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
Catalogue details

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.

    34/638 (page 24)
    picul ; next in order stands the first quality Corcan Ginseng = 1,000 Taels. The best cultivated Manchurian Ginseng = 200 Taels per picul. It is well known that the most highly valued specimens of Ginseng are the property of the Chinese Emperor and come only occasionally to the market. Superior sorts are sold from 20 to 250 times their weight in silver. The Chinese consider this drug the most powerful and even life- prolonging medicine. The wild Manchurian root is the most prized. But the experiments made repeatedly by European physicians with genuine Ginseng proved that it does not possess any important medicinal properties. From the ancient Chinese accounts of the Ginseng plant it would appear that in ancient times it grew in the moun- tains of Shan si and Chi li. The Shan si drug was considered the best. At present it is met with in a wild state only in Manchuria and Corea. As the wild plant even in these countries is very rare, Ginseng is much cultivated in Manchuria, Corea and Japan. About 50 years ago Ur. P. Kirillov, then physician to the Russian Eccles. Mission at Peking, sent a complete herbarium specimen of the wild-growing Manchurian Gin- seng to St. Petersburg, where it was described and depicted in Gauger’s JRepert. f. Pharmacie, etc. [I (1842), p. 51G] by C. A. Meyer under the name of Panax Ginseng. The Manchurian species is closely allied to the K. American Panax quinquefolium. Both have palmate leaves with five- toothed leaflets, minute flowers, arranged in an umbellate manner, and red berry-like fruits. The difference between them is principally in the shape, and according to the Chinese also in the medical properties, of the roots. In Japan Panax Ginseruj occurs only in a cultivated state. Anucn. exot., 818: ^ sju .yin, vulgo nisji, ni nils in.