This is a short piece for the general public that I wrote for the online open-access forum The Recipes Project (https://recipes.hypotheses.org/). Here is the link to the piece: https://recipes.hypotheses.org/10446 A more in-depth study of a transcultural history of saffron in premodern China will be published in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 2022.

By the end of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), olfactory culture in China had evolved significantly as coveted aromatics continued to be imported and in increasing quantities from Southeast Asia. Although there is no surviving treatise dedicated to aromatics from this period, anecdotes in prose literature describing the uses and curation of scents reveal a process in which imported aromatics were being actively incorporated into existing olfactory culture and accrued new social, aesthetic, and ritual significance. This process is discernible in two major respects. First, a discourse of connoisseurship for aromatics arose in contrast to the conspicuous consumption of imported aromatics that flaunted wealth and status. Secondly, aromatics that were once the privilege of the very few began to be circulated among a wider (admittedly still elite) population, as seen in the case of the dragon brain aromatic in late-Tang and Five Dynasties accounts. By delving into these and related prose narratives and by cross-examining these accounts against other types of records, this article examines how imported aromatic goods shaped the Tang elite's perception of how scent was—and could be—used as part of a socially rooted sensory experience.

This chapter looks at the intertwined relationship between herbs and occult arts in Late Imperial China (c. sixteenth to early twentieth centuries). Before the formal creation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the 1950s, astrology, divination, talismans, spells and incantations, often combined with herbs, constituted the core of healthcare cultures in China. Invoked through herbal incense, gods and spirits stood as active agents in the processes of healing, while demons, beasts and insects could be repelled using such everyday herbs as artemisia, peach flowers and ginger. Past studies have persistently dismissed this ritual knowledge of herbs as ‘magical’ or ‘superstitious’, and the worldview wherein this knowledge is rooted as ‘ludicrous’. Drawing on manuscripts and printed books – alongside fieldwork with folk healers in Shanghai and Hong Kong (2014–2020) – the longstanding relationship between herbs, rituals and occult arts in traditional China is instead approached from historical and anthropological perspectives. What is the place of occult herbal knowledge in Chinese medical literature? To what extent does this knowledge relate to scholarly medicine, its theories and practices? What was its significance for everyday life? And who were the actors mostly involved with the ritual use of herbs?

This article preprint examines the intersection of religion, science, medicine and historical geography in China through a study of the Taiqing jinye shendan jing 太清金液神丹經 (Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold), attributed to Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343 CE). The text provides a gaze which contravenes standard narratives of foreign medical migration that vector into China via Buddhist channels. Passages from the Scripture describe the healing powers of non-Chinese drugs, and highlight ways medieval writers imagined the transmission of medical knowledge, as well as the specific places producing potent substances. As such, we argue that it provides a novel view on medical migration in its time period. As one of the early sources on physical geography and trade goods from Southeast Asia, it is an important resource for early knowledge of the region, and is one of the earliest examples of possible Daoist religio-technical continuities between the regions.

This paper aims to critically appraise the incorporation of opium poppy into medical practice in Song-dynasty China. By analysing materia medica and formularies, along with non-medical sources from the Song period, this study sheds light on the role of Chinese Buddhist monasteries in the process of incorporation of foreign plants into Chinese medicine. It argues that Buddhist monasteries played a significant role in the evolution of the use of opium poppy in Song dynasty medicine. This is because the consumption practices in Buddhist monasteries inspired substantial changes in the medical application of the flower during the Southern Song dynasty. While, at the beginning of Song dynasty, court scholars incorporated opium poppy into official materia medica in order to treat disorders such as huangdan and xiaoke, as well as cinnabar poisoning, this study of the later Song medical treatises shows how opium poppy was repurposed to treat symptoms such as diarrhoea, coughing and spasms. ...

In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the 'smellscapes' of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.