Pu Ji Fang (普济方): The Largest Formulary Ever Compiled

A Prince, a Famine, and 61,000 Prescriptions

Ming dynasty royalty produced generals, aesthetes, and schemers. It also produced, in Zhu Su (朱橚, 1361–1425), the Prince of Zhou, something rarer: a serial organizer of medical knowledge. Exiled twice, mostly resident in Kaifeng, the prince turned his household — and his budget — into a medical compilation workshop. Its two great products were the Jiuhuang Bencao (《救荒本草》, 1406), an illustrated catalog of edible famine plants, and the Pu Ji Fang (《普济方》, “Prescriptions for Universal Relief”), the largest collection of medical formulas ever assembled in China ¹.

The scale deserves a pause. By the standard count, the Pu Ji Fang runs to 168 volumes and around 61,700 prescriptions ¹ — roughly six times the famous Song He Ji Ju Fang, more than any other pre-modern formulary anywhere. “Universal relief” was the declared ambition: a prescription library large enough that whatever the disease, something in it applied.

What Is In It

The organization is the classic Chinese formulary architecture, executed at maximum size:

• General medical theory first, then
• Disease categories — external contraction (cold damage, warm disease), the organ systems, and every clinical domain: cough, wheezing, abdominal masses, edema, diabetes-like xiao ke, stroke patterns, women’s disorders, children’s disorders, eye diseases, sores and wounds, and so on — each with
• Formulas gathered from every available source: the Song imperial formularies, Jin-Yuan masters’ works, Yuan palace medicine archives, and contemporary books and family prescriptions

The historical value is mostly retrospective. Zhu Su’s compilers were working before the great printing explosion had made older books safe — many titles they quoted later vanished, so the Pu Ji Fang is now the only surviving witness for a meaningful slice of Jin-Yuan and Yuan-era clinical writing ². Historians of Chinese medicine mine it the way paleontologists mine a fossil bed: the formulas of physicians whose own books are gone survive here, uncredited or lightly credited, in bulk.

Why It Mattered Less Than Its Size

Here is the honest paradox. The Pu Ji Fang is a monument, and barely a classic. Nobody reads it cover to cover; no school formed around it; it produced no famous commentary tradition. Compare its fate with the Shang Han Lun — 113 formulas that structured a thousand years of debate. The lesson is structural: a formulary without an argument is a warehouse. Chinese medicine’s influential books are small books with a thesis — treatise, not archive.

The Pu Ji Fang’s influence is real but invisible: it served as a reference reservoir — a place later physicians, encyclopedists, and modern researchers went to look up “what had been tried” for a given disease. Its genre is the database, and like databases, its glory is comprehensiveness rather than point of view.

Survival and Modern Status

The Ming printing became scarce within centuries. The book survives through later reprint traditions and, notably, through the Qing Siku Quanshu project, whose editors recognized its archival value and preserved it — by their account, reconstituting an imperfect text from what remained ². Today it exists in modern punctuated editions in China, consulted mainly by researchers tracing the genealogy of formulas and by historians reconstructing lost Yuan-era medicine. Bits of it surface in clinics only indirectly, as source material for later standardized formula books.

The Prince’s Larger Project

It is worth closing with Zhu Su himself, because the Pu Ji Fang was half of a program. His Jiuhuang Bencao cataloged 400-plus plants that starving people could eat — an act of applied, public-interest medicine. The Pu Ji Fang aimed at the other end: when food and medicine both existed, what should be prescribed? Between the two books stands a consistent figure — an aristocrat who spent his career turning private, scattered knowledge into public, organized form. Chinese medicine’s history is usually told through physicians; the Pu Ji Fang is the reminder that a few of its biggest buildings were built by patrons.

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Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only. Consult a qualified practitioner before using any classical formula.

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• Tai Ping Hui Min He Ji Ju Fang: The Song Imperial Formulary
• Wai Tai Mi Yao: The Tang Dynasty Medical Compendium
• The History of TCM

Footnotes

1. Pu Ji Fang (《普济方》). Compiled under Zhu Su, Prince of Zhou, with his medical staff, Yongle era (c. 1406). 168 juan, ~61,700 prescriptions by the standard count; modern reprints and punctuated editions available. ↩ ↩²

2. Siku Quanshu Zongmu Tiyao (《四库全书总目提要》), entry on the Pu Ji Fang, on its preservation and textual condition; see also modern histories of Chinese medicine on the work’s sources. ↩ ↩²