About
About Bencao Archive
A personal archive of Chinese materia medica and seasonal eating.
What this is
Seasonal ingredients, where they come from in the classical Chinese herbals, and how they are cooked at home. Solar terms are arranged for China in the northern hemisphere; the substance list follows the current official Chinese catalogue, with the notice each entry comes from.
Editorial rule: three layers
Every entry is written in three separate layers that are never mixed. Each layer carries its own status: unchecked while it is still being compiled, checked once the wording has been read back against the source, and not searched where no literature search has been run.
- Layer 1 · Classical text
- Quoted verbatim from the source with its citation. No interpretation, no extrapolation.
- Layer 2 · Folk custom
- Who ate it, at which solar term, and how. It needs a citable source.
- Layer 3 · Modern literature
- If no search has been run, it reads not searched. Nothing is filled in from memory.
What this is not
- No claims about what a food does. No efficacy language, no treating or preventing disease — none of it.
- No diagnosis and no prescriptions. We do not answer what should I take for this.
- No product links, nothing for sale, no contact details.
- No comments.
Why it is so slow
Because nothing goes up until a citable source has been found and the original text checked. The archive holds 106 substances and 24 solar terms, and the three layers are being filled in one at a time. Slow beats wrong.
Who runs this
An individual, in their spare time. Bencao Archive is the personal notebook of someone with a long-standing interest in Chinese medicine and seasonal cooking. It is not a clinic.
Reuse
Repost freely with credit and a link back.
Contact
There is no contact route, and no consultations. If an email list is added, its sign-up will sit at the foot of each page.
Analytics
Page views are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics: no cookies, no cross-site tracking, nothing that identifies a person — just which pages were opened. Nothing else is loaded, and there is no advertising code.
Languages
Chinese and English are separate sets of pages for the same entries. English is the longer-term side.