ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rarities of the Southern Frontier: Tropical Illnesses and the Politics of Novelty in Early Modern China

• In Event: Rarity in Medicine 2: Geographies and Politics

English Abstract

This paper examines how medical rarity, both geographic and epistemic, shaped political discourse in early modern China. Zhang was a broad category of miasmatic illness that burdened northern Han Chinese émigrés to the far-southern region of Lingnan. Northern officials, lacking stable conceptual frameworks for understanding and treating zhang, viewed it as threatening and emblematic of the challenges of governing a culturally unfamiliar periphery. By analyzing treatments outlined in the Formulary for Defending Life in Lingnan (Lingnan weisheng fang), a twelfth-century collection of essays and recipes revised and republished by the Ming court in 1577, this paper shows how exiled or displaced northern officials in Lingnan confronted indigenous therapies, such as betel nuts, local cultivars of ginseng, and tiaocaozi acupuncture, that were unknown to medical officials in metropolitan China.
While indigenous healers regarded zhang as routine, “creolized” literati assigned to remote posts in Lingnan, who were often exiled from metropolitan China and eager to reassert themselves as elites, leveraged their encounters with rare southern practices to claim a distinctive form of regional expertise. By documenting therapies absent from northern repertoires, these officials made claims about their unique knowledge of the otherwise inscrutable southern frontier. Most significantly, they utilized medical discourse about rarity and regional knowledge to defend a degree of political and cultural autonomy, at times directly challenging northern medical canons. The Formulary thus illuminates how illnesses and treatments considered rare or unusual at the imperial center became tools for negotiating identity and authority along the empire’s southern frontier.

Author

• Brian S.-K. Li, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science