新修本草
Xinxiu Bencao
The Newly Revised Materia Medica (659 CE), commissioned by Emperor Gaozong of the Tang dynasty, is the world's first government-compiled pharmacopoeia — predating the first European pharmacopoeia by n…
About This Work
The Newly Revised Materia Medica (659 CE), commissioned by Emperor Gaozong of the Tang dynasty, is the world's first government-compiled pharmacopoeia — predating the first European pharmacopoeia by nearly 900 years. Compiled by a team of 23 scholars and physicians led by Su Jing, it systematically catalogued 850 medicinal substances with illustrations, descriptions, and therapeutic applications, drawing on material from across the Tang empire's vast territory. Its production involved collecting specimens from every province, commissioning botanical illustrations, and critically evaluating earlier pharmacological texts. It established the model of state-sponsored scientific compilation that would characterize Chinese scholarship for centuries — testifying to the Tang dynasty's recognition that medical knowledge was a public good requiring imperial investment.
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Why This Matters
This text is part of the living archive of Chinese intellectual achievement — a tradition that produced systematic astronomical observation, mathematical innovation, medical frameworks still in clinical use, and engineering at continental scale, centuries before comparable developments in Europe.
The question "did ancient China have science?" misunderstands what science is. Science is not a single cultural tradition — it is the systematic observation of nature, the rigorous documentation of phenomena, the testing of ideas against evidence, and the building of knowledge across generations. By every one of these measures, the works in this catalogue are scientific. They used different conceptual frameworks — correlative rather than mechanistic, systemic rather than reductionist — but these frameworks produced real knowledge: accurate star catalogues, effective medical treatments, precise calendar computations, and technologies that transformed civilization.