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20 Chasing the Vermilion Bird: Late-Medieval Alchemical 20 ChasingtheVermilionBird:Late-MedievalAlchemicalTransformationsin The Treasure Book of Ilkhan on Chinese Science and Techniques Vivienne Lo 羅維前 and Wang Yidan 王一丹 Edward Schafer’s 1967 title, The Vermilion Bird, was partially completed 1307 to 1316. Even though this is a work dedi- a trope to convey Tang (618–907) Chinese images of the cated mainly to Mongolian history it is also the earliest tropical south as a mysterious, exotic, sensual, and there- history of the world to aspire to cultural inclusivity and fore dangerous, realm. One of its many manifestations was includes the stories of Adam, the Buddah, Moses, as well the red planet Mars emerging from the velvet black of the as Mohammed, and lists Chinese rulers from Pangu 盤古, tropical night. To the medieval Chinese it was the spirit the first mythic king, to the Song and Jin emperors. This ‘Anger of Red Sparks’ or the ‘Dazzling Deluder’. His place is inclusive world history seems to be an intellectual reflec- in the ‘Southern Quarter’… . The Fire red God is embodied tion of the political ambitions, administrative techniques in a Vermilion Bird… . The northward drift of the sun, inhabited by a red crow (a cousin of the Vermilion Bird), and the cosmopolitan tastes of Rashīd al-Dīn’s Mongol to its ultimate goal, the Tropic of Cancer… .1 leaders, tempered with his own experience of the diverse worlds of the Ilkhanate. The Vermilion Bird was custodian of the night sky, emblem Rashīd al-Dīn also masterminded the earliest extant of the southern constellations. Like the other si xiang 四 monograph about Chinese medicine to be produced to 象, the animals of the four directions that we know from the West of China, the Tansūqnāma-i Īlkhān dar funūn-i Han astronomical/astrological traditions, it also lived ‘ulūm-i Khatā’ī (The Treasure Book of the Ilkhan on Chinese within the viscera of the medico-religious body in China, Science and Techniques, hereafter Tansūqnāma); dated determining human health and well-being. Our Vermilion anno Hegirae 713 (1313). Tansūqnāma contains substantial Bird for, example was a nervous, flighty, creature who lived tracts of translation that provide a rich resource for ana- in the Heart and determined a person’s essential stability. lysing the process of interpretation through which remote This chapter draws on others in this volume to highlight the ‘ethnic’ medical ideas were assimilated to the knowledge overlapping registers of medicine, religion and astronomy of an ever-expanding Islamic universe. that made these multiple animal transformations possible Rashīd al-Dīn faced many challenges as he set about (See Despeux, Chapter 2; Zhang, Chapter 27, in this volume). reconciling Chinese and Persian religious realities as they It will then analyse what happened as the Vermilion Bird related to medicine. Some of these he resolved creatively, tried to fly West, outside of its Chinese domains, and en- others he decided not to take on. The esoteric traditions countered conflicting Persian beliefs about the landscape of Chinese internal alchemy (neidan 內), as opposed to of the inner body. waidan 外丹, external alchemy, which was concerned with The rise of the Mongolian empire and its four Mongol drug compounding) were steeped in beliefs about the way khanates – the Yuan in China (1271–1368), the Golden spirits and spirit animals inhabited the body and were Horde in Russia (1240s–1502), the Chagatai in Central active in refining bodily elixirs in the pursuit of long life Asia (1225–1607), and the Ilkhans in Iran (1245–1343) – and transcendent states. The imagery associated with these precipitated the largest scale movement of peoples, ideas spirit animals, and particularly the four directional spirits and practices in the pre-modern world. In the diverse of antiquity (the Vermilion Bird in the South, White Tiger political, religious and commercial exchanges that fol- in the West, Blue-Green Dragon of the East, Black Turtle in lowed there was a tension between the pragmatic need to the North), in their association with specific organs of the develop commensurable knowledge that could facilitate body, features in charts directing Daoist meditation and integration of local cultures to the new world order, and healing, as well as more mainstream medical texts (Fig. 1) the desire to maintain local identity and difference. This (See Zhang, Chapter 27; Shin, Chapter 23, Fig. 23.1, in this tension will be illustrated with a study of the reception volume). While Rashīd al-Dīn accepted and copied many of Chinese medical imagery in the translation projects of medical charts from Chinese printed books, he seems not the eminent Jewish court physician and minister Rashīd to have been keen on the spirit animals. We will suggest al-Dīn Tabīb (1247–1318) of Hamadān. some reasons for his hesitation in embracing and copying Among the prolific works of this polymath the most the complete range of Chinese medico-alchemical illus- famous is Jāmi al-Tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) trations into Tansūqnāma, despite the probability that he was familiar with them. 1 Schafer 1967, p. 125. 292 vivienne lo 羅維前 and wang yidan 王一丹 Background Daoist alchemical tradition in China and at the other in the transformations that took place as Chinese illustrations In 1264 Genghis Khan’s grandson Qubilai Khan (r. 1260–94) and text were adapted to a 1313 Persian treatise on blood consolidated Mongol rule in the Middle Kingdom, con- circulation and physiology in late medieval Tabriz. In the troversially establishing their winter capital in the east enterprise of one particular individual vested in building at Beijing. In 1271 he formally inaugurated China’s Yuan bridges for personal survival and academic excellence, dynasty. Geographically speaking, the Mongol empires we find a world that appreciated the power of universal were reaching their zenith, and facing all the inevitable truth yet understood the creative potential that lies in the tensions that come with rapid imperial expansion. In the flexibility of meaning – a world uniquely receptive to the administration of this new world Qubilai learnt well the kind of adaptations that would facilitate knowledge in lessons of a millennium and more of Chinese imperial transit. We will also discover the limits of that creativity. bureaucratic practice, its attention to empire-wide stan- dardisation of coinage, writing and vehicles, in order to a) Travelling Knowledge and Practice ensure smooth operation of the economy, taxation, and Much of our interest in Jāmi al-Tawārīkh lies in the informa- military movements. Accordingly, he commissioned a new tion about Chinese history that Rashīd al-Dīn assimilated script intended to facilitate communication across an ever from Buddhist monks, travellers and scholars. Two Chinese more linguistically diverse people. described in the introduction apparently brought to Tabriz Under the influence of a powerful Tibetan Buddhist, all kinds of historical and other texts, attributed to the aPhags-pa (1235–died 1280), Qubilai Khan announced work of three monks. They had come themselves across Buddhism as the official religion of a multi ethnic, multi the breadth of the well-ridden routes of the empire from religious empire.2 Of the many religions that he had been China and Tibet, through Dunhuang, Kuche, Khotan and exposed to from across Asia, Tibetan Buddhism was Samarkand to Rashīd al-Dīn’s kitabkhāna, the translation probably closest in its ritual and practice to his native workshop and scriptorium that he established in the suburb Mongolian shamanism and the religion of the last great of Tabriz. This centre in the Rab‘-i Rashīdī, with its hospital empire in central Asia.3 and medical school became what Allsen claims was one of Within 30 years, towards the west of the Yeke Mongol the ‘leading cultural clearing houses of medieval Eurasia’.6 Ulus (the great Mongol patrimony) at the Ilkhanid capital The deep entanglement of medicine and religion in of Azarbaijan, Rashīd al-Dīn, following in the spirit of the transcultural history of Central Asia is well known. the times, converted to Islam. Islam was the faith of the Military campaigns had laid the earliest routes through majority of the non-Mongol local population and that of central Asia, but it was trading and religious networks that his patron, Ghazan Khan (1271–1304), whose own conver- really forged enduring links between Persia and China. sion from Christianity on 16 June 1295 had gained him Large translation projects such as those evidenced by the support of the strategic, but more radical, Muslim the Mogao cave library, and the copying and printing of General, Nawrūz.4 Despite Ghazan Khan’s expedient votive and other Buddhist texts were an integral feature of decision to have all his subjects convert to the Islamic programmes of salvation in the medieval Chinese world, faith, and episodic suppression of competing religions and the production of texts concerned with medicine and under his rule, he apparently also practised Mongolian healing was a part of this enterprise.7 Medical knowledge shamanism, worshipped their celestial deity, Tengri, and and practice moved in both directions, east and west, in kept the Mongolian law and traditions. He had a Chinese the form of books, manuscripts, practices and materia Mongolian wife and spoke Chinese, Arabic and ‘Frank’.5 medica. In the 1st and 2nd centuries ce, for example, In the tension between a belief in the efficacy of political, Sogdian trading families with Persian names were active administrative and religious unity and the enduring affin- in bringing Buddhism from the Indo-Parthian kingdoms ities of birth and ethnic identity peculiar to the Mongolian of western India to China. Familes with Persian names empires, we find the background dynamic to our story of dominated the trade in fragrant herbs and their presence medico-religious resistance, assimilation and transfor- in medieval China stimulated the Tang dynasty vogue for mation – at one end of the tale in a 13th and 14th century exotic commodities.8 Some of those Persians were Christian 2 Wylie 1977, p.
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