Virtuosity and Orthodoxy

This chapter picks up the transformation of bencao in post-Conquest Jiangnan. It highlights the vocal critics of amateur authors and considers the ways in which the Qing state’s cultural policy over the eighteenth century shaped the now-marginalized field. The chapter explains that with the Qing reforms in government and culture came a parallel, albeit less pronounced, reconfiguration of natural studies within Confucian learning. The centrality of pharmacy and the nature of drugs in the pre-Conquest years also came under intense questioning in postwar decades. In a move that was hardly premeditated, the Qing rulers found themselves in the company of new allies from the elite strata of literati and physicians who were championing a new approach to the field of bencao.