King of Flowers: Reinterpretation of Chinese Peonies in Early Modern Europe
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Journal of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science
Volume 3 (no. 1) 2021 https://journals.troy.edu/index.php/JSAHMS/
King of Flowers: Reinterpretation of Chinese
Peonies in Early Modern Europe
Richard Zhang, MA
MD Student, Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, United States
Email: richard.zhang@yale.edu
Abstract
This work argues that the introduction of Chinese peony variants into early modern Europe not
only incorporated them into a new, systematic, and universalizing taxonomic body of
knowledge, but also accompanied a narrowed translation of their uses that exemplified
agnotology, or culturally-induced ignorance. Cultivated in China at least since the Tang Dynasty,
both herbaceous and “tree” peonies traditionally enjoyed important medicinal applications and
symbolic purposes there, in addition to serving as ornamental garden flowers. Yet, their
introduction into Europe beginning in the late eighteenth century by naturalists such as Sir
Joseph Banks saw their use confined, albeit popularly, to the latter ornamental use. This research
draws upon classical bencao texts of Chinese medicine, early modern correspondence, and
printed books to capture how different cultures may utilize and construe the same material
objects in markedly contrasting ways. Additionally, quotes from early modern physicians such
as Menuret de Chambaud and John Floyer help illustrate European confusion and disregard for
concepts from the Chinese worldview such as qi, which likely contributed to medicinal
understandings of Chinese peonies not traveling with the actual plants themselves into Europe.
This work finally references lately-emerging pharmacologic literature on peonies to support
biomedical inquiry into traditional medical materials worldwide, for the potential benefit of
broader patient populations.
Keywords: natural history, Chinese medicine, peonies, botany, bioprospecting
Introduction
April 1787: With its flowers fallen, and now wholly packed for shipment, a “Mou-tan” plant
was loaded on board the London for a voyage into the unknown.2 Here in coastal Guangzhou, Qing
China, Scottish surgeon-naturalist Dr. John Duncan managed to procure the Mou-tan “tree” peony
I would like to thank Professor Paola Bertucci (Yale University, Department of History) and my cohort friends at
Yale University for expanding my knowledge of natural history and supporting my work on peonies.
2
Joseph Banks, The Banks Letters: A Calendar of the Manuscript Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks Preserved
in the British Museum, the British Museum (Natural History) and Other Collections in Great Britain, ed. Warren
Dawson (London: British Museum, 1958), 282.
JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
within months of being assigned to find it. He had for several years by then, with the assistance of
a local British resident named Bradshaw, worked in Guangzhou as part of a global network that
collected and shipped natural specimens to the renowned Sir Joseph Banks, soon-to-be-president
of The Royal Society.3 Duncan had enjoyed modest successes, such as sending back red and white
water lilies. He also experienced disappointment when he could not find out how the Chinese
cultivated or prepared the hemp plant. Yet, in the case of the Mou-tan, Duncan was sending home
what would prove to be a winning specimen.
Receiving the live tree peony in England during the same year, Sir Joseph Banks soon
displayed it at Kew Gardens.4 The plant’s huge prominence in Chinese medicine and poetry did
not concern Banks, but it was beautiful, just like in glowing accounts from Pierre Martial-Cibot
and other missionaries—accounts that had attracted Banks’ attention to the tree peony in the first
place.5 With its lush pink petals, sweet perfume, and fortunate lack of thorns, the Mou-tan ascended
to prompt fame.6 Though Duncan’s delivered peony did not live for long, it was followed by
another shipment of the same type in 1794, of which three survived.7 Tree peonies soon became
planted to popular delight in other European royal gardens as well. Other variants of Chinese peony
would follow, to achieve similar ornamental renown in the West.
As within other naturalist networks centered in eighteenth-century Europe, Sir Joseph Banks
corresponded with far-flung links of assisting naturalists, like Dr. Duncan, to obtain global flora
and fauna and attempt to epistemologically assimilate them as scientific information.8 Some
specimens such as the tree peony would come to again enjoy ornamental fame in their new
European home, but often much indigenous knowledge about species was lost in translation.
Indeed, from Guangzhou, at least 1,500 years’ worth of Chinese understanding of the mudan
(transliterated by Banks as Mou-tan) went weakly transmitted, with much of it failing to take root
in England, unlike the actual plant itself. This work argues that the introduction of Chinese peony
variants into early modern Europe not only incorporated them into a new, universalizing system
of taxonomic knowledge, but also, through shedding much medicinal, culinary, and symbolic
understanding of the peonies, exemplified agnotological, or culturally-induced ignorance.
I. Peonies of China: The Practical and the Magnificent
Over thirty species of peony have seeded, expanded, and beautifully bloomed throughout
world history.9 Not always conceptualized by humans as intrinsically related, the two broad
categories of non-hybrid peonies—the herbaceous and the tree variants—were first classified
together under the taxonomic genus Paeonia by eighteenth-century European naturalists. As the
more common of the two variants, herbaceous peonies such as P. lactiflora comprise low-growing,
3
Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 20.
4
Alice Harding, The Book of the Peony (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1917), 200.
5
John Claudius Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, Vol. 1 (London: printed by the author, 1838), 252.
And, Joseph Dehergne, “Une Grande Collection: Mémoires Concernant Les Chinois (1776-1814),” Bulletin de l’École
Française d’Extrême-Orient 72 (1983): 284.
6
Sandra Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration (Toronto: Firefly Books,
2003), 63.
7
Harding, The Book of the Peony, 200.
8
Joseph Banks, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, ed. Neil Chambers, Vol. 3 (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2007).
9
Ji Lijing, Qi Wang, Jaime Teixeira da Silva, and Xiao Yu, “The Genetic Diversity of Paeonia L,” Scientia
Horticulturae 143 (2012): 62–74.
Page | 42JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
vascular plants predominantly native to China, the Mediterranean portions of Europe and the
Middle East, and North America’s Pacific coast. Eight species of peony fall under Sir Joseph
Banks’ scientifically christened P. moutan section, comprising the tree category of woody-
stemmed, flowering shrubs. These tree peonies are all indigenous to central and southern China.10
Distinguishing between the two types aids an understanding of the historiography of the peony
in pre-modern China, where natural knowledge understood the shaoyao (芍藥: herbaceous peony)
and mudan (牡丹: tree peony) as separate plants, without a taxonomic system to group them into
a common genus.11 Yet, the two variants both served prominent medicinal, dietary, symbolic, and
aesthetic roles for many centuries in classical China. Cultivated in gardens there for over a
millennium, with some mudan variants domesticated at least since the seventh-century C.E. during
the Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.), Chinese peonies shared a resplendent, ancient heritage which
naturalist networks centered in early modern Europe would come to admire, though not grasp the
entirety of.12
The visual beauty and brilliance of shaoyao and mudan did not preclude their wide-scale,
pragmatic applications to human bodies. Like their ancient Mediterranean counterparts, such as P.
officinalis, which featured in Greco-Roman and Islamic materia medica, and with sometimes
strikingly similarly described indications, Chinese variants of peony started to appear in key
medicinal texts even before their extensive domestication in gardens.13 Further yet, the actual
earliest incorporation of these plants into local herbal knowledge presumably predated their
earliest textual appearances. The very etymologies of Chinese peonies convey their deep-rooted
associations with human health: the second character of shaoyao, 藥, refers to a medicinal drug,
while the second character of mudan, 丹, traditionally also referred to, among many meanings, a
prepared medicinal substance.
The authoritative Shennong Bencao Jing (third-century C.E.) represented the earliest extant
bencao (本草), or classical Chinese compendium of medicinal natural knowledge.14 Its 365
catalogued medicinals included the red peony root, described as controlling the malevolent qi force
to alleviate abdominal pain, poor blood flow, and urinary retention.15 As with many references to
peonies in later bencao, this description framed the herb through a contemporary understanding of
qi (氣), the vital force that comprised and linked all entities in the universe, had complementary
yin and yang elements, and whose elements’ imbalance or disruption in humans could manifest as
illnesses, among implications for many fields.16 From early on, evidently, peonies and their parts
enjoyed specific indications and interactions with important cosmological ideas in their
10
Zhi-Qin Zhou, “Taxonomy, Geographic Distribution and Ecological Habitats of Tree Peonies,” Genetic
Resources and Crop Evolution 53, no. 1 (February 2006): 11–22.
11
Fan Chengda, Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea: The Natural World and Material
Culture of Twelfth-Century China (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011), 89. And, Teruyuki Kubo,
“The Problem of Identifying Mudan 牡丹 and the Tree Peony in Early China,” Asian Medicine 5, no. 1 (January
2009): 108–45.
12
Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan.” And, Wang Ying, “A National Flower’s Symbolic Value During
the Tang and Song Dynasties in China,” Space and Culture 21, no. 1 (2017): 46–59
13
Efrayim Lev and Zohar ’Ama, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to
the Cairo Genizah (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2008), 235.
14
Zhongzhen Zhao, Ping Guo, and Eric Brand, “A Concise Classification of Bencao (Materia Medica),” Chinese
Medicine 13 (2018): 1-4.
15
Asaf Goldschmidt, Medical Practice in Twelfth-Century China: A Translation of Xu Shuwei’s Ninety Discussions
[Cases] on Cold Damage Disorders (Basel, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 31.
16
Jung-Yeup Kim, Zhang Zai’s Philosophy of Qi: A Practical Understanding (Lexington Books, 2015).
Page | 43JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
descriptions, supporting the plants’ long-time, serious consideration by practitioners of Chinese
medicine.
Mainstream bencao texts in later centuries developed this Chinese way of valuing peonies.
Commissioned by the Tang Dynasty, the Xinxiu Bencao (659 C.E.) contained one section listing
mudan among various materials with essentially “cold” properties, ranging from rhubarb to
antelope horns.17 As a “cold” herb per the contemporary cosmological logic, mudan could
counteract yang-favoring inner imbalances of qi, and was indicated in the text for conditions
provoked by such type of imbalance, including stroke, epilepsy, and skin ulcers. 18 Shaoyao, of
which the earlier Shennong Bencao Jing’s red peony root was a material derivative, was listed as
a “mildly cold” material in the Xinxiu Bencao.19 Its listed indications again included alleviating
abdominal pain and improving blood flow and urination, showing marked consistency with those
of the red peony root recorded over four centuries earlier.
The monumental works Zhenglei Bencao (1108) and Bencao Gangmu (1596) further
preserved and added to these medicinal understandings of Chinese peonies. Examples of
increasingly refined indications included those of shaoyao in treating postpartum women’s
abdominal pain in the Zhenglei Bencao, and of mudan—still described as “cold”—alleviating
pediatric seizures in the Bencao Gangmu, which now also assigned indications such as
inflammation and rheumatism to shaoyao.20 Yet, many previous indications were carried into the
Bencao Gangmu unchanged. Entering the early modern period, China’s bencao, which transmitted
classical knowledge, did not encounter serious epistemological challenges on the level that their
Greco-Roman counterparts in Europe did from skeptical, early Renaissance naturalists. As
explained by Bianca Maria Rinaldi, the strong continuity of prestigious Chinese culture enhanced
its increasing completeness of botanical descriptions, but discouraged radical departures in inquiry,
such as empirical methods being eagerly developed in early modern Europe by naturalists who
carefully re-examined familiar as well as new plants in search of generalizable, defining principles
of natural classification for all flora.21 Furthermore, unlike in early modern Europe where botany
increasingly became redefined as a science separate from medicine, Chinese scholarly inquiry into
plants continued to prioritize cataloguing plants alongside their therapeutic properties, thus
solidifying materia medica like the Bencao Gangmu as authorities on natural knowledge. Hence,
therapeutic descriptions of shaoyao and mudan that crystallized over thirteen centuries’ worth of
bencao, but whose classification methodology did not drastically change, exemplified a Chinese
approach to natural knowledge that would have diverged greatly from Europe’s by the time Sir
Joseph Banks imported the P. moutan.
Smaller, more specialized, and yet intriguing, non-bencao medical texts throughout Chinese
history included peony-derived materials as pharmaceuticals. In some of these texts, which, unlike
bencao, focused more on cataloguing human diseases than natural materials themselves, the plants
only appeared in the context of treatments assigned to each type of illness. Liu Juanzi’s Ghosts’
Remedies (劉涓子鬼遺方), written by Gong Qingxuan at a time (499 C.E.) when inter-dynastic
17
Su Jing, Xinxiu Bencao, Vol. 2, 659,
https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E6%96%B0%E4%BF%AE%E6%9C%AC%E8%8D%89.
18
Xianjun Fu, Lewis Mervin, Xuebo Li, Huayun Yu, and Jiaoyang Li, “Toward Understanding the Cold, Hot, and
Neutral Nature of Chinese Medicines Using in Silico Mode-of-Action Analysis,” American Chemical Society 57, no.
3 (2017): 468–83. And, Su, Xinxiu Bencao, Vol. 8.
19
Su, Xinxiu Bencao, Vol. 2.
20
Tang Shenwei, Zhenglei Bencao, Vol. 30, 1083. And, Li Shizhen, Bencao Gangmu, Vol. 52, 1578.
21
Bianca Maria Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste”: Jesuits and Europe’s Knowledge of Chinese Flora
and Art of the Garden in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Munchen: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006), 87-88.
Page | 44JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
warring caused frequent injuries among the Chinese, prescribed analgesia, hemostasis, and other
procedures in addition to 140 medicinal preparations for a wide variety of skin infections. 22 Such
medicines included both shaoyao and mudan.23 A much later example, which illustrates continuity
of non-bencao references to peonies, could be found in Sun Simiao’s Essential Subtleties on the
Silver Sea (銀海精微) from the fifteenth century.24 Describing etiologies, symptoms, and
treatments for every ophthalmologic disease known to Ming Chinese healers, this work listed red
and white peony root derivatives of shaoyao as drugs, and even indicated mudan as one substance
in treating far-sightedness.25 Evidently, Chinese peonies received acknowledgement as remedies
or ingredients of remedies even in less canonical medicinal works, supporting their pervasive
recognition as therapeutic throughout Chinese society.
Apart from serving well-established medicinal purposes, derivatives of Chinese peonies
sometimes entered human bodies for dietary reasons. Confucius (551—479 B.C.E.) was reported
to have enjoyed eating foods with sauce made from white peony root.26 Furthermore, of the two
variants of delicate, “white tea” produced in Fujian province for over 1,000 years, the white mudan
tea was derived from parts of its namesake, peony.27 Most remarkably, shaoyao and especially
mudan both appeared in the fascinating Jiuhuang Bencao from 1406.28 Written by a Ming scholar-
prince, and despite being named a bencao, this work catalogued hundreds of Chinese wild plants
as emergency foods for times of famine.
Hence, the manifold Chinese peony had a tremendous, practical form. Sealed into the national
canon of herbal knowledge by all major volumes of bencao, and assigned to treating specific,
common diseases by smaller works, the shaoyao and mudan became familiar to human
consumption even to the point of recognition as reliable famine foods. Visually resplendent, these
flowering plants also retained powerful symbolic and aesthetic roles in their homeland. Together
with medicinal and dietary applications, the Chinese peonies’ symbolism would predate by many
centuries, though not survive, the narrowed translation of the plants in Europe.
The mudan acquired its lasting regal status among China’s flora during the Tang Dynasty.
Known mostly for its medicinal qualities prior to then, the increasingly court-approved mudan
gained the transient status of national flower, and even the lasting cultural title of “King of
Flowers” (花王).29 It also became popularly known as the “flower of wealth and honor” (富貴花
).30 Under the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690—705 C.E.), the city of Luoyang acquired its
lasting distinction as a cultivation center of tree peonies.31 Prices of the plant also skyrocketed as
22
Zhenguo Wang, Ping Chen, and Peiping Xie, History and Development of Traditional Chinese Medicine
(Amsterdam: IOS Press, 1999), 274.
23
Gong Qingxuan, Liu Juanzi’s Ghosts’ Remedies (劉涓子鬼遺方), Vol. 5, 499AD.
24
Sun Simiao, Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea (銀海精微), 15th century. https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-
hans/%E9%8A%80%E6%B5%B7%E7%B2%BE%E5%BE%AE.
25
Sun Simiao, Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea. And, Marta Hanson, “Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea:
The Yin-hai jing-wei: A Chinese Classic on Ophthalmology. The Chinese Medical Classics. Comparative Studies of
Health Systems and Medical Care by Jürgen Kovacs, Paul U. Unschuld,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no.
1 (Spring 2001): 123-125.
26
Ikhlas Khan and Ehab Abourashed, Leung’s Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients: Used in Food,
Drugs and Cosmetics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 178.
27
Helen Saberi, Tea: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 13.
28
Zhu Xiao, Jiuhuang Bencao, Vol. 3 and Vol. 8, 1406.
29
Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan 牡丹 and the Tree Peony in Early China,” 109.
30
Christopher Cumo, Encyclopedia of Cultivated Plants: From Acacia to Zinnia (Denver, CO: ABC-CLIO, 2013),
784.
31
Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration, 63.
Page | 45JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
Chinese flocked to buy them, not unlike those of over-purchased tulips in the seventeenth-century
Dutch Republic.32 The mudan received further, extensive praise from the emperor Xuanzong (r.
712-756 C.E.) and especially fashionable status during the Zhongtang period (766-835 C.E.), when
brilliant rows of the plant adorned imperial palaces in Chang’an.33 Compared to the orchid and
lotus, which were planted alongside it in classical landscape gardens, and which respectively
symbolized nobility and curiosity, the mudan would for centuries onward represent magnificence
and luxuriance.34
Generations of influential Chinese poets and artists extolled the tree peony as well. The
prolific and highly-esteemed Li Bai (701-762 C.E.) paired the plant’s desirability with that of the
extraordinarily beautiful, imperial consort Yang Yuhuan in a set of three poems. The quite
flattering poems, which contributed to the mudan’s symbolic promotion to national flower, ended
with:
His Majesty’s love of both of you can never be otherwise than eternal,
Because he would, from now on in his leisure hours, nothing do
But the two of you to woo. 35
In an even more famous poem, “To the Tree Peonies,” Liu Yuxi (772-842 C.E.) ended by
writing that the eponymous plants’ unfolding was “bound to turn the imperial capital raptly astir.”36
Lu Shusheng (1509-1605), a scholar-official of the Ming Dynasty, wrote the poems “Mudan,”
“White Mudan,” and “Buying Mudan,” which celebrated the plant’s red and violet brilliance.37
Furthermore, watercolor painters and ceramics makers visually celebrated the tree peony across
centuries, well before the time of Sir Joseph Banks. This is evidenced by tenth-century works such
as Zhao Chang’s Mudan Painting, named after the magnificently blooming specimens of the tree
peony it captured (figure 1).38 A clear, classical corpus of creative work vigorously shaped an
opulent meaning of tree peonies in China, whose complexity a strict focus on scientific
assimilation of nature might not easily appreciate during later centuries.
Furthermore, while the more-medicalized shaoyao featured less prominently than the King of
Flowers did in Chinese culture, it also retained symbolic value. Just as its woody-stemmed
counterpart connoted magnificence, the herbaceous peony represented romantic love in classical
China.39 Some shaoyao whose flowers were yellow, a color symbolizing wealth, commanded both
an aura of luxuriance and a literal price on par with those of mudan, which typically far exceeded
32
Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration, 63.
33
Kubo, “The Problem of Identifying Mudan 牡丹 and the Tree Peony in Early China,” 108.
34
Guanzeng Zhang, and Lan Wang, Urban Planning and Development in China and Other East Asian Countries
(Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2018), 80.
35
Ying, “A National Flower’s Symbolic Value,” 48.
36
Ying, “A National Flower’s Symbolic Value,” 48.
37
Jiang Tingxi, ed., Gujin Tushu Jicheng, Vol. 554, 1725,
https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/Page:Gujin_Tushu_Jicheng,_Volume_554_(1700-
1725).djvu/37#%E3%80%8A%E7%89%A1%E4%B8%B9%E3%80%8B%E8%96%9B%E8%95%99.
38
Zhao Chang, Mudan Painting (牡丹圖). Tenth century. Silk painting.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zhao_Chang_-_Tree_Peony.jpg.
39
Paul Kroll, ed., Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2014),
124.
Page | 46JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
Figure 1: Mudan Painting (牡丹圖), a tenth-century silk painting by Zhao Chang that captured the
brilliance of tree peonies in bloom. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
red and violet-flowered shaoyao in value.40 Rivaling Luoyang’s traditional linkage with mudan,
the southern city of Yangzhou became lastingly associated with shaoyao production and
decoration at least as early as 1079.41 The latter plant adorned ancestral memorial hall gardens in
classical Yangzhou, and a particular Zhu family there aided the city’s image by displaying 50,000
specimens of the flower when they bloomed.42 Artists also created cultural associations with the
herbaceous plant. In his elegant poem “Rose” (月季), the Song-era polymath Su Shi (1037—1101)
associated the mudan with the spring season, and the shaoyao with early summer.43 The poem
“Shaoyao” by Yuan-era writer Ma Zuchang (1279—1338) compared the beauty of silk-clad ladies
with that of Yangzhou Purple, a shaoyao variant.44 Painter Yun Shouping (1633-1690) honored
the diverse beauty of herbaceous peonies in multiple works, such as Five Colors of Shaoyao
Painting (figure 2).45 Evidently, China’s shaoyao occupied a symbolic niche that long predated,
40
Daqiu Zhao, Mengran Wei, Min Shi, Zhaojun Hao, and Tao Jun, “Identification and Comparative Profiling of
MiRNAs in Herbaceous Peony (Paeonia Lactiflora Pall.) with Red/Yellow Bicoloured Flowers,” Scientific Reports 7
(2017): 1-13.
41
Lucie Olivova, and Vibeke Ordahl, Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009),
85.
42
Olivova and Ordahl, Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou, 85.
43
Yanghua Peng, Flowers and Trees by the Poets (詩人筆下的花草樹木), 2018.
44
Jiang Tingxi, ed., Gujin Tushu Jicheng, Vol. 541, 1725,
https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/Page:Gujin_Tushu_Jicheng,_Volume_541_(1700-1725).djvu/13.
45
Yun Shouping, Five Colors of Peony Painting (五色芍藥圖), Eighteenth century, Painting, Cleveland Museum
of Art, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yun_Shouping_-_Peonies_-_1967.192_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art.tiff.
Page | 47JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
but was massive enough to not easily accompany the plants’ transplantation into early modern
Europe.
Figure 2: Five Colors of Shaoyao Painting (五色芍藥圖), a seventeenth-century painting by Yun
Shouping that celebrated the visual diversity of its eponymous flowers. Image courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons.
Altogether, the rich representations of Chinese peonies aided imperial governance as well.
Chinese emperors maintained their legitimizing Mandate of Heaven to rule by asserting their own
intelligence, generosity, and cultural competence.46 Not unlike contemporary kings throughout
early modern Europe, Qing emperors carefully cultivated their public images as capable and
refined through varied means, including displaying artwork of symbolically-imbued objects at
court. These ranged from watercolors of peacocks which signaled the emperor’s familiarity with
and control over the birds’ Central Asian homeland, to silk thangka paintings that replaced lotuses
in Tibetan Buddhist scenes with Chinese-symbolizing shaoyao, implying the emperor’s close
relationship with Tibet.47 Both shaoyao and mudan featured prominently in such symbolic
paintings and ceramics used by the imperial state.48 Furthermore, as explained by Daniela
Bleichmar, naturalist art commissioned by empires could make “nature movable, knowable, and—
ideally—governable.”49 In a territorially expanding China, forever-blooming peony illustrations
comprised some of many visualizing tools that recorded, tracked, and celebrated diverse natural
46
Kristen Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers, and Other Things at the Qing Court,” Word & Image 34, no.
4 (2018): 388.
47
Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers,” 388–406.
48
Chiem, “Possessing the King of Flowers,” 399.
49
Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5.
Page | 48JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
resources. As not only symbols of luxuriance and love, but also abstracted markers of imperial
legitimacy and mastery over regions, peonies had a tradition of impacting Chinese people far from
where the flowers actually grew.
All of this cumulative medicinal, culinary, and symbolic understanding existed alongside
peonies’ simple ornamental use in classical China. While herbalists might cook red peony root into
medicinal concoctions, or poets might contemplate the brilliant purple bloom before them, well-
off scholar-officials or merchants could plant mudan seedlings in their gardens with purely
aesthetic reasons in mind.50 Come each spring or early summer, the sheer lushness and fragrance
of flowering peonies would favorably compare with those of other garden plants. The mudan and
shaoyao might not have been universal with regards to how Chinese from different professions
analyzed their appearance, but they overall appeared beautiful to observers in some kind of natural
capacity. Such sensual beauty could accompany the peonies wherever they went. Yet, a literal
millennia’s worth of epistemological and cultural associations would have more difficulty
traveling abroad with the plants, as will be next discussed.
II. European Translation, Incorporation, and Agnotology
The first surviving mudan that reached Sir Joseph Banks in 1787 soon awoke Europe to
Chinese peonies. Captain James Prendergast transported the violet P. rockii variant of tree peony
to England in 1802, where it became grown in gardens of prominent gentlemen like Sir Abraham
Humes.51 A shipment of P. moutan reached France’s Jardin de la Malmaison in 1803, which led
to specimens reaching more of continental Europe.52 Furthermore, P. lactiflora, the most common
variant of the herbaceous shaoyao, reached Kew Gardens via Sir Joseph Banks by 1805, where it
joined its woody-stemmed cousin there.53 These were not the West’s earliest exposures to Chinese
peonies, as colonial gardens in Virginia had grown them as early as 1771, but well-connected
European naturalists could now rapidly disseminate knowledge about the plants as well as the
beloved plants themselves.54 By 1838, the comprehensive Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum
would report the “beautiful” P. moutan as widely “propagated in the principal nurseries of Europe
and America.”55
Naturalism in Europe had by the 1780s evolved for over two centuries. Its refined, Linnaean
taxonomical approach to classification—rigorous, systematic, and generalizable to the world’s
flora and fauna—could be traced back to inklings of skepticism towards the accuracy of Greco-
Roman herbal classics among Renaissance physicians, such as Niccolo Leoniceno.56 Incorporating
more of the world’s organisms within a shared and all-encompassing body of taxonomic
knowledge, prominent eighteenth-century naturalists headquartered in Europe, such as Sir Joseph
Banks, now directed vast networks of correspondents abroad, who furnished back natural
specimens. Indeed, per his extant letters of scientific correspondence between 1786 and 1787, Sir
50
Cumo, Encyclopedia of Cultivated Plants: From Acacia to Zinnia, 784.
51
Knapp, Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage Through Plant Exploration, 68.
52
Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 252.
53
Steven Foster and Chongxi Yue, Herbal Emissaries: Bringing Chinese Herbs to the West: A Guide to Gardening,
Herbal Wisdom, and Well-Being (Rochester, Vermont: Healing Arts Press, 1992), 202.
54
Foster and Yue, Herbal Emissaries, 202.
55
Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 250.
56
Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 30-34.
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Joseph Banks enjoyed assistance from specimen-collecting naturalists in localities as far apart as
Naples, Russia, and the East Indies.57
Flora from all of these locations, China, and elsewhere underwent meticulous inspection by
Linnaean taxonomists who produced new epistemological linkages among them. Examinations of
similar reproductive organs and nutritional systems justified lumping together different species
into common orders and genera.58 Yet, inter-species similarities discerned by taxonomists may not
always have been recognized beforehand by indigenous observers. Despite P. moutan and P.
lactiflora’s shared incorporation into the genus Paeonia, they appeared to have been understood
as unlike species in their homeland. Their Chinese names did not share characters or radicals in
common. Furthermore, they occupied asymmetric and separate positions in symbolism and
culture, with the King of Flowers enjoying the lion’s share of titular, poetic, and artistic renown.
Crucially, within various bencao that focused on cataloguing national herbs, the mudan and
shaoyao received very different indications and associated impacts on qi. Bencao creators, as
explained by Carla Nappi, categorized plants according to flavor, medicinal potency, seasonality,
and many other qualities, but seldom according to anatomy as eighteenth-century European
naturalists did.59 Hence, Chinese peonies collected by early modern European naturalists were first
reinterpreted in an organizational sense.
Arguably, beyond predominantly ornamental appropriation, this successful scientific
incorporation of P. moutan, lactiflora, and rockii comprised a partial symbolic victory for
European naturalism. Early modern botanists and their successors worked towards an intellectual
conquest of the world’s natural resources. Similar to Qing emperors who displayed vivid portraits
at court of faraway peacocks and peonies, Western taxonomists who acquired new flowers,
analyzed their stamens and pistils, and placed them into specific entries within a grand body of
natural knowledge could lay claim to mastery over distant flora. Gargantuan losses of symbolic
heritage accompanied the narrowed translation of Chinese peonies: among countless examples,
the mudan did not retain its kingly status at Kew Gardens, nor did shaoyao become a common
subject of Neoclassical or Romantic paintings. Yet, like the “Plagianthes” ribbonwood and
Gynandra vegetable that Swedish correspondent Olof Swartz mentioned to Sir Joseph Banks in
1787, the renamed Chinese peonies added their bit to the sum magnificence, prestige, and triumph
of European natural knowledge.60
After their arrival and dissemination in Western royal gardens such as at Kew, Chinese
peonies lost their encoded medicinal associations. Eastern Mediterranean materia medica up to the
1500s did list epilepsy and visceral ailments among indications for the P. officinalis species—
worn as a necklace—native to the region, and as late as 1678, Nicholas Culpeper’s School of
Physick prescribed “half an ounce [of white wine] with Peony-water one ounce” daily for
epilepsy.61,62 However, European medicinal use of P. officinalis, or any peonies, appeared to have
soon become confined to sporadic folk use. William Lewis’ The New Dispensatory (1753) listed
Mediterranean but no Chinese paeonia variants, and even then derided those medicinally using
paeonia as “absurd enough to believe that the root of this plant would do by being only worn about
57
Banks, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, 205-263.
58
Staffan Muller-Wille, “Linnaeus and the Love Life of Plants,” in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 305–18.
59
Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 28.
60
Banks, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, 316.
61
Lev, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah, 236.
62
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s School of Physick: Or the Experimental Practice of the Whole Art (London,
1678), 460.
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the neck.”63 Post-introduction into Europe, and perhaps with partial contribution from Paeonia’s
overall decline in medicinal use there, P. moutan and P. lactiflora did not see textual incorporation
into key medicinal texts anywhere comparable to that of China’s thirteen centuries’ worth of
bencao and supplementary works. William Lewis’ later, authoritative The Edinburgh New
Dispensatory listed P. officinalis but not P. moutan or P. lactiflora among the many
pharmaceutical herbs of its 1789 and 1808 editions.64 As late as 1838, the Arboretum et Fruticetum
Britannicum described P. moutan as having “no use,” “but as an ornamental flowering shrub.”65
Such hinted at the practical absence of Chinese peonies in the prescriptions of trained European
physicians. Out of popular exotic interest, though, a limited number of Chinese medicinal recipes
that could have included peonies were translated for lay European readers by eighteenth-century
Jesuits like Jean-Baptiste du Halde.66 Exoticism, nonetheless, implied more of a fashionable
reinterpretation of Asian material culture than serious manipulation of herbs to alleviate abdominal
pain, urinary retention, and seizures as in China. Applications in Europe hence clearly remained
confined to the ornamental.
Broadly, the narrowed translation of knowledge about Chinese peonies comprised an
exemplary case study of agnotology, or the study of culturally-induced ignorance. As observed by
Londa Schiebinger, cases of incomplete transmission of natural knowledge to Europe could result
from a “mix of deliberate and inadvertent neglect.”67 Prospectors of South American flora, for
example, extracted the nutritious potato and malaria-quelling cinchona bark, both of which gained
easy acceptance among Europeans who benefited from them, but the abortifacient peacock flower
did not reach pharmacopoeias that served an increasingly anti-abortion Europe.68 Likewise,
English naturalists collected Chinese peonies for display in their royal gardens just as Qing
imperial gardens had used them, but for many entangled reasons selectively neglected the
medicinal and symbolic purposes the flowers had served for millennia.
Difficulty translating Chinese writings contributed to large-scale ignorance. Lacking common
Germanic, Romance, or even Indo-European origins with European languages, classical Chinese
posed unfamiliar writing conventions and cultural assumptions to Western agents. Jesuit
missionaries, the only mid-eighteenth-century Western scholars permitted by the Qing to visit
remote Chinese provinces, work in imperial gardens, and collect floral specimens, could not finish
translations of the bencao into European languages.69 As reported by Jean-Baptiste du Halde, the
Jesuits experienced difficulties translating and identifying what Chinese terms referred to. An
exasperated Francois Xavier Dentrecolles lamented as well his troubles navigating the
organizational structures of bencao, which did not sort materials by anatomical structure.70 In
comparison, much Chinese medicinal-botanical knowledge about peonies had been conveyed
63
William Lewis, The New Dispensatory (London: J. Nourse, 1753), 174.
64
William Lewis, The Edinburgh New Dispensatory (London: Charles Elliot, 1789), 246. And, William Lewis
and Andrew Duncan, The Edinburgh New Dispensatory (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1808), 411.
65
Loudon, Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 252.
66
Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste,” 90.
67
Londa Schiebinger, “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its
Study),” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1-
33.
68
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 150-193.
69
Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste,” 81.
70
Rinaldi, The “Chinese Garden in Good Taste,” 89.
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centuries earlier to scholars of Korea and Japan, states familiar with the Chinese writing system.71
Given that materia medica as well as poetic works embodied classical understandings of Chinese
peonies, many medicinal and symbolic ideas about shaoyao and mudan could not be conveyed if
their meaning-laden sources did not reach Europeans in romanized form.
Contrasting ways of understanding the world also perplexed and deterred many Europeans
trying to grasp cultural concepts relevant to peonies’ medicinal use. Translations often failed to
convey sophisticated Chinese concepts: for instance, qi could literally translate into “air” just as it
could denote a richly meaning-imbued, vital force linking together humans and their surroundings.
When poor translations intersected with European physicians’ lack of familiarity with Chinese
cosmology, the resulting confusion led to cases such as a mid-nineteenth-century Dr. Lamprey in
Tianjin scoffing at Chinese “absurd notions of attributing diseases to wind, breath, water, or
sweat,” substances the Englishman appeared to have mentally reduced qi to.72 As the efficacy of
shaoyao was strongly tied to its impact on imbalanced qi as early as in the Shennong Bencao Jing
sixteen centuries before, these misinterpretations hint at the sheer difficulty Western doctors had
in assimilating native medicinal knowledge about the Chinese peony. Some eighteenth-century
European physicians spoke bluntly about Chinese medical thinking’s impenetrability. John Floyer
proclaimed that “Asiatics have a gay, luxurious imagination.”73 Menuret de Chambaud contrasted
European precision in health discourse with the “allegorical style” of China’s medicinal texts.74
With regards to agnotology, even if Chinese health indications for peonies reached early modern
Europe in some written form, the disconnect between Chinese and Western worldviews—and thus
medical rationales—hindered their serious informing of European physicians.
Finally, botany’s distinctness as a scientific discipline contributed towards culturally-induced
ignorance regarding Chinese peonies. By the late eighteenth century, European botany had
departed substantially from its Renaissance intertwining with medicine, even though incoming
plant specimens were often appropriated for medicine, food, and other human uses.75 Intellectually
assimilating more species, transporting them rot-free across inhospitable oceans, and planting them
alive were major priorities for European naturalists at this point, with casualty-prone Chinese
specimens being no exception.76 Illustrative examples include that of Gabriel de Clieu complaining
in 1774 of “infinite cares” he needed to provide to a “delicate” coffee plant during an ocean voyage,
and even of Kew Gardens’ first planted mudan perishing prematurely.77 Furthermore, acquisition
of plants even for utilitarian ends could devalue less relevant indigenous connotations: in 1769,
for instance, Sir Joseph Banks sought the breadfruit more for food production than to understand
its place in Polynesian mythology.78 Amidst so many logistical concerns, European naturalists may
71
Dong-Yi He and Sheng-Ming Dai, “Anti-Inflammatory and Immunomodulatory Effects of Paeonia Lactiflora
Pall., a Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine,” Frontiers in Pharmacology 2, no. 10 (2011): 1–5.
72
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2004), 94.
73
Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 62.
74
Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body, 62.
75
Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 73-104.
76
Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China, 19.
77
Christopher Parsons and Kathleen Murphy, “Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-
Century French and British Atlantics,” Early American Studies (2012): 503–38. And, Harding, The Book of the Peony,
200.
78
Anya Zilberstein, “Bastard Breadfruit and Other Cheap Provisions: Early Food Science for the Welfare of the
Lower Orders,” Early Science and Medicine 21, no. 5 (2018): 492–508.
Page | 52JSAHMS Vol. 3 (no. 1) 2021
have paid less attention to peonies’ medicinal and symbolic associations out of perceived
necessity.
Early modern Europeans did not neglect so much Chinese understanding of peonies because
they disliked the flowers’ tangible medical benefits, or their eponymous, elegant poems. Rather,
literal under-translations and mistranslations of Asian ideas joined with logistical realities to create
a narrowed translation of mudan and shaoyao as ornamental flora. Truly, the Chinese peonies that
arrived at Kew, Malmaison, and other royal gardens stripped of their myriad medico-cultural
associations were interpreted there anew.
Conclusion
Domesticated plants throughout history have been inextricable from the desires, languages,
and worldviews of their cultivators. Humans have named them; heaped literary accolades or
assigned humble uses to them; and boiled them into remedies or feared their toxicity. Even for
sensually brilliant plants like the peony, their meanings and value changed as their cultivators
changed. Sir Joseph Banks’ P. moutan received praise throughout Europe for its beauty, but it was
no imperially-sanctioned, poetically glorified, and ameliorative mudan.
This curious case of agnotology saw agents from two disparate cultural bodies construe and
manipulate the same material entity in drastically unlike ways. It was far from the first such
instance between China and the West. Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body partly
examined how palpating the wrist, a universal corporeal act, presented a richer meaning to Chinese
practitioners than to early modern European physicians who only elicited a numerical pulse rate.79
Because those who utilized shaoyao or mudan comprised generations not only of physicians but
also of artists, officials, lay growers, and many others, Chinese peonies demonstrated their own
culturally contingent “expressiveness” on an enormous scale.
Beyond the early modern period, how has this expressiveness changed today? Biomedicine,
which originated in the early twentieth-century West, has now synthesized with traditional
medicine in China to produce a promising, prolific “expression” of the peony. A burgeoning
corpus of literature on anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, and other compounds extracted from P.
lactiflora and P. suffruticosa (renamed from moutan) has emerged due to extensive Chinese
experimentation, where the peony possesses a new but precious status as biochemical reservoir.80
These hopeful discoveries have required precise technological handling of peony parts, a culturally
contingent manipulation just like boiling medicinal shaoyao roots at Tang-era Luoyang, or
ornamental arrangement of the Mou-tan at Kew Gardens.
79
Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body, 17-108.
80
For example, see Ma Xiao, Jian-Xia Wen, Si-Jia Gao, Xuan He, and Peng-Yan Li, “Paeonia Lactiflora Pall.
Regulates the NF‐κB‐NLRP3 Inflammasome Pathway to Alleviate Cholestasis in Rats,” Journal of Pharmacy and
Pharmacology 70, no. 12 (2018): 1675–87; Shefton Parker, Brian May, Claire Zhang, Anthony Zhang, and Chuanjian
Lu, “A Pharmacological Review of Bioactive Constituents of Paeonia Lactiflora Pallas and Paeonia Veitchii Lynch,”
Phytotherapy Research 30, no. 9 (2016): 1445–73; Wei Zhang and Dai Sheng-Ming, “Mechanisms Involved in the
Therapeutic Effects of Paeonia Lactiflora Pallas in Rheumatoid Arthritis,” International Immunopharmacology 14,
no. 1 (2012): 27–31; Dan-Dan Yin, Wen-Zhong Xu, Qing-Yan Shu, Shan-Shan Li, and Qian Wu, “Fatty Acid
Desaturase 3 (PsFAD3) from Paeonia Suffruticosa Reveals High α-Linolenic Acid Accumulation,” Plant Science 274
(2018): 212–22; ZhengWang Sun, Juan Du, Eunson Hwang, and Tae-Hoo Yi, “Paeonol Extracted from Paeonia
Suffruticosa Andr. Ameliorated UVB‐induced Skin Photoaging via DLD/Nrf2/ARE and MAPK/AP‐1 Pathway,”
Phytotherapy Research 32, no. 9 (2018): 1741–49; and Wei-Hua Song, Zhi-Hong Cheng, and Dao-Feng Chen,
“Anticomplement Monoterpenoid Glucosides from the Root Bark of Paeonia Suffruticosa,” Journal of Natural
Products 77, no. 1 (2014): 42–48.
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Evidently, culturally-induced ignorance precluded not only transient medicinal and cultural
benefits of Chinese peonies on Europeans during the later early modern period, but also
development of non-ornamental meanings of the Westernized plants from that point on. Just as the
shaoyao accumulated meanings and thus evolved between the ancient Shennong Bencao Jing and
the eighteenth-century peony paintings of the Qing emperor, the Western-adopted P. moutan could
have built upon, rather than lost its Chinese pharmacologic and literary value in the immediate
decades after 1787, had Europeans not confined it to decoration. One may wonder if the
nineteenth-century P. moutan, peacock flower, or any other incompletely translated plant in
Europe could have had a consequential history there, had it become the subject of interest and
inquiry of more professions. One may wonder as well, given biomedicine’s belated yet fruitful
collaboration with Chinese medicine over the peony, and in this age of accessible pharmaceuticals
and renewed environmentalist interest in nature, if the King of Flowers may soon regain its title
throughout the entire world.
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