Mapping the Bencao

This article uses GIS mapping to plot the historical locations known for producing Chinese material medica recorded in a text with three historical layers. On the basis of these plots, it argues that: early Chinese pharmacology emerged not from the central plains but along the Yellow River Corridor, from the Bohai Sea through to Chang’an and then beyond, into the Sichuan Plain, and that the drug exchange network may have emerged through stepwise local trading between these sites, as along the Silk Road; these sites are not necessarily biotopes specific to where the drugs grow, but sites of “drug production,” which enter these natural products into circulation; the activity at these sites consists of sociotechnical operations that translate these materials across diverse technical domains, facilitated by drug names as a key marker; and, finally, that comparing these geolocated drug names to terms within excavated recipe literature may indicate a likelihood of the regional origin of certain texts. The Tianhui recipes from Laoguanshan appear to be representative of local drug cultures from northeast China.