a. “Traditional Books” in the Context of New Media

Missionaries who required material media to facilitate proselytization across the vast Chinese imperium were the first to introduce new print forms and new print technologies to the Chinese audience. The former included periodicals and newspapers, the latter letterpress and lithography.Footnote ¹ While the importance of lithography, which I will turn to in a moment, has been largely ignored, it was the expansion of letterpress technology that fuelled the rapid expansion of the new media and that has come to define our understanding of this era.

China's first periodicals were edited and printed by missionaries. These included periodicals in English, the first being Robert Morrison's China Monthly Magazine published in Malacca in 1815. They eventually also included Chinese-language periodicals that not only spread missionary and international news but also introduced new fields in the Western sciences. Liuhe congtan 六合叢談 (Shanghai Serial, 1857–58), and the Gezhi huibian 格致彙編 (translated in different periods as The Chinese Scientific Magazine, The Chinese Scientific and Industrial Magazine, between 1876 and 1892 with some interruptions) are two prime examples. Excerpts of the Gezhi huibian were further disseminated through the pages of the highly influential Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報 (Review of the Times), a Protestant missionary publication in print from 1874 to 1907 with an interruption of six years between 1883 and 1889.Footnote ² Less well known Jesuit periodicals such as the Yiwenlu 益聞錄 (Record of Useful News), published from 1879–1911, also disseminated new scientific ideas.Footnote ³ The Chinese readership of even these Chinese-language publications seems to have been minimal, however. Only eight percent of subscribers to the Liuhe congtan were Chinese, for example (Elman Reference Elman2005, 299).

These new print technologies also spawned a plethora of general-interest media that were often published by foreign merchants rather than missionaries. China's first Chinese-language daily newspaper, Shenbao 申報 (Shanghai News), was founded by a British tea merchant in 1872. By 1937 some 1,500 newspapers – dailies, weeklies, and monthlies – had been published in Shanghai alone.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, the number and subgenres of periodicals increased exponentially over the early years of the twentieth century – including literary journals, entertainment journals, pictorials, and women's journals.Footnote ⁵ The trajectory of women's journals offers one example of the proliferation of this form of media: an estimated 44 were published in China and Japan between 1898 and 1911, another 30 appeared between 1912 and 1915, and close to 250 more by the late 1930s (Maeyama 1995; “Fu (Appendix) 3.

Scholars have been increasingly attentive to more downmarket forms of these new media such as pictorials, entertainment journals, and women's journals.Footnote ⁶ Few have, however, examined the ongoing publication of what Cynthia Brokaw calls “traditional books,” including woodblock texts, in this period of new media proliferation. Brokaw has argued that the lack of research on these traditional materials – which include wanbao quanshu – in studies of new media in the Republican period has limited our understanding of the early twentieth-century print world. A fuller appreciation of the enduring importance of the “geographically broad and socially deep” late imperial woodblock print culture would also greatly nuance received narratives of radical ruptures in late Qing and early Republican culture.Footnote ⁷

I extend Brokaw's argument to include lithograph printed as well as wood-block printed books, and to encompass the main publishing market of Shanghai where “traditional books” continued to thrive alongside new media. I further emphasize that these texts offer glimpses not only into a separate, co-existing print culture but into the broader knowledge culture. Information – including scientific information – traveled in the late Qing and early Republic from “traditional” texts to new media, and from new media into revised “traditional” texts. We cannot fully understand the network of knowledge circuits in this period without taking these kinds of texts – most notably here wanbao quanshu – into account.

b. Publication of Wanbao quanshu

Wanbao quanshu served as sources of pragmatic, usable, everyday knowledge from the inception of the genre in the late Ming dynasty. The compilations were originally designed to valorize and textualize a form of knowledge that was distinct from traditional learning (xueshu 學術) and to engage a demographic of readers that was largely separate from the office-seeking literati (Wang Cheng-hua 2003, 6). Shifting the focus of leishu 類書 or category books from politically-relevant knowledge to quotidian information, they often referenced daily use (riyong 日用) in their titles and addressed their broadened audience through accessible prose and the inclusion of abundant illustrations (Wei Shang 2005, 68, 72). The genre of myriad treasures continued to evolve during the next three centuries in ways that reinforced this commitment to practical daily knowledge.Footnote ⁸

By the late Qing dynasty a plethora of small commercial publishers not only reprinted but also expanded and updated editions of what had become the dominant version of wanbao quanshu by the late nineteenth century, the Zengbu wanbao quanshu 增補萬寶全書 (Expanded Comprehensive Compendium of Myriad Treasures) with a preface by Mao Huanwen 毛煥文 (fl. 1720) dated 1739.Footnote ⁹ These publishers include the Shanggu shanfang 尚古山房, Qixin shuju 啟新書局, Guangyi shuju 廣益書局, and Saoye shanfang 掃葉山房, together with numerous other presses so fledgling that their names only appear on a handful of texts and are nearly impossible to trace. While only a few of these publishers initiated significant changes to the original Mao Huanwen text, numerous others reprinted the updated editions using new means of technological reproduction. These shifts in both technology and structure reflect forward-looking confidence in the ongoing relevance and marketability of the genre.

From at least 1894, these commercial publishers shifted from woodblock printing to lithography – the process of manually or mechanically printing texts from slabs of limestone upon which characters or images were drawn using chemically-treated greasy ink or crayon.Footnote ¹⁰ The publishers who adopted this new technology were the first to invest in significant quantities of foreign printing machinery and the first to promote a mechanized, Western-style form of printing in China (Reed Reference Reed2004, 89). They used this new technology to reprint existing works including not only wanbao quanshu but a range of texts, most prominently aids for civil service examination candidates and medical works – the lithographed genres that have received the most attention to date.Footnote ¹¹ This new method of reproduction also enabled publishers to make highly marketable textual innovations including the production of pocket-sized or “kerchief” editions (jinxiang ben 巾箱本, xiuzhen ben 袖珍本).Footnote ¹² More compact and portable, these lithographed texts were also cheaper than woodblock editions, ensuring that lithograph publishers would quickly supplant woodblock publishers (Reed, 89).

The wanbao quanshu publishers who turned to lithography from the mid-1890s simultaneously made significant changes to the content of the compendia. Already from the Xianfeng era (1850-61) the 30 juan of the original Ming compendia were reduced to twenty.Footnote ¹³ While some earlier content was thus eliminated, from the 1890s publishers introduced new social and political content into the remaining 20 juan. Post-1911 editions detail the political and civic changes that heralded the new Republican regime in 1912, for example. These included changes to the macro-category of “Social Conduct” (Renji men 人紀門), the third of the three macro-categories used in all great historical Chinese encyclopedias.Footnote ¹⁴ The new content describes the investiture of the Republican president, Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859-1916), the new Republican dress code, and rituals pertaining to the new practice of enlightened marriage (wenming jiehun 文明結婚). One “newly revised edition” features a portrait of the Prime Minister of the new Republic from March to June of 1912, Tang Shaoyi 唐紹儀 (1862-1938), on its cover.Footnote ¹⁵

The clearest evidence of the commitment of wanbao quanshu publishers to accommodate new useful knowledge is, however, the addition of a series of supplements starting in 1894. For the first time in the genre's over three-hundred-year history during which revised information had been repeatedly added and obsolete information deleted from within the compendia's existing categories, publishers appended a series of additional juan to the core texts. These supplements signal that editors considered it possible to “fill in” what was missing from the wanbao quanshu’s core juan. Rather than jettison the entire epistemic structure, they could add to what was perceived as an originary lack.Footnote ¹⁶

These supplements conformed to the ruling editorial principle of Chinese leishu including wanbao quanshu: they were compilations of other texts rather than original works. Most, but not all, of the source texts for material in the supplements were published in the nineteenth century; the source on botany which I discuss in more detail below was an exception in that it dated from the early Qing dynasty. These source texts were generally handbooks of various kinds written by those with practical skills and experience. The majority (with the text on botany again being an exception) directly or indirectly address the ramifications of the foreign-Chinese encounter in the post-Opium war period. There is no clear epistemological link between the various supplements – again similar to the contents of the main body of the wanbao quanshu, but without even the façade of the overarching macro-categories. The first three include information on foreign coins, trade, commerce and Shanghai, addressing what would have been merchant concerns. The next two on plants and animals, and magic tricks offer instruction on leisure time activities and include what could be considered proto-scientific content. The final supplement which seems to have been added in 1906 includes a short section on prognostication followed by two sections on health: one on Western approaches to health maintenance and the second on how to cure an opium addiction. I discuss both of these further below.

It is difficult to determine how many editions of these expanded wanbao quanshu circulated in the late Qing and early Republic but between those I have seen and examined in various libraries in East Asia (nine editions), those featured online (three editions), and those mentioned in advertisements and catalogues (nine editions), it is clear that there were well over 20 editions of wanbao quanshu in print between 1894 and at least 1928.Footnote ¹⁷ It is also difficult to get a precise sense of circulation numbers. Disparate evidence suggests that these were high. Given the general resistance to archiving texts such as wanbao quanshu which are widely considered to be of lowly cultural value, the fact that one or two editions can be found in most municipal and major libraries in China and Japan suggests their abundance as does a trove of uncatalogued materials I was able to access in Beijing. Anecdotal evidence indicates that it has been most common to find extant post-1894 editions of wanbao quanshu in old bookstalls in recent years. One collector describes the relative profusion of “Republican lithographed editions” with the standard 20 juan, and 6 supplementary juan (Xiao Yifei 2011). This suggests that these post-1894 or even post-1906 expanded texts were produced in significantly greater numbers than other late nineteenth-century editions.

There is also evidence that some editions were published outside of Shanghai and that these various texts circulated in other parts of the country. One compendium was published in the “Northern Warlord Area” (Beiyang junfuqu 北洋軍閥區) and this very text was used as a source by a contemporary scholar researching currency in the southern province of Guangdong in the late Qing dynasty (Chen Jingxi 2002, 207).

c. Readers of Wanbao quanshu

While it is difficult to accurately assess the circulation of wanbao quanshu it is even more challenging to determine the readership for these texts. Much of what we can surmise about the consumers of wanbao quanshu has to be gleaned from the materiality of the texts themselves, from their paratexts including advertisements, and from other disparate references. The picture that emerges is of common readers who were driven by the need to find practical information, rather than of model readers who were encouraged by reformers and officials to consume politically sanctioned new knowledge. Demographically, these common readers would have included residents of China's burgeoning metropolises and smaller urban centers who were equipped with basic general literacy, straddling the worlds of “full” and “fragmented” literacy.Footnote ¹⁸ More specifically, these perusers of wanbao quanshu would most likely have been low-level bureaucrats and merchants, workers, and housewives of modest means.

These common readers were not the model readers of new media invoked by reformists, revolutionaries, and radical intellectuals, from Liang Qichao's 梁啟超 (1873-1929) calls at the turn of the twentieth century for new citizens (xin guomin 新國民) to read newspapers and new fiction (xin xiaoshuo 新小說), to May Fourth activists’ calls for readers to consume new literature (xin wenxue 新聞學) imbued with the wisdom of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”Footnote ¹⁹ Nor were these common readers model students. Rather than attend the new-style schools established from 1904 where they would have been exposed to new learning through new-style textbooks, they were most likely schooled in “old-style primers” – the Sanzi jing 三字經 (Three Character Classic), the Baijia xing 百家姓 (One-hundred Names), the Qianzi wen 千字文 (Thousand Character Classic), various zazi 雜字 character texts, and/or wanshi buqiuren 萬事不求人書 (myriad matters you won't need to ask) collections which incorporated many elements of the earlier primers.Footnote ²⁰ These texts, which constituted the building blocks of the common readers’ literacy, were used for instruction in old-style private schools (sishu 私塾) or for informal or self-instruction in the home.

While these rudimentarily-educated common readers may have had an interest in the news, they would have been more likely to get it from xiaobao 小報 – the entertainment or mosquito press – rather than from mainstream newspapers. And while they most certainly enjoyed reading fiction, they would have been more likely to turn to illustrated serial books (lianhuantu 連環圖) than to the less familiar – in terms of both content and grammar– new fiction or new literature. Similarly, these common rather than model readers would have sought information relevant to the conduct of their daily lives not from new compendia of Western learning but from the more culturally legible and pragmatically grounded wanbao quanshu.Footnote ²¹

As the title of the compendia suggests, these texts offered myriad treasures to a myriad of readers: one text could serve many readers or satisfy a single reader's divergent needs. The wanbao quanshu could inspire with wonder about mythical beings and fantastical inhabitants of foreign countries; they could instruct in performing status by offering knowledge of painting, calligraphy, and epistolary protocol; and they could entertain with tips on how to perform a magic trick or win a game of pitchpot.

Most significantly, however, the compendia could also enlighten inquiring readers with practical information on how to track a pregnancy, graft a plant, or cure an opium addiction. It is this practical function of the texts that seems to have been preeminent. This is reflected in the phrase bu qiuren 不求人 which is featured in the Mao Huanwen preface, and which served as the alternate title for wanbao quanshu and as the title of related texts such as wanshi buqiuren, a genre that is still in print today.Footnote ²² The phrase suggests that these texts would furnish readers with epistemological autonomy by liberating them from the need to ask others for information.

This practical function is increasingly emphasized over time. In the original 1759 Mao Huanwen preface which is reprinted verbatim in a number of late nineteenth-century expanded versions of the compendia, readers are told: “If you take [the compilation] and read it (qu er yue zhi 取而閱之) you will have about all [the knowledge/information] that you need (dagai yi ju 大概已具).” (Mao Huanwen 1828, Preface). In the latest of the wanbao quanshu to include a preface, a 1912 edition, the phrasing is slightly, and arguably, significantly changed. Rather than “take the compilation and read it” readers are instructed to take [the book] and use it (qu er yong zhi 取而用之).” Instead of gaining all the knowledge they would need through reading, they would gather necessary information through a quick glimpse at the text. If you take the book and use it, the reader is told, “with one glance you will have about all that you need (yilan dagai yi ju 一覽大概已具)” (ibid., Tianji shuju, Preface).

The frontispiece to this 1912 edition, together with the frontispiece to a 1920 edition further underline this conception of the text as a useful product rather than a storehouse of treasures. The 1912 text announces that it is a “Revised and newly made product” (Xiuzheng xinzhi yongpin 修正新制用品). The cover of the 1920 version similarly declares that it is the latest revised and expanded edition, appropriate for common use in the Republic (zengding zuixin Minguo tongyong 增訂最新民國通用). It further (and repetitively) boasts that it is a newly manufactured product for use in the Republic (Minguo shiyong xinzhi yongpin 民國適用新制用品) (Tianbao shuju 1920).

Such statements beg the question of useful for whom? A variety of paratextual evidence suggests that readers of the wanbao quanshu included low-level bureaucrats and merchants. The original Mao Huanwen preface indicates that the compilation's main audience would be low-level bureaucrats: “those who wait on high-ranking officials (sihou yu gongqing 伺候於公卿) and run around everywhere (benzou yu xingshi zhi tu 奔走於形勢之途) [in search of information], bending and scraping to curry favor (nuyan bixi 奴顏婢膝)” (Mao Huanwen Preface; Shanghai Liuxian shuju 1898, Preface).

This accords well with a series of advertisements that appeared in Shenbao for another edition of wanbao quanshu offered by a pharmacy, the Jindu Tongdetang 京都同德堂. These advertisements depict low-level merchants and officials throughout China clamoring to get copies of the text. They include an employee at the Yangzhou Lisheng Old-style Bank (Yangzhou Lisheng quanzhuang 1895), an official working in the Hanyang Railway Office in Hubei (Hubei Hanyang qianzheng ju 湖北漢陽鐵政局) (Suzhou Yanjiagang, 1895), a representative of the Nanjing Neighborhood Association Office (Jinling baojia ju 金陵保甲局) (Jinling baojia, 1895), and a clerk from the office of the Legal Secretary of Wenzhou prefecture (Wenzhoufu shuxingxi 温州府署刑席) (Jinling baojia, 1895). As with testimonials in advertisements for pharmaceuticals in this period, the veracity of these attestations of enthusiasm for the Tongdetang's compendium is certainly questionable. The kinds of individuals depicted in the advertisements nonetheless reflect the profile of readers the publisher of the wanbao quanshu hoped to attract.Footnote ²³

Advertisements for the Mao Huanwen lineage of texts also appeared in Shenbao. Published in 1894, they state that the revised edition of the text is “popular throughout the land and appeals to the masses (kuaizhirenkou 膾炙人口).” At the same time the advertisements attempt to lend the text legitimacy by stating, “officials and merchants (shitu shanggu 仕途商賈) all have a copy in their houses” (“Shiyin Xiantian” 1894). Advertisements for a Weiwen ge 緯文閣 edition in Shenbao similarly claimed that it was officials and merchants who had urged the publisher to add the newly appended supplements (“Shiyin chongxiao” 1894).

While it is most likely a conceit that high-level officials or merchants would have been avid consumers of wanbao quanshu, it seems those at the lower end of the bureaucratic and commercial hierarchies would have been. These individuals would most likely have considered the information useful in the supplements on recognizing counterfeit coins, negotiating a commercial treaty, or navigating the brothel district of the foreign concessions. They also would have found the texts affordable. A multi-volume compendia of myriad treasures which a household would keep on hand indefinitely cost approximately 8 jiao.Footnote ²⁴ This was comparable to other instructional manuals in the early Republic: a two volume vernacular text on the use of the abacus (Yitian biye baihua zhusuan jiaoben 一天畢業白話珠算教本) cost 1 jiao and an eight volume letter writing manual (Zuixin xiangzhu fenlei chidu kuailan 最新詳註分類尺牘快覽), 8 jiao (Zuixin huitu, backmatter). It was comparatively cheaper than the cost of a new-style periodical: one issue of a late Qing and early Republican women's or fiction journal cost approximately 4 jiao and an annual subscription as much as four yuan two jiao (Judge Reference Judge2015, 18). To put these prices in some kind of perspective, female textile factory workers who would have been less well off than low-level merchants earned a mere 2 to 3 jiao a day in the early Republic (Qin Huirong 1911, 39). A full meal in Shanghai's Zhang Garden which would have been a luxury for these common consumers of wanbao quanshu, would cost as much as 6 jiao (Ge Tao 2003, 57).

The fuzzy picture that we can draw of consumers of the compendia is one of pragmatic, low-level elites who would have absorbed the latest commercial, intellectual, and scientific trends into their daily repertoires to the extent that it made practical sense to do so. While they would have been vaguely cognizant of the introduction of “new learning,” they would not have experienced it as a profound intellectual rupture. Nor would they have viewed the Western knowledge that filtered into the wanbao quanshu supplements as a bounded epistemological category. At the same time, they brought elements of the concerns, predilections, curiosity, and imagination of sub-literate and illiterate members of their community to bear on the ways they conceived of and repurposed new forms of usable knowledge.

a. Scientific Content in the Wanbao quanshu

Compendia editors and common readers did not use the newly circulating terms for science – whether gezhi 格致 or kexue 科學 – to label the useful material in the supplements on managing the natural world or maintaining health.Footnote ²⁵ This material can, however, be deemed scientific if we define science as an intellectual endeavor based on empirical testing and grounded in systematic engagement with the natural world. Scholars from mainland China have recently used the term kexue in asserting that material reprinted in the wanbao quanshu supplements was scientific. They also relate this material to Western methods of determining scientific efficacy such as clinical trials.

This material includes excerpts from a seventeenth-century treatise on plants, Chen Haozi's 陳涅子 (Fuyao 扶搖, Xihu huayinweng 西湖花隱翁 b. 1612 [1615]) Huajing 花镜 (Mirror of Flowers) which were reprinted in the fourth juan of the wanbao quanshu supplements. The Huajing had a long history of republication in East Asia in and beyond the period when systematic botanical knowledge entered China. Woodblock editions of the text were frequently reprinted in China and Japan in the late seventeenth through at least the late nineteenth centuries by which time Carolus Linnaeus’ (1707-78) binomial nomenclature had become a universal practice of botany.Footnote ²⁶ Two illustrated lithographed versions were published in China in 1914.Footnote ²⁷ Typeset editions appeared in 1936 and 1937, a photocopied version in 1956, and an annotated version in 1962 (revised in 1980). Two editions with the same title, Mijuan Huajing 秘傳花鏡 (Esoteric Lore of the Mirror of Flowers) appeared in 2001 and 2002.Footnote ²⁸

Chen originally wrote the text to overcome what he considered to be prevailing ignorance about plants in his time. He criticized his compatriots for being obsessed with either commerce or officialdom while knowing nothing about planting and producing (Shen Yuwu 2010, 49). He was also determined to vanquish the “superstitious” notion that planting had to be restricted to a specific growing season by explaining transplanting techniques (Yi Qinheng [1962] Reference Qinheng1980, 5). His work was based on personal and textual knowledge. This knowledge included his own lifetime experience, and what he had learned from acquaintances who earned a living growing flowers, from friends interested in flowers, and from his critical reading of previous treatises on flowers (huapu 花谱) (ibid., 1). Chen built on and improved these earlier texts by correcting errors and introducing original ideas.Footnote ²⁹ Focused on ornamental plants (guanshangzhiwu 觀賞植物) and fruit trees, his treatise records more than 300 kinds of flowers and fruit trees together with the growing expertise necessary to cultivate them (ibid., 2; Shen Yuwu 2010, 51). His is also the earliest Chinese record of growing and arranging potted plants (Shu Yinglan 2002, 4).

The wanbao quanshu compilers selectively reprinted parts of Chen's 6-juan (section), 110,000-character text. This includes what commentators unanimously consider its “most brilliant” section, the second juan entitled “Eighteen methods for growing plants” (Kehua shiba fa 課花十八法).Footnote ³⁰

Chen's introduction to this second juan explains that plants are a product of their environment: those in the north are able to endure extreme cold while those in the south can tolerate intense heat (Shanggu shanfang 1912, 52a; Shen Yuwu 2010, 50). The juan includes sections on “Methods for expediting the growth of flowers” (Bianhua cuihua fa 變花催花法), “Determining whether or not to use fertilizer” (Peiyong kefou fa 培雍可否法), “Growing new plants from cuttage” (Qiancha yisheng 扦插易生), and “Arranging the soil around transplanted flowers” (Yihua zhuanduo fa 移花轉垛法) (Shanggu shanfang 1912, 56a; 56b). It also includes an important section on “Wondrous methods for grafting plants” (Jiehuan shenqi fa” 接换神奇法) (Shanggu shanfang 1912 54a).Footnote ³¹

In contrast to his “superstitious” forebearers, Chen believed the cultivation of plants shouldn't be limited by the seasons. In the subsection on transplanting in juan 2, he claims that it is possible to transplant and replant at any time (“Yihua zhuanduo fa,” Shanggu shanfang 1912, 57a; Shen Yuwu 2010, 50). He further argues that the very nature of plants could be changed by the skilled cultivator. “Red colored ones can become purple, and small can become large. Those which are sour and bitter can become sweet and those that are malodorous can become fragrant. Man can reverse nature through the process of grafting (wei zai jiehuan de qi chuan er 惟在接換得其傳耳) (Shanggu shanfang 1912, 54a; Shen Yuwu, 50). It was possible, he insisted, to graft plants that were not particularly similar, such as peaches, plums, apricots, and kumquats.

This section on “Miraculous methods for creating hybrids” was not only featured in the wanbao quanshu but also continued to appear – unattributed – in a number of later compendia in the daily-use genre. These include the Guangyi shuju's 1921 Xinbian riyong wanquan xinshu 新編日用萬全新書 (Newly edited completely thorough new book for daily use), Saoye shanfang's 1929 Riyong wanshi baoku choushi bixu 日用萬事寶庫酬世必需 (Treasure-house of all daily things necessary for social relations), and Xinhua shuju's 新華書局 1930 Jiating baike quanshu 家庭百科全書 (Household encyclopedia).Footnote ³² As we will see in the conclusion, this section includes information that mainland Chinese scholars have deemed most scientific in Chen's text: instruction on improving the quality of plant species by crossing particular rootstocks with particular branches.

These sections from the Huajing on grafting were initially included in the first set of supplements added to the wanbao quanshu in the 1890s. The last set of supplements added in 1906 included a cure for opium addiction which, similar to Chen Haozi's text, could be considered scientific.

The cure was published in the wanbao quanshu in the very year that the Qing government launched the first coordinated national campaign of opium eradication in Chinese history – 1906.Footnote ³³ The prescription dates to 1833, however, when the official and anti-opium czar, Lin Zexu 林則徐 (1785-1850), commissioned the doctor He Qiwei 何其偉 (Shutian 書田 1774-1837) to develop a treatment for opium addiction. This cure which He labeled Jiumi liangfang 救迷良方 (Effective methods for ending addiction), would serve as a critical component in Lin's quixotic opium suppression campaign.

He Shutian had explored several different therapeutic methods for ending opium addiction before ultimately formulating the Jiumi liangfang. This treatment may have been one of the first cures based on the substitution method in Chinese medicine (Zhongyao tidai yaowu 中药替代药物), a method of gradually decreasing the dose of one medicine while increasing the dose of another (dijian dizeng 遞減遞增) (Yang, Zhan, Li, Sun 2014, 95). In the case of the Jiumi liangfang this substitution treatment is based on administering decreasing doses of opium ash (yapian yanhui 鴉片煙灰) in a pill called Jisuan wan 忌酸丸, literally “taboo sour pill,” and increasing doses of a restorative Buzheng wan 補正丸 (Repairing and rectifying pill) to gradually boost the addict's qi and liberate him from addiction (Xiao Zhongsheng 2009, 216; Wang Mei 2012, 20). Over the course of the treatment, the addict lowers the amount of Jisuan by one granule (li 粒, the size of a parasol tree seed [wutongzi 梧桐子]) and replaces it with two granules of the Buzheng pill until the Jisuan medicine is completed. He continues to take the Buzheng medicine alone in the last half month of the treatment and for up to another half a year (He Shixi 1984c, 81; He Shixi 1984a, 71; Wang Mei 2012, 20). The Jiumi liangfang also includes prescriptions for two kinds of drinks effective in fighting addiction; one made with pumpkin (nangua 南瓜), a second composed of four key ingredients, opium ash among them (He Shutian 1988, 2543, 2548).

He's cure was widely distributed in various print and manuscript editions, and was included in a repeatedly expanded collection of medical works initially compiled by Chen Xiuyuan 陳修園 (ca. 1753-ca. 1823).Footnote ³⁴ It ultimately became best known, however, through its inclusion in Lin Zexu's June 28, 1838 memorial to the Daoguang 道光 emperor (r. 1820–50), “Chouyi yanjin yapian zhangcheng” 籌議嚴禁鴉片章程 (Discussion of regulations for the strict prohibition of opium). The fourth part of the memorial, entitled “Jieyan duanyin qianhou liangfang zonglun” 戒煙斷癮前後兩方總論 (General discussion of two methods for quitting [opium] smoking and ending [opium] cravings) – the precise title that is used in the wanbao quanshu supplement – features Lin's slightly revised version of the Jiumi liangfang. Half of the memorial – over 2,200 characters out of 5,000 – is devoted to detailing the cure, making the memorial as much a medical work as a petition to the emperor (Lin Zexu Reference Guozhen2013, 184–87).

Lin made some modifications to He Shutian's prescription. He revised the presentation of the two liquid cures and added three ingredients to He's original recipe of fifteen for the Jisuan pill (He Shixi 1984c, 81).Footnote ³⁵ This expanded cure became known as “Lin Wenzhong gong jieyan wan” 林文忠公戒煙丸 (The honorable Lin's pill for quitting opium) and in more colloquial language, “Lin shiba” 林十八 (Lin 1937, 18), referring to the eighteen ingredients in Lin's prescription (Wang Mei 2012, 21; Xiao Zhongsheng 2009, 216).

The popularity of He Shutian's/Lin Zexu's method intensified in 1906 not because of but in spite of the government's anti-opium decree. The regulations the edict gave rise to called on experienced local doctors to formulate opium cures that contained neither morphine (mafei 嗎啡) which was becoming increasingly widespread in China at this time, nor opium ash – a critical ingredient in the Jisuan pills (Zhu Shoupeng 1958, 5570). Local officials at various ranks and in various capacities resisted this stipulation and continued to promote Lin's method as among the most effective in an increasingly crowded market of available cures for opium addiction. These included various therapies that medical missionaries had been promoting for decades, together with a plethora of newly minted patent medicines, many of which were morphine-based.Footnote ³⁶ Lin Zexu's prescription continued to be published and promoted through this period, not only in the wanbao quanshu supplement, but in articles and advertisements in the commercial periodical press, and in fiction (Lin Yiqing [1932, 1996] 2002, 193).Footnote ³⁷ The Lin Shiba therapy was also prominently featured in quasi-official journals used to advance the Nanjing Government's efforts to completely eradicate opium from 1936. These include the Jinyan banyuekan 禁煙半月刊 (Fortnightly journal of opium suppression), and the Sichuan jieyan yuekan 四川禁煙月刊 (The Sichuan anti-opium monthly) (“Huiyi jilu”; “Lin Wenzhong Gong jieyan liangfang” 1936).

He and Lin's original formulations of the cure, together with its repeatedly reprinted versions, include a lengthy discussion of the physiology of addiction. Late Qing and early Republican promoters of the treatment generally emphasize its empirical validity rather than its theoretical principles however. Following Lin Zexu who highlighted the treatment's empirical efficacy in his memorial, later texts often use a recurring trope–“repeatedly tested” (lüshilüyan 屢試屢驗)” –to assert the cure's superiority. (Lin Zexu Reference Guozhen2013, 187).Footnote ³⁸ Shanghai officials who endorsed Lin Wenzhonggong jieyanfang, insisted that other manufactured medicines that had not been vetted as Lin's cure had, must undergo laboratory testing (huayan 化驗) to ensure that they were not harmful “fake medicines” (“Daopi zhaolu” 1907).

The sections of the wanbao quanshu supplements on the opium cure and the Huajing made no references to Western knowledge. The only entry to do so appears in the top register of the final juan (which also includes the opium cure). In the table of contents to some editions the entry is entitled “Important Western Methods for Maintaining Health” (Taixi yangsheng yaofa 泰西養生要法). It is, more accurately, a small collection of practical tips largely drawn from two Western-inspired texts: Jiachen riyong baoshu 甲辰日用寶書 (The 1904 daily digest), a Catholic missionary digest, and Taishi shiwu congkao 泰西事務叢考 (Reference work on Western affairs) (Huibao guan 1904; van Hée Reference van Hée1903).Footnote ³⁹ Topics include methods for cutting glass (jian boli fa 剪玻璃法), for avoiding blisters when walking a long distance, and for stamping clothing (yinyi 印衣) (to avoid confusion among garments given to a washerwoman). A few items relate to animals: the period of gestation for pregnant animals, ways to kill mice, and a new method for killing domestic animals. A number offer instruction on new everyday technologies: the need for light in schools with an excursus on different kinds of light, techniques for washing clothing with soap and for storing fresh eggs (jiucang xiandan 久藏鮮蛋). The precise method for the latter includes making a limestone sauce, spreading it over the surface of the eggs, and placing them in an airtight earthenware jar (Qixin shuju ca 1912, 6: 22a).

Similar to the wanbao quanshu supplement entries on opium addiction and plants, this short entry on preserving eggs also had an afterlife, if a relatively less extensive one. The method for preserving eggs is repeated word for word in the April 26, 1933, edition of the entertainment journal Linglong 玲瓏 (Petite). It appears in a short piece that includes two other kinds of practical instruction (not featured in the wanbao quanshu): how to prevent ink from blotting and four ways to efficiently use waste (“Jiucang”).

b. Approaches to Chinese Science

These sections of the wanbao quanshu supplements raise questions about the very nature of science and how it is to be understood in a non-Western and specifically in a Chinese context. If we define science as Western works on biology, physics, and chemistry translated into Chinese in missionary publications in the late-nineteenth century, in commercial periodicals in the early twentieth century, and in Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshu guan 商務印書館) book series in the Republic, we have to question the inroads this science made into the broader reading culture in this period. Containing often illegible transliterations and numerous foreign terms, circulated in relatively expensive print formats, and often containing abstract knowledge, such works highlight the paradoxical conception of science as uniquely public and highly exclusive (Shapin and Schaffer Reference Shapin and Schaffer2011). How accessible, attractive, or relevant was this translated, abstract science to someone who was most concerned with, for example, keeping eggs in the pantry from rotting or getting his opium addiction under control? And if tacit thought is integral to all knowledge, how can allegedly detached, objective scientific knowledge imported from the West be successfully integrated into Chinese epistemology?Footnote ⁴⁰

Focusing on the constitution and dissemination of practical, everyday information in the wanbao quanshu rather than the assimilation of theoretical, Western-derived ideas requires an approach to science that emphasizes the local production of knowledge. Characterized by systematic engagement with the natural world, this approach offers new perspectives on the history of Chinese science, “ethno-scientific” approaches to knowledge formation, and the study of the “popularization” of science.

Recent work in the history of Chinese science has sought to sideline “the Needham question” (posed by Joseph Needham [1900-95], British scientist and author of the multi-volume Science and Civilization in China): Why did a divided Europe rather than imperial China develop modern science first? Rather than focus on notions of failure or time lag, these scholars highlight what scientific “dead ends” reveal about the dynamism of Chinese epistemologies and historical processes.Footnote ⁴¹ We can push this position further by asking why China did not need to have a scientific revolution. Were existing bodies of natural knowledge, of botany and health, for example, sufficiently dynamic and permeable to serve practical human needs even in the context of the imperialist technological challenges China faced from the mid-nineteenth century? While not denying the critical importance of, for example, bio-medicine in reducing Chinese infant mortality rates, an examination of the kinds of useful knowledge disseminated in daily-use texts suggests the need to resist a rigidly bifurcated understanding of universally valid Western science and uniformly backward Chinese knowledge.

Viewing knowledge from the vantage point of wanbao quanshu also contributes to efforts to place ethno-science on the same footing as Western science (Burke Reference Burke2016, 114). This approach asserts that early Chinese “botanical knowledge,” for example, has to be analyzed from an anthropological rather than a teleological point of view, not as the pre-or proto-scientific stage of modern science, and not as part of any “fundamental continuity and universality of all science” as posited by Needham. Only after a situated assessment of the specific historical, cultural, and social context that produced a body of knowledge has been made can any comparison to modern science be attempted; or not, as the danger of such comparisons lies in flattening or familiarizing the distinctiveness of certain individuals’ very particular relationship to the natural objects around them (Métaillié Reference Métaillié2007, 66, 48, 83, 84).

A close examination of the scientific or ethno-scientific content of the wanbao quanshu, further complicates notions of the popularization of science. Scholarship in this field to date has generally been done by historians of the West: even studies that claim to look “beyond borders” do not stray from the European continent.Footnote ⁴² While these works tend to focus on relatively advanced readers of journals or books devoted to science popularization, the process is different when we examine common readers who encountered selected items of imported scientific knowledge in daily-use materials.Footnote ⁴³

The vantage point of the wanbao quanshu also encourages us to not exclusively trace downward processes of popularization characteristic of studies of Victorian popular science but to probe horizontal or even upward processes through which local empirical texts traveled across genres and time, and interacted with Western scientific ideas. This is the case for the Huajing which served as a source text for the 1918 Zhiwuxue dacidian 植物學大辭典 (Botanical dictionary), one of the first scientific Chinese encyclopedias to appear at the turn of the century. A trilingual dictionary of botanical terms (Chinese, Latin, Japanese), the Zhiwuxue dacidian adopted the Linnean system of plant classification. At the same time, it included brief philological accounts of the original Chinese texts – including the Huajing – that recorded information about particular plants. In referencing historical works such as Chen's Mirror of Flowers, the Botanical Dictionary thus breaks down seemingly universal botanical knowledge and displays the polycentric origins of such knowledge (Meng Reference Meng2006, 52–60).