ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Bencaogangmu to Historia naturalis Sinarum: Chinese Knowledge and Natural History in Hans Sloane’s Collection

• In Event: Challenging Boundaries in the Enlightenment

English Abstract

In the 18th century, British collector Hans Sloane (1660-1753) included a copy of Li Shizhen’s Bencao gangmu (Jiangxi edition, 1603, Ming Dynasty) in his extensive natural history collection, naming it Historia Naturalis Sinarum (Natural History of China). This naming not only reflects Sloane’s misinterpretation of Chinese medical classics but also reveals how Enlightenment-era European science integrated non-European empirical knowledge into its rational system through translation, naming, and reclassification. Taking Sloane’s collected Bencao gangmu as a micro-archival case, this study examines its transmission from East Asia to Britain, its reclassification within the context of the Royal Society, and its resemanticization mechanism in Sloane’s collection system. The research finds that Bencao gangmu underwent three layers of transmutation during cross-cultural circulation: recoding from local medical knowledge to natural history facts, redefinition from an empirical text to a material exhibit, and resemanticization from a Chinese classic to a symbol of imperial knowledge. Through this process, Sloane expanded the scope of natural history while inadvertently establishing the power structure of Enlightenment science—where the universality of science was premised on redefining others’ knowledge. The study concludes that the fate of Bencao gangmu in Sloane’s collection epitomizes the formation of a global knowledge system: it demonstrates how Enlightenment science, supported by imperial networks and material culture, constructed a cognitive order of universal rationality through misinterpretation, translation, and exhibition.

Author

• Siqing SUN, Beijing Normal University and the University of Leeds