When I was small, there was no good physician nearby, so I often had to go to the neighboring county of Huguan to seek treatment. Near the right-side lane just inside Huguan’s eastern gate there was an apothecary that treated only odd complaints such as mouth sores and chapped skin, infantile convulsions, madness, and poisonous sores. When I was four years old, I was once taken there because of convulsions. My mother told me that the physician there merely asked what symptoms I had, took out a black-gold book, tore out a certain page, burned it, and had me swallow the ashes with warm water. Within a few days I was well. I always felt that this way of treating illness was wonderfully strange, but I was too young then to remember it clearly.
When I was in middle school, I once accompanied a classmate to that same Huguan apothecary after he had been bitten on the back by a poisonous spider and developed a festering sore. The physician on duty was a young, gaunt man who said his surname was Wu. He examined my classmate’s wound, asked about the markings on the spider, then went straight to one drawer in the medicine cabinet and took out a book. The book appeared to be made of green paper, its pages giving off a bluish-green sheen and looking extremely old. Physician Wu turned to a page bearing an illustration of the poisonous spider and asked whether this was the one. My classmate hurriedly said yes. Wu then tore out that page, took out a stack of green paper from another drawer, and folded one sheet into the shape of a dove. Finally, he burned both the page and the paper dove together into ashes and had my classmate drink them with clear water. In about the time it takes one stick of incense to burn, the boil, which had been blackish-purple before, had already begun slowly to subside, and its color had lightened considerably. Wu then cut some more green paper for my classmate to take home and instructed him to burn and take one sheet each day. Within less than half a month, he said, the wound would be completely healed.
I took one of the sheets of green paper and held it before me. It carried a faint smell of medicinal herbs, so the paper had clearly been soaked in some kind of medicinal preparation. Across it, a testament-like text had been densely written in small-seal script, possibly from an ancient book that already existed in the Jin dynasty. So-called green paper was a bluish paper made by old methods. In the Jin, imperial decrees were written on green paper with purple sealing clay, so later “green paper” also became a metonym for imperial edicts. I suspect Physician Wu’s ancestors may once have been court physicians. The method of infusing medicinal preparations into paper by heat was already known before the Qin, and perhaps the reason that this apothecary treated only a few odd ailments was that only a limited number of such medicinal books still survived, or perhaps that the method required green paper itself as a medium. Green paper was also called black-gold paper and was itself one of the materials used in medicine, often for making or substituting for gold leaf. Ordinary people could clearly never have afforded such an expensive treatment. As for Physician Wu’s folding of the paper dove, I suspect it worked by the same principle as the paper-cutting sorcery of the Human Victory Festival. I only hope that the apothecary still possesses many such medicinal books on green paper, or else still retains the method for making them, and that this unique art does not vanish entirely.
Jingxian: convulsive illness in children.
PS: Thanks to jojo for the suggestion. Then I may as well write about brush, ink, paper, and inkstone first.