Botanicon Sinicum: notes on Chinese botany from native and Western sources. Part 3, Botanical investigations into the materia medica of the ancient Chinese / [E. Bretschneider].

  • Emil Bretschneider
Date:
1895
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Botanicon Sinicum: notes on Chinese botany from native and Western sources. Part 3, Botanical investigations into the materia medica of the ancient Chinese / [E. Bretschneider]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Ch‘u chou and Ho chou [both in An hui, App. 25, 71]. Its flowers are of different colours—yellow, purple, red, white—and appear in the 3rd month. The flowers and leaves of the wild-growing plant are the same as in the cultivated sorts, but the wild mou tan produces only single flowers. In the 5th month it produces fruit of a black colour, resembling a cock’s head, with large seeds. The root is of a yellowish white colour, from five to seven inches long, of the thickness of a pencil-holder. K‘ou Tsung-shi [Sung dynasty]:—The rind of the root of the mountain mou tan is that which is used in medicine. The cultivated plant produces also dark red and pale blue flowers. Li Shi-chen :—From ancient times the mou tan flower has been called Hi ^lua wang (king of flowers). Ou Yang- siu [Sung dynasty] enumerates more than thirty cultivated varieties of it. The Hua pu (a treatise on flowers, Sung dynasty) records that to the west of Tan chou and Yen chou [in Shen si, v. supra'] the mou tan is so common that the country people use its wood for fuel like the king (Vitex) and ki (Zizyplius). The mou tan is the China Tree Pseony, Pceonia Moutan, Sims., a favorite garden-flower of the Chinese, which they have cultivated from a remote period. In ancient times Lo yang, the old capital of China, in Ho nan, was famed for its mou tan flowers [see sub 52]. A good drawing of the plant is found in the Ch. [XXV, 18]. Tatar., Cat., 3(J :—Mou tan pli (rind). Radix Pa’onice moutan.—Gauger [28] figures and describes the drug. In the drug-shops it is simply called ta)l P‘1'—P- Smith, 169. Oust. Med., p. 104 (87):—Tan pH exported 1885 from Wu hu 1,606 piculs,