Digital Tools in Presenting Chinese Materia Medica: the Case of Jiuhuang Bencao

Bencao (Materia Medica) is a special body of literature on pharmaceutical natural history in China. From the 6th century to the 17th century, it has developed into a characteristic genre of classifying and documenting medicinal materials in an encyclopaedic style. The information on plants, for instance, was written in an established modular schema and heavily relied on existing medical treatises created even since the beginning of this scholarly tradition, forming a knowledge network of bencao books that referred to and commented on each other.

Digital tools can be employed to organise the original bencao texts into meaningful datasets that enable quantitative analysis among a huge body of botanical information. At the same time, the digital tool could present the internal structure and editorial logics of the original book, and possibly reveal its relationship with other books. This paper will focus on a full-text database of Jiuhuang bencao (Materia Medica for Famine Relief, 1406), an illustrated treatise that contains 414 entries of edible plants to be utilised as food resources in times of scarcity. I will show how tags and metadata were attached to the original text in order to enhance the functions of browsing and searching on the digital platform DocuSky. I will also discuss the potentials and challenges in expanding the digital tool for larger-scale textual and visual analysis.