The monkey of the inkpot: Natural history and its transformations in early modern China

This dissertation investigates natural history in early modern China, seen primarily through the lens of the Bencao gangmu (1596), a massive work of materia medica and natural history written by Ming scholar Li Shizhen (1518-1593) in the last decades of the sixteenth century. The Bencao functioned as a stage on which many great debates over the natural world in China were enacted, and this thesis is devoted primarily to exploring and understanding the epistemological mechanics of those arguments.;Fact-making in the Bencao and other natural history texts relied on a combination of innovative citation practices, example-making, and negotiation between sensory and textual evidence that together created an epistemological environment wherein scholars created notions of "reasonableness" and of "absurdity." I argue that a deep commitment to the centrality of transformation and change in the universe shaped Li Shizhen's epistemology and informed all aspects of the Bencao gangmu. Li invoked varied sets of authoritative sources and focused his comments on different themes when treating different categories of natural objects, from the primacy of foundational notions of change in discussing members of the Five Phases, to the importance of poetry as a source of authority when discussing plants, to the role of analogy in debating the morality of using human body parts in food and medicine. This dissertation explores the thematic and epistemic nuances of each major category treated in the Bencao gangmu in turn, situating the debates therein within a broader context of late Ming texts on plants, animals, and stones. The discussions within the Bencao gangmu resonated through a history of reinterpretations of the work, from appendation to the text using local gazetteers as a result of Qing expansion of imperial territory, to a twentieth century refashioning of Li Shizhen as scientist, comic-book figure, artistic muse, and medical icon.