CROSS-ASIAN MOVEMENT OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE: HUIHUI YAOFANG AND ITS PERSIAN SOURCES

Abstract

The global movement of premodern knowledge relied on vehicles of transmission, the production of local commensurabilities, and the preservation and application of that knowledge. This essay examines one iteration of such movement, the transmission of medicinal knowledge from the Islamicate world to late medieval China, as it is preserved in a fragmentary text that distilled several Persian medical encyclopedias into a single practical guide to treatments and recipes, apparently compiled under imperial auspices when experts in Islamicate medicine were scarce. By identifying textual affinities between Chinese and Persian medical works, this essay demonstrates that the Chinese medical work Huihui yaofang 回回藥方 (“Islamicate Formulary”) is a composite translation of the twelfth-century Persian compendium Ẕakhīra-yi Khvārazmshāhī, supplemented by other Persian medical texts. Huihui yaofang thus emerges as the earliest extant translation of Galenic-Islamicate medicine into Chinese. The essay also illuminates premodern translation practices and identifies the text’s Chinese scribes and references to the texts within Chinese historical sources.