The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[countingtls]

I think this: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the book that Prof. Stolfi referred to as a possible source of the Voynich MS.

Thanks for a deep dive into this interesting hypothesis, and although I am a bit late to the party, and certainly not an expert in Voynich, but I think I can offer some insights in terms of the context for different versions of BenCao (本草). 

First of all, the version shared by oshfdk from ctext (中國哲學書電子化計劃, this is an open-source project to digitize ancient texts, hence the quality of the transcription sometimes might not be the best, and some are done by OCR with really bad quality). And this particular version is poorly formatted, with subsections and section titles in the wrong place. Also, this particular version I believe, is from a late 18th-century reconstruction version edited by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. There are 3 major "modern versions" compiled in 1799(孫本), 1844(顧本), and 1845(森本). And their differences are how they categorize the "Better quality"(上品), "Medicore quality" (中品), and "Poor quality"(下品). The 1799 version split them into 120/120/125 (total 365), and the 1844 version split them into 142/113/103 (total 358), and the 1854 version split them into 125/114/118 (total 357). For modern Chinese medicine practitioners, the 1844 version is usually considered more proper due to its categorization following the famous BenCao GangMu (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. published in 1596). 

The format of ancient Chinese printed books is very crucial, since they are often a collection of notes and references mixed in with the "original texts", and each version is basically a reference to a reference to a reference, that theoretically still contains the original texts. Here is an example of an entry from the 1799 printed version (孫本)
   

The red marked lines are texts for the supposed original texts, and the orange lines are additional notes from the current author, usually denoting some alias or their opinions of the entry. The green lines are the sources from previous works (quotes and notes from particular authors/versions), and the blue lines are references to aliases and additional notes from these older sources. And as you can see, the format matters. Since there are no breaks or punctuation, the paragraph alignments, heights, and even font sizes are crucial in separating the source materials, reference sources, and different notes from various authors/versions. This also means, digitizing and showing these printed versions is a massive challenge, as well as very hard to do OCR automatically, even breaking the words into phrases and paragraphs needs extensive work.

As for the index and subsections, here are the index pages for the "Better quality" for each entry in the 1799 version
           
The subsections of different types (like minerals, plants, different types of animals, fruits, etc.) are added after the listing of indexes (I marked in yellow), with how many of them in numbers (marked in green, the word 種 is the classifier), and their numbers in older sources (marked in light blue, the word 舊 means old, and 同 means the same, if there were no change in the number of types listed). The extraction of the subsections also required understanding the work itself, and definitely needs some work to insert them in the main text correctly.

For a more complete transcription, here is a version that mostly kept the format (the 1799 version).
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And here is the scan of a reprinted 1799 version in the 20th century
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