King of Flowers: Reinterpretation of Chinese Peonies in Early Modern Europe
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Journal of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science Volume 3 (no. 1) 2021 https://journals.troy.edu/index.php/JSAHMS/ King of Flowers: Reinterpretation of Chinese Peonies in Early Modern Europe Richard Zhang, MA MD Student, Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Email: [email protected] Abstract This work argues that the introduction of Chinese peony variants into early modern Europe not only incorporated them into a new, systematic, and universalizing taxonomic body of knowledge, but also accompanied a narrowed translation of their uses that exemplified agnotology, or culturally-induced ignorance. Cultivated in China at least since the Tang Dynasty, both herbaceous and “tree” peonies traditionally enjoyed important medicinal applications and symbolic purposes there, in addition to serving as ornamental garden flowers. Yet, their introduction into Europe beginning in the late eighteenth century by naturalists such as Sir Joseph Banks saw their use confined, albeit popularly, to the latter ornamental use. This research draws upon classical bencao texts of Chinese medicine, early modern correspondence, and printed books to capture how different cultures may utilize and construe the same material objects in markedly contrasting ways. Additionally, quotes from early modern physicians such as Menuret de Chambaud and John Floyer help illustrate European confusion and disregard for concepts from the Chinese worldview such as qi, which likely contributed to medicinal understandings of Chinese peonies not traveling with the actual plants themselves into Europe. This work finally references lately-emerging pharmacologic literature on peonies to support biomedical inquiry into traditional medical materials worldwide, for the potential benefit of broader patient populations. Keywords: natural history, Chinese medicine, peonies, botany, bioprospecting Introduction April 1787: With its flowers fallen, and now wholly packed for shipment, a “Mou-tan” plant was loaded on board the London for a voyage into the unknown.2 Here in coastal Guangzhou, Qing China, Scottish surgeon-naturalist Dr. John Duncan managed to procure the Mou-tan “tree” peony I would like to thank Professor Paola Bertucci (Yale University, Department of History) and my cohort friends at Yale University for expanding my knowledge of natural history and supporting my work on peonies. 2 Joseph Banks, The Banks Letters: A Calendar of the Manuscript Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks Preserved in the British Museum, the British Museum (Natural History) and Other Collections in Great Britain, ed. Warren Dawson (London: British Museum, 1958), 282. JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 within months of being assigned to find it. He had for several years by then, with the assistance of a local British resident named Bradshaw, worked in Guangzhou as part of a global network that collected and shipped natural specimens to the renowned Sir Joseph Banks, soon-to-be-president of The Royal Society.3 Duncan had enjoyed modest successes, such as sending back red and white water lilies. He also experienced disappointment when he could not find out how the Chinese cultivated or prepared the hemp plant. Yet, in the case of the Mou-tan, Duncan was sending home what would prove to be a winning specimen. Receiving the live tree peony in England during the same year, Sir Joseph Banks soon displayed it at Kew Gardens.4 The plant’s huge prominence in Chinese medicine and poetry did not concern Banks, but it was beautiful, just like in glowing accounts from Pierre Martial-Cibot and other missionaries—accounts that had attracted Banks’ attention to the tree peony in the first place.5 With its lush pink petals, sweet perfume, and fortunate lack of thorns, the Mou-tan ascended to prompt fame.6 Though Duncan’s delivered peony did not live for long, it was followed by another shipment of the same type in 1794, of which three survived.7 Tree peonies soon became planted to popular delight in other European royal gardens as well. Other variants of Chinese peony would follow, to achieve similar ornamental renown in the West. As within other naturalist networks centered in eighteenth-century Europe, Sir Joseph Banks corresponded with far-flung links of assisting naturalists, like Dr. Duncan, to obtain global flora and fauna and attempt to epistemologically assimilate them as scientific information.8 Some specimens such as the tree peony would come to again enjoy ornamental fame in their new European home, but often much indigenous knowledge about species was lost in translation. Indeed, from Guangzhou, at least 1,500 years’ worth of Chinese understanding of the mudan (transliterated by Banks as Mou-tan) went weakly transmitted, with much of it failing to take root in England, unlike the actual plant itself. This work argues that the introduction of Chinese peony variants into early modern Europe not only incorporated them into a new, universalizing system of taxonomic knowledge, but also, through shedding much medicinal, culinary, and symbolic understanding of the peonies, exemplified agnotological, or culturally-induced ignorance. I. Peonies of China: The Practical and the Magnificent Over thirty species of peony have seeded, expanded, and beautifully bloomed throughout world history.9 Not always conceptualized by humans as intrinsically related, the two broad categories of non-hybrid peonies—the herbaceous and the tree variants—were first classified together under the taxonomic genus Paeonia by eighteenth-century European naturalists. As the more common of the two variants, herbaceous peonies such as P. lactiflora comprise low-growing, 3 Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20. 4 Alice Harding, The Book of the Peony (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1917), 200. 5 John Claudius Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, Vol. 1 (London: printed by the author, 1838), 252. And, Joseph Dehergne, “Une Grande Collection: Mémoires Concernant Les Chinois (1776-1814),” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 72 (1983): 284. 6 Sandra Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration (Toronto: Firefly Books, 2003), 63. 7 Harding, The Book of the Peony, 200. 8 Joseph Banks, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, ed. Neil Chambers, Vol. 3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 9 Ji Lijing, Qi Wang, Jaime Teixeira da Silva, and Xiao Yu, “The Genetic Diversity of Paeonia L,” Scientia Horticulturae 143 (2012): 62–74. Page | 42 JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 vascular plants predominantly native to China, the Mediterranean portions of Europe and the Middle East, and North America’s Pacific coast. Eight species of peony fall under Sir Joseph Banks’ scientifically christened P. moutan section, comprising the tree category of woody- stemmed, flowering shrubs. These tree peonies are all indigenous to central and southern China.10 Distinguishing between the two types aids an understanding of the historiography of the peony in pre-modern China, where natural knowledge understood the shaoyao (芍藥: herbaceous peony) and mudan (牡丹: tree peony) as separate plants, without a taxonomic system to group them into a common genus.11 Yet, the two variants both served prominent medicinal, dietary, symbolic, and aesthetic roles for many centuries in classical China. Cultivated in gardens there for over a millennium, with some mudan variants domesticated at least since the seventh-century C.E. during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.), Chinese peonies shared a resplendent, ancient heritage which naturalist networks centered in early modern Europe would come to admire, though not grasp the entirety of.12 The visual beauty and brilliance of shaoyao and mudan did not preclude their wide-scale, pragmatic applications to human bodies. Like their ancient Mediterranean counterparts, such as P. officinalis, which featured in Greco-Roman and Islamic materia medica, and with sometimes strikingly similarly described indications, Chinese variants of peony started to appear in key medicinal texts even before their extensive domestication in gardens.13 Further yet, the actual earliest incorporation of these plants into local herbal knowledge presumably predated their earliest textual appearances. The very etymologies of Chinese peonies convey their deep-rooted associations with human health: the second character of shaoyao, 藥, refers to a medicinal drug, while the second character of mudan, 丹, traditionally also referred to, among many meanings, a prepared medicinal substance. The authoritative Shennong Bencao Jing (third-century C.E.) represented the earliest extant bencao (本草), or classical Chinese compendium of medicinal natural knowledge.14 Its 365 catalogued medicinals included the red peony root, described as controlling the malevolent qi force to alleviate abdominal pain, poor blood flow, and urinary retention.15 As with many references to peonies in later bencao, this description framed the herb through a contemporary understanding of qi (氣), the vital force that comprised and linked all entities in the universe, had complementary yin and yang elements, and whose elements’ imbalance or disruption in humans could manifest as illnesses, among implications for many fields.16 From early on, evidently, peonies and their parts enjoyed specific indications and interactions with important cosmological ideas in their 10 Zhi-Qin Zhou,