Bamboo Slip Medical Manuscripts Excavated from Tianhui Township, Sichuan

Abstract

Since 2014 our team of scholars at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS) has been transcribing and analyzing the 951 bamboo slips excavated from the Laoguanshan tomb site at Tianhui. The team includes Liu Changhua 柳长华, Gu Man 顾漫, Zhou Qi 周琦, Luo Qiong 罗琼, and Liu Yang 刘阳. The lead author of this article, who is the former director of the Institute of Chinese Medical History and Medical Literature at CACMS, is the principal investigator. What follows is a report of our work on the six different manuscripts we identified among the tomb M3–121 bamboo slips and a preliminary analysis of their content and its formation. The texts from Tianhui were copied in the early second century BCE. They thus give us invaluable insight into how medical literature was compiled and edited during the course of the Han dynasty in the century before Liu Xiang (77–6 BCE) and Li Zhuguo (fl. ca. 26 BCE) compiled their bibliographic treatise on books on medicine and diagnosis in the Han imperial library.