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.

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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, “Taxonomy, Geographic Distribution and Ecological Habitats of Tree Peonies,” Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 53, no. 1 (February 2006): 11–22. 11 Fan Chengda, Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea: The Natural World and Material Culture of Twelfth-Century China (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011), 89. And, Teruyuki Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan 牡丹 and the Tree Peony in Early China,” Asian Medicine 5, no. 1 (January 2009): 108–45. 12 Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan.” And, Wang Ying, “A National Flower’s Symbolic Value During the Tang and Song Dynasties in China,” Space and Culture 21, no. 1 (2017): 46–59 13 Efrayim Lev and Zohar ’Ama, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2008), 235. 14 Zhongzhen Zhao, Ping Guo, and Eric Brand, “A Concise Classification of Bencao (Materia Medica),” Chinese Medicine 13 (2018): 1-4. 15Asaf Goldschmidt, Medical Practice in Twelfth-Century China: A Translation of Xu Shuwei’s Ninety Discussions [Cases] on Cold Damage Disorders (Basel, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 31. 16 Jung-Yeup Kim, Zhang Zai’s Philosophy of Qi: A Practical Understanding (Lexington Books, 2015).

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 descriptions, supporting the plants’ long-time, serious consideration by practitioners of Chinese medicine. Mainstream bencao texts in later centuries developed this Chinese way of valuing peonies. Commissioned by the Tang Dynasty, the Xinxiu Bencao (659 C.E.) contained one section listing mudan among various materials with essentially “cold” properties, ranging from rhubarb to antelope horns.17 As a “cold” herb per the contemporary cosmological logic, mudan could counteract yang-favoring inner imbalances of qi, and was indicated in the text for conditions provoked by such type of imbalance, including stroke, epilepsy, and skin ulcers.18 Shaoyao, of which the earlier Shennong Bencao Jing’s red peony root was a material derivative, was listed as a “mildly cold” material in the Xinxiu Bencao.19 Its listed indications again included alleviating abdominal pain and improving blood flow and urination, showing marked consistency with those of the red peony root recorded over four centuries earlier. The monumental works Zhenglei Bencao (1108) and Bencao Gangmu (1596) further preserved and added to these medicinal understandings of Chinese peonies. Examples of increasingly refined indications included those of shaoyao in treating postpartum women’s abdominal pain in the Zhenglei Bencao, and of mudan—still described as “cold”—alleviating pediatric seizures in the Bencao Gangmu, which now also assigned indications such as inflammation and rheumatism to shaoyao.20 Yet, many previous indications were carried into the Bencao Gangmu unchanged. Entering the early modern period, China’s bencao, which transmitted classical knowledge, did not encounter serious epistemological challenges on the level that their Greco-Roman counterparts in Europe did from skeptical, early Renaissance naturalists. As explained by Bianca Maria Rinaldi, the strong continuity of prestigious Chinese culture enhanced its increasing completeness of botanical descriptions, but discouraged radical departures in inquiry, such as empirical methods being eagerly developed in early modern Europe by naturalists who carefully re-examined familiar as well as new plants in search of generalizable, defining principles of natural classification for all flora.21 Furthermore, unlike in early modern Europe where botany increasingly became redefined as a science separate from medicine, Chinese scholarly inquiry into plants continued to prioritize cataloguing plants alongside their therapeutic properties, thus solidifying materia medica like the Bencao Gangmu as authorities on natural knowledge. Hence, therapeutic descriptions of shaoyao and mudan that crystallized over thirteen centuries’ worth of bencao, but whose classification methodology did not drastically change, exemplified a Chinese approach to natural knowledge that would have diverged greatly from Europe’s by the time Sir Joseph Banks imported the P. moutan. Smaller, more specialized, and yet intriguing, non-bencao medical texts throughout Chinese history included peony-derived materials as pharmaceuticals. In some of these texts, which, unlike bencao, focused more on cataloguing human diseases than natural materials themselves, the plants only appeared in the context of treatments assigned to each type of illness. Liu Juanzi’s Ghosts’ Remedies (劉涓子鬼遺方), written by Gong Qingxuan at a time (499 C.E.) when inter-dynastic

17 Su Jing, Xinxiu Bencao, Vol. 2, 659, https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E6%96%B0%E4%BF%AE%E6%9C%AC%E8%8D%89. 18 Xianjun Fu, Lewis Mervin, Xuebo Li, Huayun Yu, and Jiaoyang Li, “Toward Understanding the Cold, Hot, and Neutral Nature of Chinese Medicines Using in Silico Mode-of-Action Analysis,” American Chemical Society 57, no. 3 (2017): 468–83. And, Su, Xinxiu Bencao, Vol. 8. 19 Su, Xinxiu Bencao, Vol. 2. 20 Tang Shenwei, Zhenglei Bencao, Vol. 30, 1083. And, Li Shizhen, Bencao Gangmu, Vol. 52, 1578. 21 Bianca Maria Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste”: Jesuits and Europe’s Knowledge of Chinese Flora and Art of the Garden in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Munchen: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006), 87-88.

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 warring caused frequent injuries among the Chinese, prescribed analgesia, hemostasis, and other procedures in addition to 140 medicinal preparations for a wide variety of skin infections.22 Such medicines included both shaoyao and mudan.23 A much later example, which illustrates continuity of non-bencao references to peonies, could be found in Sun Simiao’s Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea (銀海精微) from the fifteenth century.24 Describing etiologies, symptoms, and treatments for every ophthalmologic disease known to Ming Chinese healers, this work listed red and white peony root derivatives of shaoyao as drugs, and even indicated mudan as one substance in treating far-sightedness.25 Evidently, Chinese peonies received acknowledgement as remedies or ingredients of remedies even in less canonical medicinal works, supporting their pervasive recognition as therapeutic throughout Chinese society. Apart from serving well-established medicinal purposes, derivatives of Chinese peonies sometimes entered human bodies for dietary reasons. Confucius (551—479 B.C.E.) was reported to have enjoyed eating foods with sauce made from white peony root.26 Furthermore, of the two variants of delicate, “white tea” produced in Fujian province for over 1,000 years, the white mudan tea was derived from parts of its namesake, peony.27 Most remarkably, shaoyao and especially mudan both appeared in the fascinating Jiuhuang Bencao from 1406.28 Written by a Ming scholar- prince, and despite being named a bencao, this work catalogued hundreds of Chinese wild plants as emergency foods for times of famine. Hence, the manifold Chinese peony had a tremendous, practical form. Sealed into the national canon of herbal knowledge by all major volumes of bencao, and assigned to treating specific, common diseases by smaller works, the shaoyao and mudan became familiar to human consumption even to the point of recognition as reliable famine foods. Visually resplendent, these flowering plants also retained powerful symbolic and aesthetic roles in their homeland. Together with medicinal and dietary applications, the Chinese peonies’ symbolism would predate by many centuries, though not survive, the narrowed translation of the plants in Europe. The mudan acquired its lasting regal status among China’s flora during the Tang Dynasty. Known mostly for its medicinal qualities prior to then, the increasingly court-approved mudan gained the transient status of national flower, and even the lasting cultural title of “King of Flowers” (花王).29 It also became popularly known as the “flower of wealth and honor” (富貴花 ).30 Under the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690—705 C.E.), the city of Luoyang acquired its lasting distinction as a cultivation center of tree peonies.31 Prices of the plant also skyrocketed as

22 Zhenguo Wang, Ping Chen, and Peiping Xie, History and Development of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 1999), 274. 23 Gong Qingxuan, Liu Juanzi’s Ghosts’ Remedies (劉涓子鬼遺方), Vol. 5, 499AD. 24 Sun Simiao, Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea (銀海精微), 15th century. https://zh.wikisource.org/zh- hans/%E9%8A%80%E6%B5%B7%E7%B2%BE%E5%BE%AE. 25 Sun Simiao, Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea. And, Marta Hanson, “Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea: The Yin-hai jing-wei: A Chinese Classic on Ophthalmology. The Chinese Medical Classics. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care by Jürgen Kovacs, Paul U. Unschuld,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 123-125. 26 Ikhlas Khan and Ehab Abourashed, Leung’s Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients: Used in Food, Drugs and Cosmetics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 178. 27 Helen Saberi, Tea: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 13. 28 Zhu Xiao, Jiuhuang Bencao, Vol. 3 and Vol. 8, 1406. 29 Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan 牡丹 and the Tree Peony in Early China,” 109. 30 Christopher Cumo, Encyclopedia of Cultivated Plants: From Acacia to Zinnia (Denver, CO: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 784. 31 Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration, 63.

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Chinese flocked to buy them, not unlike those of over-purchased tulips in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.32 The mudan received further, extensive praise from the emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-756 C.E.) and especially fashionable status during the Zhongtang period (766-835 C.E.), when brilliant rows of the plant adorned imperial palaces in Chang’an.33 Compared to the orchid and lotus, which were planted alongside it in classical landscape gardens, and which respectively symbolized nobility and curiosity, the mudan would for centuries onward represent magnificence and luxuriance.34 Generations of influential Chinese poets and artists extolled the tree peony as well. The prolific and highly-esteemed Li Bai (701-762 C.E.) paired the plant’s desirability with that of the extraordinarily beautiful, imperial consort Yang Yuhuan in a set of three poems. The quite flattering poems, which contributed to the mudan’s symbolic promotion to national flower, ended with:

His Majesty’s love of both of you can never be otherwise than eternal, Because he would, from now on in his leisure hours, nothing do But the two of you to woo.35

In an even more famous poem, “To the Tree Peonies,” Liu Yuxi (772-842 C.E.) ended by writing that the eponymous plants’ unfolding was “bound to turn the imperial capital raptly astir.”36 Lu Shusheng (1509-1605), a scholar-official of the Ming Dynasty, wrote the poems “Mudan,” “White Mudan,” and “Buying Mudan,” which celebrated the plant’s red and violet brilliance.37 Furthermore, watercolor painters and ceramics makers visually celebrated the tree peony across centuries, well before the time of Sir Joseph Banks. This is evidenced by tenth-century works such as Zhao Chang’s Mudan Painting, named after the magnificently blooming specimens of the tree peony it captured (figure 1).38 A clear, classical corpus of creative work vigorously shaped an opulent meaning of tree peonies in China, whose complexity a strict focus on scientific assimilation of nature might not easily appreciate during later centuries. Furthermore, while the more-medicalized shaoyao featured less prominently than the King of Flowers did in Chinese culture, it also retained symbolic value. Just as its woody-stemmed counterpart connoted magnificence, the herbaceous peony represented romantic love in classical China.39 Some shaoyao whose flowers were yellow, a color symbolizing wealth, commanded both an aura of luxuriance and a literal price on par with those of mudan, which typically far exceeded

32 Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration, 63. 33 Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan 牡丹 and the Tree Peony in Early China,” 108. 34 Guanzeng Zhang, and Lan Wang, Urban Planning and Development in China and Other East Asian Countries (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2018), 80. 35 Ying, “A National Flower’s Symbolic Value,” 48. 36 Ying, “A National Flower’s Symbolic Value,” 48. 37 Jiang Tingxi, ed., Gujin Tushu Jicheng, Vol. 554, 1725, https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/Page:Gujin_Tushu_Jicheng,_Volume_554_(1700- 1725).djvu/37#%E3%80%8A%E7%89%A1%E4%B8%B9%E3%80%8B%E8%96%9B%E8%95%99. 38 Zhao Chang, Mudan Painting (牡丹圖). Tenth century. Silk painting. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zhao_Chang_-_Tree_Peony.jpg. 39 Paul Kroll, ed., Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2014), 124.

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Figure 1: Mudan Painting (牡丹圖), a tenth-century silk painting by Zhao Chang that captured the brilliance of tree peonies in bloom. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. red and violet-flowered shaoyao in value.40 Rivaling Luoyang’s traditional linkage with mudan, the southern city of Yangzhou became lastingly associated with shaoyao production and decoration at least as early as 1079.41 The latter plant adorned ancestral memorial hall gardens in classical Yangzhou, and a particular Zhu family there aided the city’s image by displaying 50,000 specimens of the flower when they bloomed.42 Artists also created cultural associations with the herbaceous plant. In his elegant poem “Rose” (月季), the Song-era polymath Su Shi (1037—1101) associated the mudan with the spring season, and the shaoyao with early summer.43 The poem “Shaoyao” by Yuan-era writer Ma Zuchang (1279—1338) compared the beauty of silk-clad ladies with that of Yangzhou Purple, a shaoyao variant.44 Painter Yun Shouping (1633-1690) honored the diverse beauty of herbaceous peonies in multiple works, such as Five Colors of Shaoyao Painting (figure 2).45 Evidently, China’s shaoyao occupied a symbolic niche that long predated,

40 Daqiu Zhao, Mengran Wei, Min Shi, Zhaojun Hao, and Tao Jun, “Identification and Comparative Profiling of MiRNAs in Herbaceous Peony (Paeonia Lactiflora Pall.) with Red/Yellow Bicoloured Flowers,” Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 1-13. 41 Lucie Olivova, and Vibeke Ordahl, Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009), 85. 42 Olivova and Ordahl, Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou, 85. 43 Yanghua Peng, Flowers and Trees by the Poets (詩人筆下的花草樹木), 2018. 44 Jiang Tingxi, ed., Gujin Tushu Jicheng, Vol. 541, 1725, https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/Page:Gujin_Tushu_Jicheng,_Volume_541_(1700-1725).djvu/13. 45 Yun Shouping, Five Colors of Peony Painting (五色芍藥圖), Eighteenth century, Painting, Cleveland Museum of Art, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yun_Shouping_-_Peonies_-_1967.192_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art.tiff.

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 but was massive enough to not easily accompany the plants’ transplantation into early modern Europe.

Figure 2: Five Colors of Shaoyao Painting (五色芍藥圖), a seventeenth-century painting by Yun Shouping that celebrated the visual diversity of its eponymous flowers. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Altogether, the rich representations of Chinese peonies aided imperial governance as well. Chinese emperors maintained their legitimizing Mandate of Heaven to rule by asserting their own intelligence, generosity, and cultural competence.46 Not unlike contemporary kings throughout early modern Europe, Qing emperors carefully cultivated their public images as capable and refined through varied means, including displaying artwork of symbolically-imbued objects at court. These ranged from watercolors of peacocks which signaled the emperor’s familiarity with and control over the birds’ Central Asian homeland, to silk thangka paintings that replaced lotuses in Tibetan Buddhist scenes with Chinese-symbolizing shaoyao, implying the emperor’s close relationship with Tibet.47 Both shaoyao and mudan featured prominently in such symbolic paintings and ceramics used by the imperial state.48 Furthermore, as explained by Daniela Bleichmar, naturalist art commissioned by empires could make “nature movable, knowable, and— ideally—governable.”49 In a territorially expanding China, forever-blooming peony illustrations comprised some of many visualizing tools that recorded, tracked, and celebrated diverse natural

46 Kristen Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers, and Other Things at the Qing Court,” Word & Image 34, no. 4 (2018): 388. 47 Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers,” 388–406. 48 Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers,” 399. 49 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5.

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 resources. As not only symbols of luxuriance and love, but also abstracted markers of imperial legitimacy and mastery over regions, peonies had a tradition of impacting Chinese people far from where the flowers actually grew. All of this cumulative medicinal, culinary, and symbolic understanding existed alongside peonies’ simple ornamental use in classical China. While herbalists might cook red peony root into medicinal concoctions, or poets might contemplate the brilliant purple bloom before them, well- off scholar-officials or merchants could plant mudan seedlings in their gardens with purely aesthetic reasons in mind.50 Come each spring or early summer, the sheer lushness and fragrance of flowering peonies would favorably compare with those of other garden plants. The mudan and shaoyao might not have been universal with regards to how Chinese from different professions analyzed their appearance, but they overall appeared beautiful to observers in some kind of natural capacity. Such sensual beauty could accompany the peonies wherever they went. Yet, a literal millennia’s worth of epistemological and cultural associations would have more difficulty traveling abroad with the plants, as will be next discussed.

II. European Translation, Incorporation, and Agnotology

The first surviving mudan that reached Sir Joseph Banks in 1787 soon awoke Europe to Chinese peonies. Captain James Prendergast transported the violet P. rockii variant of tree peony to England in 1802, where it became grown in gardens of prominent gentlemen like Sir Abraham Humes.51 A shipment of P. moutan reached France’s Jardin de la Malmaison in 1803, which led to specimens reaching more of continental Europe.52 Furthermore, P. lactiflora, the most common variant of the herbaceous shaoyao, reached Kew Gardens via Sir Joseph Banks by 1805, where it joined its woody-stemmed cousin there.53 These were not the West’s earliest exposures to Chinese peonies, as colonial gardens in Virginia had grown them as early as 1771, but well-connected European naturalists could now rapidly disseminate knowledge about the plants as well as the beloved plants themselves.54 By 1838, the comprehensive Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum would report the “beautiful” P. moutan as widely “propagated in the principal nurseries of Europe and America.”55 Naturalism in Europe had by the 1780s evolved for over two centuries. Its refined, Linnaean taxonomical approach to classification—rigorous, systematic, and generalizable to the world’s flora and fauna—could be traced back to inklings of skepticism towards the accuracy of Greco- Roman herbal classics among Renaissance physicians, such as Niccolo Leoniceno.56 Incorporating more of the world’s organisms within a shared and all-encompassing body of taxonomic knowledge, prominent eighteenth-century naturalists headquartered in Europe, such as Sir Joseph Banks, now directed vast networks of correspondents abroad, who furnished back natural specimens. Indeed, per his extant letters of scientific correspondence between 1786 and 1787, Sir

50 Cumo, Encyclopedia of Cultivated Plants: From Acacia to Zinnia, 784. 51 Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration, 68. 52 Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 252. 53 Steven Foster and Chongxi Yue, Herbal Emissaries: Bringing Chinese Herbs to the West: A Guide to Gardening, Herbal Wisdom, and Well-Being (Rochester, Vermont: Healing Arts Press, 1992), 202. 54 Foster and Yue, Herbal Emissaries, 202. 55 Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 250. 56 Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 30-34.

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Joseph Banks enjoyed assistance from specimen-collecting naturalists in localities as far apart as Naples, Russia, and the East Indies.57 Flora from all of these locations, China, and elsewhere underwent meticulous inspection by Linnaean taxonomists who produced new epistemological linkages among them. Examinations of similar reproductive organs and nutritional systems justified lumping together different species into common orders and genera.58 Yet, inter-species similarities discerned by taxonomists may not always have been recognized beforehand by indigenous observers. Despite P. moutan and P. lactiflora’s shared incorporation into the genus Paeonia, they appeared to have been understood as unlike species in their homeland. Their Chinese names did not share characters or radicals in common. Furthermore, they occupied asymmetric and separate positions in symbolism and culture, with the King of Flowers enjoying the lion’s share of titular, poetic, and artistic renown. Crucially, within various bencao that focused on cataloguing national herbs, the mudan and shaoyao received very different indications and associated impacts on qi. Bencao creators, as explained by Carla Nappi, categorized plants according to flavor, medicinal potency, seasonality, and many other qualities, but seldom according to anatomy as eighteenth-century European naturalists did.59 Hence, Chinese peonies collected by early modern European naturalists were first reinterpreted in an organizational sense. Arguably, beyond predominantly ornamental appropriation, this successful scientific incorporation of P. moutan, lactiflora, and rockii comprised a partial symbolic victory for European naturalism. Early modern botanists and their successors worked towards an intellectual conquest of the world’s natural resources. Similar to Qing emperors who displayed vivid portraits at court of faraway peacocks and peonies, Western taxonomists who acquired new flowers, analyzed their stamens and pistils, and placed them into specific entries within a grand body of natural knowledge could lay claim to mastery over distant flora. Gargantuan losses of symbolic heritage accompanied the narrowed translation of Chinese peonies: among countless examples, the mudan did not retain its kingly status at Kew Gardens, nor did shaoyao become a common subject of Neoclassical or Romantic paintings. Yet, like the “Plagianthes” ribbonwood and Gynandra vegetable that Swedish correspondent Olof Swartz mentioned to Sir Joseph Banks in 1787, the renamed Chinese peonies added their bit to the sum magnificence, prestige, and triumph of European natural knowledge.60 After their arrival and dissemination in Western royal gardens such as at Kew, Chinese peonies lost their encoded medicinal associations. Eastern Mediterranean materia medica up to the 1500s did list epilepsy and visceral ailments among indications for the P. officinalis species— worn as a necklace—native to the region, and as late as 1678, Nicholas Culpeper’s School of Physick prescribed “half an ounce [of white wine] with Peony-water one ounce” daily for epilepsy.61,62 However, European medicinal use of P. officinalis, or any peonies, appeared to have soon become confined to sporadic folk use. William Lewis’ The New Dispensatory (1753) listed Mediterranean but no Chinese paeonia variants, and even then derided those medicinally using paeonia as “absurd enough to believe that the root of this plant would do by being only worn about

57 Banks, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, 205-263. 58 Staffan Muller-Wille, “Linnaeus and the Love Life of Plants,” in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 305–18. 59 Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 28. 60 Banks, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, 316. 61 Lev, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah, 236. 62 Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s School of Physick: Or the Experimental Practice of the Whole Art (London, 1678), 460.

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 the neck.”63 Post-introduction into Europe, and perhaps with partial contribution from Paeonia’s overall decline in medicinal use there, P. moutan and P. lactiflora did not see textual incorporation into key medicinal texts anywhere comparable to that of China’s thirteen centuries’ worth of bencao and supplementary works. William Lewis’ later, authoritative The Edinburgh New Dispensatory listed P. officinalis but not P. moutan or P. lactiflora among the many pharmaceutical herbs of its 1789 and 1808 editions.64 As late as 1838, the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum described P. moutan as having “no use,” “but as an ornamental flowering shrub.”65 Such hinted at the practical absence of Chinese peonies in the prescriptions of trained European physicians. Out of popular exotic interest, though, a limited number of Chinese medicinal recipes that could have included peonies were translated for lay European readers by eighteenth-century Jesuits like Jean-Baptiste du Halde.66 Exoticism, nonetheless, implied more of a fashionable reinterpretation of Asian material culture than serious manipulation of herbs to alleviate abdominal pain, urinary retention, and seizures as in China. Applications in Europe hence clearly remained confined to the ornamental. Broadly, the narrowed translation of knowledge about Chinese peonies comprised an exemplary case study of agnotology, or the study of culturally-induced ignorance. As observed by Londa Schiebinger, cases of incomplete transmission of natural knowledge to Europe could result from a “mix of deliberate and inadvertent neglect.”67 Prospectors of South American flora, for example, extracted the nutritious potato and malaria-quelling cinchona bark, both of which gained easy acceptance among Europeans who benefited from them, but the abortifacient peacock flower did not reach pharmacopoeias that served an increasingly anti-abortion Europe.68 Likewise, English naturalists collected Chinese peonies for display in their royal gardens just as Qing imperial gardens had used them, but for many entangled reasons selectively neglected the medicinal and symbolic purposes the flowers had served for millennia. Difficulty translating Chinese writings contributed to large-scale ignorance. Lacking common Germanic, Romance, or even Indo-European origins with European languages, classical Chinese posed unfamiliar writing conventions and cultural assumptions to Western agents. Jesuit missionaries, the only mid-eighteenth-century Western scholars permitted by the Qing to visit remote Chinese provinces, work in imperial gardens, and collect floral specimens, could not finish translations of the bencao into European languages.69 As reported by Jean-Baptiste du Halde, the Jesuits experienced difficulties translating and identifying what Chinese terms referred to. An exasperated Francois Xavier Dentrecolles lamented as well his troubles navigating the organizational structures of bencao, which did not sort materials by anatomical structure.70 In comparison, much Chinese medicinal-botanical knowledge about peonies had been conveyed

63 William Lewis, The New Dispensatory (London: J. Nourse, 1753), 174. 64 William Lewis, The Edinburgh New Dispensatory (London: Charles Elliot, 1789), 246. And, William Lewis and Andrew Duncan, The Edinburgh New Dispensatory (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1808), 411. 65 Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 252. 66 Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste,” 90. 67 Londa Schiebinger, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study),” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1- 33. 68 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 150-193. 69 Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste,” 81. 70 Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste,” 89.

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 centuries earlier to scholars of Korea and Japan, states familiar with the Chinese writing system.71 Given that materia medica as well as poetic works embodied classical understandings of Chinese peonies, many medicinal and symbolic ideas about shaoyao and mudan could not be conveyed if their meaning-laden sources did not reach Europeans in romanized form. Contrasting ways of understanding the world also perplexed and deterred many Europeans trying to grasp cultural concepts relevant to peonies’ medicinal use. Translations often failed to convey sophisticated Chinese concepts: for instance, qi could literally translate into “air” just as it could denote a richly meaning-imbued, vital force linking together humans and their surroundings. When poor translations intersected with European physicians’ lack of familiarity with Chinese cosmology, the resulting confusion led to cases such as a mid-nineteenth-century Dr. Lamprey in Tianjin scoffing at Chinese “absurd notions of attributing diseases to wind, breath, water, or sweat,” substances the Englishman appeared to have mentally reduced qi to.72 As the efficacy of shaoyao was strongly tied to its impact on imbalanced qi as early as in the Shennong Bencao Jing sixteen centuries before, these misinterpretations hint at the sheer difficulty Western doctors had in assimilating native medicinal knowledge about the Chinese peony. Some eighteenth-century European physicians spoke bluntly about Chinese medical thinking’s impenetrability. John Floyer proclaimed that “Asiatics have a gay, luxurious imagination.”73 Menuret de Chambaud contrasted European precision in health discourse with the “allegorical style” of China’s medicinal texts.74 With regards to agnotology, even if Chinese health indications for peonies reached early modern Europe in some written form, the disconnect between Chinese and Western worldviews—and thus medical rationales—hindered their serious informing of European physicians. Finally, botany’s distinctness as a scientific discipline contributed towards culturally-induced ignorance regarding Chinese peonies. By the late eighteenth century, European botany had departed substantially from its Renaissance intertwining with medicine, even though incoming plant specimens were often appropriated for medicine, food, and other human uses.75 Intellectually assimilating more species, transporting them rot-free across inhospitable oceans, and planting them alive were major priorities for European naturalists at this point, with casualty-prone Chinese specimens being no exception.76 Illustrative examples include that of Gabriel de Clieu complaining in 1774 of “infinite cares” he needed to provide to a “delicate” coffee plant during an ocean voyage, and even of Kew Gardens’ first planted mudan perishing prematurely.77 Furthermore, acquisition of plants even for utilitarian ends could devalue less relevant indigenous connotations: in 1769, for instance, Sir Joseph Banks sought the breadfruit more for food production than to understand its place in Polynesian mythology.78 Amidst so many logistical concerns, European naturalists may

71 Dong-Yi He and Sheng-Ming Dai, “Anti-Inflammatory and Immunomodulatory Effects of Paeonia Lactiflora Pall., a Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine,” Frontiers in Pharmacology 2, no. 10 (2011): 1–5. 72 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 94. 73 Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 62. 74 Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body, 62. 75 Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 73-104. 76 Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 19. 77 Christopher Parsons and Kathleen Murphy, “Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth- Century French and British Atlantics,” Early American Studies (2012): 503–38. And, Harding, The Book of the Peony, 200. 78 Anya Zilberstein, “Bastard Breadfruit and Other Cheap Provisions: Early Food Science for the Welfare of the Lower Orders,” Early Science and Medicine 21, no. 5 (2018): 492–508.

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JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021 have paid less attention to peonies’ medicinal and symbolic associations out of perceived necessity. Early modern Europeans did not neglect so much Chinese understanding of peonies because they disliked the flowers’ tangible medical benefits, or their eponymous, elegant poems. Rather, literal under-translations and mistranslations of Asian ideas joined with logistical realities to create a narrowed translation of mudan and shaoyao as ornamental flora. Truly, the Chinese peonies that arrived at Kew, Malmaison, and other royal gardens stripped of their myriad medico-cultural associations were interpreted there anew.

Conclusion

Domesticated plants throughout history have been inextricable from the desires, languages, and worldviews of their cultivators. Humans have named them; heaped literary accolades or assigned humble uses to them; and boiled them into remedies or feared their toxicity. Even for sensually brilliant plants like the peony, their meanings and value changed as their cultivators changed. Sir Joseph Banks’ P. moutan received praise throughout Europe for its beauty, but it was no imperially-sanctioned, poetically glorified, and ameliorative mudan. This curious case of agnotology saw agents from two disparate cultural bodies construe and manipulate the same material entity in drastically unlike ways. It was far from the first such instance between China and the West. Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body partly examined how palpating the wrist, a universal corporeal act, presented a richer meaning to Chinese practitioners than to early modern European physicians who only elicited a numerical pulse rate.79 Because those who utilized shaoyao or mudan comprised generations not only of physicians but also of artists, officials, lay growers, and many others, Chinese peonies demonstrated their own culturally contingent “expressiveness” on an enormous scale. Beyond the early modern period, how has this expressiveness changed today? Biomedicine, which originated in the early twentieth-century West, has now synthesized with traditional medicine in China to produce a promising, prolific “expression” of the peony. A burgeoning corpus of literature on anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, and other compounds extracted from P. lactiflora and P. suffruticosa (renamed from moutan) has emerged due to extensive Chinese experimentation, where the peony possesses a new but precious status as biochemical reservoir.80 These hopeful discoveries have required precise technological handling of peony parts, a culturally contingent manipulation just like boiling medicinal shaoyao roots at Tang-era Luoyang, or ornamental arrangement of the Mou-tan at Kew Gardens.

79 Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body, 17-108. 80 For example, see Ma Xiao, Jian-Xia Wen, Si-Jia Gao, Xuan He, and Peng-Yan Li, “Paeonia Lactiflora Pall. Regulates the NF‐κB‐NLRP3 Inflammasome Pathway to Alleviate Cholestasis in Rats,” Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 70, no. 12 (2018): 1675–87; Shefton Parker, Brian May, Claire Zhang, Anthony Zhang, and Chuanjian Lu, “A Pharmacological Review of Bioactive Constituents of Paeonia Lactiflora Pallas and Paeonia Veitchii Lynch,” Phytotherapy Research 30, no. 9 (2016): 1445–73; Wei Zhang and Dai Sheng-Ming, “Mechanisms Involved in the Therapeutic Effects of Paeonia Lactiflora Pallas in Rheumatoid Arthritis,” International Immunopharmacology 14, no. 1 (2012): 27–31; Dan-Dan Yin, Wen-Zhong Xu, Qing-Yan Shu, Shan-Shan Li, and Qian Wu, “Fatty Acid Desaturase 3 (PsFAD3) from Paeonia Suffruticosa Reveals High α-Linolenic Acid Accumulation,” Plant Science 274 (2018): 212–22; ZhengWang Sun, Juan Du, Eunson Hwang, and Tae-Hoo Yi, “Paeonol Extracted from Paeonia Suffruticosa Andr. Ameliorated UVB‐induced Skin Photoaging via DLD/Nrf2/ARE and MAPK/AP‐1 Pathway,” Phytotherapy Research 32, no. 9 (2018): 1741–49; and Wei-Hua Song, Zhi-Hong Cheng, and Dao-Feng Chen, “Anticomplement Monoterpenoid Glucosides from the Root Bark of Paeonia Suffruticosa,” Journal of Natural Products 77, no. 1 (2014): 42–48.

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Evidently, culturally-induced ignorance precluded not only transient medicinal and cultural benefits of Chinese peonies on Europeans during the later early modern period, but also development of non-ornamental meanings of the Westernized plants from that point on. Just as the shaoyao accumulated meanings and thus evolved between the ancient Shennong Bencao Jing and the eighteenth-century peony paintings of the Qing emperor, the Western-adopted P. moutan could have built upon, rather than lost its Chinese pharmacologic and literary value in the immediate decades after 1787, had Europeans not confined it to decoration. One may wonder if the nineteenth-century P. moutan, peacock flower, or any other incompletely translated plant in Europe could have had a consequential history there, had it become the subject of interest and inquiry of more professions. One may wonder as well, given biomedicine’s belated yet fruitful collaboration with Chinese medicine over the peony, and in this age of accessible pharmaceuticals and renewed environmentalist interest in nature, if the King of Flowers may soon regain its title throughout the entire world.

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