13-05-2026, 11:49 AM
We don't need to make a close read of the content or small differences, fortunately. I doubt your hypothetical reader had this exact edition, and the digitization errors were small enough I didn't systematically check if they were errors or simplified characters. No, the problem is this:
The reason why the Ming reconstructions were so bad was because available texts had assimilated a huge amount of interpolations into the text it was identifying with Shennong's original. The implication of the quote above about the Bencao Chengya Banjie is that Ming scholars couldn't even recover which ~365 materials were in the original, let alone the lean text you're using. Reading off "the characters marked in red" (in this case, the larger text) gets you the huge text you then had to make further edits to to bring it into alignment with the 21st century understanding of the underlying SBJ. That work would not be done to a high quality until 1799, and that's the version you are working from. Like I said at the outset, this has a strange status as a "lost" text because the evidence for a credible reconstruction never stopped circulating---this is not a text that was recovered because of a chance find---but it took 300 years from the first try to get a high quality version.
So, again, I ask: Do you have a period basis for using a much later reconstruction?
(13-05-2026, 12:33 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.After mapping both texts to simplified characters, and comparing the hanzi by hand, I found that practically every character of my version (bottom 5 lines) was present in the ZLB version (assumed to be the top 7 lines), in the same order, intercalated with lots of other material. After deleting the latter...Emphasis mine, because you are deleting words attributed Shennong. I have already removed the marked interpolations. There is no basis for recovering the text you are recovering from the Zhenglei Bencao alone. If the Reader were using it, and chose to only read the Shennong part of the Rooster entry, he would have no basis to make the edits you are.
The reason why the Ming reconstructions were so bad was because available texts had assimilated a huge amount of interpolations into the text it was identifying with Shennong's original. The implication of the quote above about the Bencao Chengya Banjie is that Ming scholars couldn't even recover which ~365 materials were in the original, let alone the lean text you're using. Reading off "the characters marked in red" (in this case, the larger text) gets you the huge text you then had to make further edits to to bring it into alignment with the 21st century understanding of the underlying SBJ. That work would not be done to a high quality until 1799, and that's the version you are working from. Like I said at the outset, this has a strange status as a "lost" text because the evidence for a credible reconstruction never stopped circulating---this is not a text that was recovered because of a chance find---but it took 300 years from the first try to get a high quality version.
So, again, I ask: Do you have a period basis for using a much later reconstruction?