The Monkey and the Inkpot. Nappi's aim is, in fact, to show “the pulses and mechanics of knowledge-making with all of its inconsistencies and revelations” (p. 7). By “localizing” the epistemology of the Bencao gangmu in the language, numbering, letters, institutions, practices, decision-making, rules of persuasiveness and truth-claiming of Ming China, she succeeds in revealing the logic behind the “styles of reasoning” characterizing intellectual exchanges in early modern East Asia.

Contrary to Borges and Foucault, Nappi is not just enticed by the sense of alienation that exotic classificatory systems trigger. She was able to disenchant Li's system by unveiling its peculiar inherent logic. This is evident in the second half of the book, where Nappi focuses on the importance of change and transformation in natural substances. Li Shizhen accepted the metaphysical notion according to which the essential properties of everything existing resided in the permutation of the fundamental principles that constitute them, yin, yang, and the Five Phases (wu xing): earth, water, fire, metal, and wood. In the case of natural objects, these permutations were the source of their medicinal properties. Needham recognized an affinity of Li's system to the Aristotelian scala naturae. As Nappi rightly argues, however, a conspicuous difference distinguished Li Shizhen's view from the Aristotelian one. Aristotle's “elements” (stoicheion) were in essence static and eternal. The Five Phases were on the contrary dynamic and transformative: “One Heraclitean constant informed the Bencao [gangmu]: nothing was constant. Transformation and processes of change were ubiquitous” (p. 140). Human intervention, therefore, acted precisely in channeling the inherently transformative power of nature.

To conclude, do not be misled by Nappi's light prose. Her book offers one of the most brilliant and penetrating investigations of the deep cognitive parameters of early modern Chinese scientific discourse: as such, it is a must-read for anybody interested in the comparative history of the early modern world.