Source-traceable Chinese medicine knowledge.
Every claim links to a citable classical source you can open and check.
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Content frozen 29 July 2026. Development on MateriaTrace has stopped. The site remains online as a static archive: all 1,900 entries are free to read and cite, no account needed — and none of it will change from here.
Sometimes the classics missed what we now know. Sometimes they nailed it centuries early. We show both records, each with its source — and let you decide.
We keep the classical line exactly as written, the modern evidence beside it — never one tidy verdict.
Source-traceable essays on herbs, formulas, and concepts.
An AI assistant will tell you confidently that licorice was called the state elder, that e jiao is donkey-hide gelatin, and that an ancient dictionary identified a certain bitter plant as licorice. One of those checks out, one is a later change the texts recorded as it happened, and one is a mis-gloss the classical record itself caught and corrected. Here is the actual procedure for telling them apart, run on all three.
The classical materia medica does not mention a herb's place of origin in passing. It writes the place into the name, narrows it to a single well, argues about which region is best, and — in one remarkable line — admits that the answer has changed over the centuries. Here we transcribe those origin passages from four entries, each traced to the authority who wrote it, and leave the disagreements exactly where the texts left them.
An entry in the Bencao Gangmu looks like a wall of classical Chinese, but it has a fixed skeleton — the name-and-grade line, the collected explanations, the nature-and-flavour line that carries toxicity, and the channels the herb was said to enter. Read one entry — licorice (gan cao) — line by line, and you can tell the base classic from the later commentators, and check every claim against its named source. A guide to reading the classics, not a guide to using any herb.
Every assertion here comes from a named text and links back to it — you can open the source and check the wording yourself, rather than taking it on trust.
Chinese and English side by side, with the traditional context spelled out — not flattened into a guess.
Stable source identifiers — reliable for teaching and citation.
Classical Sources
MateriaTrace is a free, open archive — every herb, formula, and concept is fully cited and open to browse, no account required.
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