ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Toxic Knowledge and Invisible Expertise: Reassessing Zhou Ziliang’s “Ascension Drug” in Sixth-Century China

• In Event: Plants and Knowledge

English Abstract

This paper examines a rare case of toxic knowledge and invisible expertise recorded in The Record of Zhou (Zhou shi mingtong ji), in which a young Daoist practitioner, Zhou Ziliang (d. 515), allegedly prepared and consumed a drug that enabled him to “ascend” and abandon his mortal body. The formula—unknown to Tao Hongjing, the leading Maoshan scholar-physician—appears neither in the Shangqing canon nor in official medical texts. Its ingredients, preparation steps, and secrecy instead point to a body of local, non-canonical, and technically sophisticated toxic knowledge.A close reading of the text, combined with insights from material epistemology, the history of chemistry, and Foucauldian knowledge archaeology, suggests that Zhou’s drug represents a mode of corpse liberation operating outside the Shangqing Maoshan orthodoxy, shaped partly by Tianshi Dao practices and local Jiangnan shamanic traditions. Seen from this angle, the episode reveals the presence of hidden toxic knowledge networks functioning beneath or beyond canonical Daoist authority. Rather than an alchemical elixir, Zhou’s preparation was likely produced through controlled reactions between copper vessels and plant-derived organic acids, generating toxic copper complexes capable of inducing a painless death. This points to an artisanal–ritual toxicology embedded in local healing traditions, Daoist practice, and southern religious culture.The case highlights a broader tension in sixth-century China: while Shangqing texts attempted to canonize and restrict legitimate corpse-transcendence techniques, alternative toxic practices persisted at the margins and were later pathologized or erased. Zhou Ziliang’s death thus offers a microhistorical window onto contested expertise, the circulation of subjugated knowledge, and the material technologies underlying Daoist transcendence.Placed within global histories of toxic substances, embodiment, and non-Western chemistry, the case provides a distinctive Chinese perspective on plural scientific worlds and the dynamics of knowledge exclusion.

Author

• Dongyue Xue