Lu Gwei-Djen

A Contribution to the History of Chinese Dietetics

M t /[ ODERN knowledge of nutrition and disease has brought the realisation that vitamins are essentials of a complete diet as much as the proteins, carbohydrates and fats, and that each has a function peculiar to itself, being essential for the maintenance of some normal function or functions of the body. Deficiency of any of the vitamins in the diet may result in ill health and even death. The League of Nations formed a special committee for the investigation of such problems, and its work is now continued by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Considerable progress has been made each year though it is to be admitted that our approach is still somewhat slow in view of the importance of dietetics for human welfare. Nevertheless it is a striking fact in the history of science that the first pioneer of vitamin studies, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, has lived to see the establishment of the chemical constitution, and even the synthesis, of many of the most important vitamins. The present contribution arises from the fact that one of us (G.D.L.), while engaged in experimental work I on the physiology of vitamin B1, became interested in the question of the antiquity of human knowledge of beri-beri as a deficiency disease. Such knowledge has certainly existed at least since the 5th century A.D. in China, as may be found from writings of that period which we possess. The fact that the Chinese knowledge of dietetics has been so largely overlooked is due partly to the lack of any proper index to Chinese literature, and partly to the extreme divergence of the Chinese language from Western alphabetical languages, which has sealed off the history of thought and knowledge in China from the scholars of the west. Even the standard history of Chinese medicine, however, (Wong & Wu) has practically nothing to say regarding Chinese dietetics. A detailed review of the development of our present knowledge of nutrition and disease which led in the end to the discovery of vitamin B1 and its relation to the disease beri-beri would of course include an account of the isolation of the vitamin in crystalline form, the various theories proposed to account for its action, its role in cell oxidations, etc. But we shall simply refer the reader to reviews (Peters; Harris; Williams & Spies). By the end of the last century, it was clear that diseases like scurvy, beri-beri and rickets, could be cured empirically by the addition of suitable foods to the diet, although there was no knowledge of the chemistry or the nature of the deficient substances. In connection with beri-beri, a disease which we now know to be due to vitamin Bldeficiency, Harris writes:

An 8th-century meridian line: I-Hsing's chain of gnomons and the pre-history of the metric system

A study is here made of one of the most remarkable pieces of organized field research in the early middle ages — the meridian survey directed by a Buddhist monk I-Hsing and an official astronomer Nankung Yueh in +725. At a central chain of four stations in Eastern China, at measured distances apart, covering some 200 km., observations were systematically made. It is believed that these consisted of the measurement of solstitial and equinoctial Sun shadows and of polar altitudes. The observations were also carried out at a chain of five further stations, about 2500 km in length in all, from Indo-China to the southern border of Mongolia. A single northernmost station in the vicinity of Lake Baikal had also been the scene of similar observations, thus making it possible to consider an arc of no less than 3800 km. length. The ratio of terrestrial distance units (li) to the degree, which it was one of the objects of the survey to ascertain, fixed a civil unit in a manner prefiguring the metric system of a thousand years later. The fact that I-Hsing, Nankung Yueh and their colleagues accepted this ratio as a constant may imply that some of them envisaged the Earths sphericity—a view in harmony with some of the ancient schools of Chinese cosmology, but not generally accepted by scholars in their time. The li which these astronomers desired to express in terms of the degree appears to have been one of the two usual distance units of the period, namely the “normal short Thang li”. A surprising result is that I-Hsing appears to have had remarkably accurate trigonometric tables at his disposal. The paper concludes with a study of the astronomical standardization of the li by Antoine Thomas S.J. in 1702 at the request of the Khang-Hsi emperor, nearly a century before the similar standardization of the metre in Europe.

Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part II: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality

List of illustrations List of tables List of abbreviations Acknowledgements Authors note 33. Alchemy and chemistry (continued) Bibliographies General index.

Trans-Pacific Echoes and Resonances; Listening Once Again

This monograph is a review of the present state of knowledge of the relationships and consequences of over 25 centuries of interactions between the Amerindian and Asean Circum-Pacific regions. A fascinating, special case of previous work by two Asianists on similar themes of the Euro-Asian Continental land mass, providing the theoretical framework within which the complexities of cultural cross-pattern are studied.The subjects dicussed individually begin with the elements of recording and writing, continuing through the arts, religion, folklore and an eventual examination of the natural sciences and technology. There is also a discussion in this context of evidence from and the relevance of ethno-botany, ethno-zoology and ethno-helminthology.The underlying thesis of this volume is the relative independence and powerfully original development and evolution of Amerindian cultures and societies in Central and South America.