Download PDF | A Soup For The Qan Chinese Dietary Medicine Of The Mongol Era As Seen In Hu Sihui's Yinshan Zhengyao ( Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series), by Paul D Buell (Author), Eugene N Anderson (Author), Brill 2010.
681 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THE SECOND EDITION
In addition to those listed in conneetion with the first edition, we would like to thank the expert readers of the text of this new edition, namely Ulrike Unschuld, of Berlin, Germany, Angelika Messner, of Kiel, Germany, and Ruth Meserve, of Bloomington, Indiana. Needless to say, in spite of their help, only the authors are responsible for any errors that remain. Dalena Pham has ably served as the research assis¬ tant for the second edition; including helping recompile a complex index. She was assisted by Kun Yang. In Berlin, Siglinde Mooney has untiringly provided secretarial support to PDB and this is most grate¬ fully acknowledged and likewise, in Seattle, the legal assistance of attorneys David Lovik and Nicholas Juhl in helping settle thorny con¬ tractual issues with publishers. Among our colleagues, the advice and encouragement of Vivienne Lo, John Carswell, Fran^oise Sabban, and Judy Kolbas, also Jacqueline Newman, H. T. Huang, Sidney Mintz, David and Taiping Knechtges, Lisa Raphals, Christopher and Gala Muench and Igor de Rachewiltz are also gratefully acknowledged. Teresa Wang has continued to be of enormous help to us by supplying books from China, including tracking which ones to supply, often no easy task. Paul Unschuld has served above and beyond as series editor and we would like to thank him for his continued encouragement of our work. Without him it would never have seen the light of day. In this same connection, particular thanks go to Patricia Radder of Brill for solving a series of technical issues with our typescript and for her warm encouragement of our endeavors. Eugene Anderson has contin¬ ued to be funded by the University of California at Riverside and Paul Buell would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for an individual fellowship during 2006-7.
We have attempted this new edition both to update and expand our presentation and to correct many errors still found in the first edition in spite of careful editing and proofing. Also, our view of some of the material and of the Mongol world in general has changed over the years. Our work with the set of early Ming Hfj fragments of a Yuan tL encyclopedia now called the Huihui yaofang “Muslim Me¬dicinal Recipes,” has also led to some reassessment. The influence of Arabic medicine on our dietary seems far clearer now than it once was. Despite this, we have resisted the temptation to completely redo the present book and will keep most of our new material for later. In fact, the favorable reception that our work has received since it was first published has made clear to us that we, by and large, got it right the first time. Above all, we want to make our efforts available to a larger audience than was the case for the original edition, priced too high even for large libraries.
Berlin
Christmas, 2009
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE FIRST EDITION
First, we are grateful to our families, who had to put up with a great deal of lamb and goat, among other things, in the process of kitchen testing. Secondly, we are grateful to the University of California, Ri¬ verside, for providing generous funding and facilities for research (grants and facilities to ENA), and to the Wilson Library of Western Washington University for making its excellent collection of Mongo¬ lian and Turkic materials and facilities freely available. Finally, we are grateful to a large number of friends and advisors, including Paul Unschuld, whose efforts went far beyond what is normally required of a series editor, Franfoise Sabban, Francesca Bray, Christopher Muench, Dm Gladney, William Jankowiak, Nancy Peterson Walter, Jacqueline Newman, Penelope Van Esterik, Igor de Rachewiltz, Henry Schwarz, Edward Kaplan, Linda Kimball, Kathleen Tomlonovic, Wayne Rich¬ ter, Edward Vajda, Angelo Anastasio, Tamsin Hekala, Olav Hekala, Use Cirtautas, Thomas A. P. Gwinner, Linda Vane, Penny Goode, Sa¬ brina Wilson, Hen Sen Chin, Jeffrey MacDonald, Richard Brzustowicz, Chung Chih-hui, Phyllis Graham, Julia Fearing, Jennifer Jay, Robin Mayberry, Iris Olga Ludviksdottir, Arienne Dwyer, Judy Kolbas, Dominik Wujastyk of the Wellcome Trust, Kaori O’Connor of Kegan Paul International, and to the countless house guests who served as guinea pigs, willing, eager, and enthusiastic, to be sure, for the kitchen tests.
Herbert Franke and Franfoise Sabban served as the publisher’s reviewers for the manuscript and we thank them for many useful suggestions. Au6ur Ingolfsdottir was briefly project research assistant and provided much needed help with indexing. Her re¬ placement was Christine Buell who undertook final proofreading and helped with the index. Thanks also to Frau Holler of Munich and John Donahue of the University of California at Riverside who helped pre¬ pare the text facsimile. Special thanks goes to “Hafiz” of Microsoft Corporation for hours spent on the phone helping solve some tricky formatting problems as we pushed the parameters of Microsoft Word’^" to the limit. The Department of Liberal Studies, Western Washington University (William Stoever, chair), also provided travel support for PDB to attend Paul Unschuld’s important 1986 Miinchen, Federal Republic of Germany, conference on traditional medical lite¬ rature. The vote of confidence is gratefully acknowledged. Needless to say, none of the above mentioned individuals or organizations are in any way responsible for any errors or misconceptions in our book, for which the authors take full responsibility.
When we began our book none of us suspected in the slightest that its realization would take most of two decades, at least a third of that time spent in solving the technical problems associated with produc¬ ing the camera-ready copy required by the publishers. We did not in¬ tend to make it our “life’s work,” but it has turned out that way. We sincerely hope that the reading public will think that the results are worth the effort that has gone into producing them as we finally offer our too many pages in print.
Seattle Easter, 1999
A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION
A simplified system has been employed to transeribe Classieal Mon¬ golian, Medieval Turkie, Persian, and Arabic except in Appendix II, reproduced as published with minor changes. Most but not all diacritic marks have been omitted including indications of vowel length. “H” has been used after consonants to indicate voicing in Classical Mon¬ golian and Turkic. As much as possible, forms are spelled consistently and usually according to some authority. Perry for most Turkic grain foods, Doerfer for most other Turkic words. Middle Mongolian is transcribed according to the simplified system employed in Igor de Rachewiltz, Index to the Secret History of the Mongols (Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 121, 1972), except that “s” is used consistently where appropriate. All Chi¬ nese is transcribed according to the Pinyin system except for recon¬ structed forms and bibliographical entries originally using Wade-Giles transcription. For Japanese the Hepburn system has been used. West¬ ern European languages are spelled normally but Russian and most other languages written in the Cyrillic Script have largely been tran¬ scribed according to systems employed in United States Government publications except that front and back vocalization is shown by umlauting in the transcription of Khalkha Mongolian. Those knowing the relevant languages will have no difficulty in restoring the original forms. Throughout the text, reconstructions from Chinese transcrip¬ tions made by the present authors are marked with except in Ap¬ pendix II where the asterisk indicates reconstructed proto-Turkic forms. Reconstructions made by others are not so marked but the source of the reconstruction is indicated in each case.
INTRODUCTION
In fact, Kublai Khan (more correctly Qubilai-qan) did indeed eat ho¬ ney and milk, but mostly he ate sheep. His grandfather, Cinggis-qan, had first invaded China in the early thirteenth century. His uncle, Ogodei completed the conquest of the north by crushing Jin ^ in 1234. In 1260 Qubilai himself came to power and in 1266 built a new winter capital at what is now Beijing, alternating between it and his old princely residence, after 1263 his summer capital of Shangdu Coleridge’s Xanadu, on the cool fringes of the steppe. By 1276 Qubilai’s Mongols had conquered all China and established the Yuan ft Dynasty.
Amazingly enough, we have an excellent record of the haute cui¬ sine of this court. In 1330 there was presented to the emperor a dietary manual, the Yinshan zhengyao DEMIES (YSZY), or “Proper and Es¬ sential* Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink.” This book was written by Hu Sihui who had been an imperial dietary physi-cian under several short-lived descendants of Qubilai in the early 1300s. Although his name appears purely Chinese,^ Hu himself, if he was not a foreigner, must have come from a culturally mixed back¬ ground. He quite likely came from a bilingual, Chinese and Turkic family resident in the former Xixia domains of northwest China,
perhaps from what is now Ningxia Province.^ His work reflects
the cuisine of the era in some detail, also long-term Chinese assimi¬ lation of foreign foods and foodways, and a considerable “future shock” due to conquest and rule of China by foreigners, with only li¬ mited interest in China and Chinese culture. Since Hu’s primary inter¬ est and charge was the medical aspect of nutrition, always a central focus in the Chinese world, much of the book is an account of the medical values of foods and recipes, in terms of Medieval Chinese nutritional therapy.
Hu’s dietary is thus a rich source for the study of many areas of the complex cultural history of Medieval Eurasia, one that lends itself well to the investigations of the “New History.” This school has de¬ veloped in response to the realization that study of the societies and civilizations of the past can no longer focus merely upon political events, or other great and obvious achievements of a time. Historians must also take into consideration more mundane areas of human life, perhaps less obvious, but none the less vital for understanding what actually happened. The French Annales school (named after the jour¬ nal of the same name founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) has taken the initiative in this area. Leading exponents, such as the late Fernand Braudel,^ have placed at the center of their considerations neglected topics once at the periphery of historical studies, with bril¬ liant results.^ These topics include kinship. Bloch, for example, was one of the first historians to fuse anthropological study of kinship with medieval studies, which had revolutionary impact upon his field. An¬ nalists are also concerned with man and environment, the realities of production and trade, the evolution of prices, the nature of transport, individual perceptions of space and time, the focus of Braudel’s later work,^ and food and food production.
This last area is of particular concern to the “New History,” since food and food production are the most immediate of all the material underpinnings of life. Bound up within it are also man’s conceptuali¬ zation of food and food products, as sources of nutrition, and as medi¬ cine. Here, interests of the “New History” coincide with those of his¬ torians of medicine, of ideas, in the broadest sense, and of anthropolo¬ gists, always concerned about food and the social realities and interac¬ tions which it reflects.
Food and foodways are sensitive barometers of material and social conditions. They reveal change in process and cultural interactions which may be studied through archaeology, art, linguistics, and the philological examination of texts. Textual evidence is of particular usefulness for those cultures with long written traditions since it per¬ mits detailed study of food, food production, and foodways over the long term. Cultural changes taking place far too slowly or too subtly to draw much notice from contemporaries can be charted and ex¬ plored. Also revealed are periods of sharp departure from the past, in which the shock of the new is obvious. This is the case in the YSCY, above all on account of its association with the Mongols.
The Mongols consciously sought, once their movement had taken root, to create a universal world empire. By 1330, this dream had faded politically in bitter wars of succession among Cinggis-qan’s descendants, but pretensions of cultural universality persisted. One manifestation is the eclecticism of the YSCY. It incorporates foods from all the realms conquered or even affected by the Mongols and seems a deliberate attempt to represent the Mongolian world order in visible, tangible, edible form. A dignitary receiving hospitality at a Yuan feast could be served dishes from Baghdad, Kashmir, and Chi¬ na, as well as Mongolian game and Manchurian wildfowl. Hu inter¬ prets the dietary and nutritional values of foods served more or less in Chinese terms. In some places he simply copies out the appropriate sections of Chinese medical classics. None the less, some of his medi¬ cal recipes appear to include traditional Mongolian medicinals and some are straight borrowings from Middle Eastern medicine. Even some of his “Chinese” prescriptions are clearly adapted with Middle Eastern medicine in mind. Hu was also strongly influenced by West Asian and Mongol perceptions of health and of the human place in the cosmos. This was the cuisine of a world empire, one standing at the crossroads of the many different cultures finding expression within it: Mongol, Turkic, South and West Asian, Chinese.
But while Hu’s cuisine and the medical traditions used in its inter¬ pretation have been constructed with the universalist aims of the Mongol court in China in mind, the end result is also expressive of particular economic realities and value choices on the part of the Mongols and those closest to them. Many Mongols, for example, in¬ cluding many coming to court, still lived the traditional way of life in the fourteenth century and were dependent upon traditional foods and modes of food production. Through them, and through nostalgia even the most culturally assimilated Mongols felt for the common Mongol past, traditional Mongol foods and foodways continued to exert a strong influence. Yet while this was the case, the Yuan court was no longer dependent upon herding, hunting, and gathering for its food, although those serving the court continued to engage in these practices at its behest. It could literally call on the entire continent of Asia for foods and medicines. The exotic was, as a consequence, often freely available. Coupled with this fact, the Mongols were also self¬ consciously eclectic and eager to try new things, perhaps to appear cosmopolitan and impress others.
The Mongol court was thus bound by tradition, but was relatively free of narrow economic and social determinants. It provides us with a fascinating study in cultural history. By observing the Mongol court elite of the time at their table, in good health and in bad, we can reach a new understanding of what actually determines specific cultural re¬ pertoires.
Yuan court cuisine as reflected in the YSZY rests upon a foundation of Central Asian pastoralism. The sheep is paramount. Most main dishes are based on its meat or broth. Literally all parts were used: head, and feet, skin and intestines, bones, and tail.^ Wild game meats also loom large, as do the meats of other herd animals. Only the pig, the principal animal of Chinese diet, is virtually absent from the YSZY. If, among other products of pastoralism, dairy products are somewhat neglected in the book, it may be because most were such everyday fare that Hu did not need to mention them. Some accommodation to Chinese norms may be evident in this area as well.
Grains and dry legumes were important but they are, in most cases, used as additives, in raw or processed form, in mutton-based soups and stews. Fresh vegetable foods are rather few and far between, as they were on the steppe. Most are those which could be grown suc¬ cessfully in the cold, dry northwest. Many are gathered foods rather than cultivated ones, daily usage of the ordinary folk of the steppe. Some are used consciously with their medicinal values in mind. Noth¬ ing is more revealing of the deeply Mongol roots of the court. China did not “conquer her conquerors”; indeed, the conquerors did not even abandon wild roots and herbs for the succulent fruits and specially cultivated vegetable delicacies of Chinese traditional elite taste. Where the Tang court sent for lichees from the far south, the Yuan court sent for mushrooms and eleagnus fruits from the cold high steppe lands.
Medical influences in the YSCY include the particular problems of Chinese and Mongols of the age. The book is, of course, overwhel¬ mingly concerned with the nutritional aspects of health, and thus most of the directions fall into a few categories. Most important is the value of the foods in maintaining and regulating qi H, (vital essence, finest matter). Strict instructions given about avoiding contaminated, rotten or suspect foods alternate with ideas drawn from the logic of cos¬ mology: magical lore, folk beliefs, and accumulated wisdom from mil¬ lennia of misguided searches for immortality and long-lasting youth. Some suggestions are now recognized as being based on empiricallyobserved vitamin and mineral contents of foods, mixed with Mongo¬ lian and other cosmological ideas. There is little apparent structure: Hu simply listed ways he thought that diet could strengthen the body and make it last longer, and ways he thought diet could endanger health. Specific therapies and logically consistent theories were not part of his plan.
Cultural roots explain more than ecology in this case, for even the most stringent ecological determinants of Yuan cuisine were mediated by cultural tradition. It included new traditions developed since the establishment of an empire, peculiar to post-conquest Mongols and to the cultures of those associated with them in power. Although the em¬ peror and his establishment went through the motions of annual transhumance between winter and summer capitals until the end, by 1330 most of the court elite had grown up in the sedentary luxury of Qanbaliq (Beijing) and of other cities, rather than beside a mountain stream in the Mongolian pasture lands. Most court Mongols, as a conse¬ quence, knew dried mutton, wild currants, and Amur river sturgeons as things appearing on a table; not foods they had to gather or catch and prepare for themselves.
Cultural background was greatly complicated by court internatio¬ nalism. Mongols were a small minority. Most of the middle and lower echelons of the court were comprised of various Turks, Chinese, Ko¬ reans, Russians, and other ethnic groups. Turkic noodle dishes, Chi¬ nese fish and chicken recipes, and Tibetan tsampa were part of a col¬ lective culinary heritage. It also included substantial borrowings from Iran and Mesopotamia due in large part to the conquest of Baghdad by Qubilai’s younger brother Hiile’ii and the relations which his descen¬ dants continued to maintain with China. We should not be surprised to find the first recipe in the YSZY to be an adapted Baghdadi dish. It was all in the family. Only in medical matters do cultural traditions become heavily determinative, for here Hu tends to follow, rather un¬ critically, the received wisdom in Chinese, Muslim, and Mongol med¬ ical circles of the time.
In short, cultural background could be interpreted in many ways and could allow the court to draw on almost anything eaten in Asia. In a court which recruited people as far away as France and Italy, almost any imaginable food could be part of someone’s cultural background.
The YSZY reflects the cuisine of the sophisticated court of a world empire. Feasts were lavish, and the Mongols did everything they could to impress visitors, as we know from accounts such as those of Marco Polo and William of Rubruck. Food was used, deliberately, as a way of showing power, generosity, and wealth. It was thus an implement of statesmanship. As in most societies, feasts were used to cement alli¬ ances, celebrate important events, reward friends, overawe enemies, and lubricate politics in general.
We believe that the international flavor of the YSZY reflects the deliberate construction of a cuisine to reflect the scope of the empire. Foods and foodways from all parts of the Mongol realm were brought together to show Mongol power.
Finally, Hu was writing as court nutritionist, and the book has a major medical function. He was trying not only to codify recipes, but to improve the health of the court. Thus, the YSZY is a nutritional ma¬ nual, reflecting the food beliefs of the time. It is a rather heteroge¬ neous one. Chinese classical medical lore and folk beliefs are mixed with Mongol and west Asian practices. This leads to inconsistencies and even contradictions. It also leads to the incorporation of some magical lore that cannot have had much real-world benefit for the Mongol elite. Nonetheless, Hu’s advice is generally sound. At worst, he seems to have lived up to the old medical truism, “First, do no harm.” At best, he counseled moderation in eating and drinking, avoidance of spoiled food, and a balanced diet providing protein, min¬ erals, and vitamin s .
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