Rhino Horn: What the Classics Recorded, and Why It Is Banned

Rhino Horn Is in the Classics — and Every Rhino Is Now a Protected Species

A line from the old books

Open the Bencao Gangmu (Volume 51, the beasts) to rhino horn (xi jiao), listed since the Shennong Bencao Jing among the middle-grade entries, and the nature-and-flavor line reads: "bitter, sour, salty, cold, non-toxic." The entry records it, among other things, for clearing heart vexation, settling fright, calming the liver, quieting the five viscera — and for clearing heat and transforming phlegm.

A cold substance used to clear heat. That is the classical record, and it is exactly what the old texts wrote. We keep it as written.

But this is one entry where reading the classical line and stopping would miss almost everything that matters now. Because the animal behind the name is one the modern world has spent fifty years trying to keep alive.

The animal behind the name

Xi (犀) is the rhinoceros. The "horn" of the record is the horn of a living animal — and there are only five species of rhinoceros left on Earth. That is not an interpretation; it is a plain fact about what the substance is, the same way cinnabar being mercuric sulfide is a fact.

The classical authors named and used the horn in a world where the rhinoceros was, to them, simply another animal of the far south. They could not have known what the twentieth century would learn: that the species itself would come to the edge of disappearing, in large part because the horn was wanted.

Modern conservation adds a voice the classics couldn't

On the rhinoceros, the modern record is unusually clear, and it is not primarily a record about medicine — it is a record about survival.

• Every species and population of rhinoceros has been listed on CITES Appendix I since 1977 — the Convention's strictest category — which as a general rule prohibits international commercial trade in the animals and their parts, rhino horn included. (Two southern-white-rhino populations, in South Africa and Eswatini, were later moved to Appendix II under narrow annotations for live animals and hunting trophies; commercial trade in horn remains prohibited.)
• On the IUCN Red List, three of the five species — the black rhino, Javan rhino, and Sumatran rhino — are Critically Endangered, with the Javan and Sumatran rhinos numbering only in the dozens. The greater one-horned (Indian) rhino is Vulnerable, and the white rhino Near Threatened. None is out of danger.
• And China itself cancelled rhino horn's medicinal standard. The State Council's 1993 notice (Guo Fa 〔1993〕No. 39, dated 29 May 1993) banned the trade in rhino horn and tiger bone together, and stated plainly: "cancel the medicinal standards for rhinoceros horn and tiger bone; henceforth neither may be used to make medicine." Rhino horn, which earlier pharmacopoeia editions had carried, was removed. (The picture is not perfectly static: in October 2018 a State Council circular proposed a limited reversal — permitting rhino horn and tiger bone from farmed animals for medical and research use, including powdered forms prescribed by qualified doctors in qualified hospitals. After international response, implementation was postponed "after study" in November 2018, and officials said the country's wildlife-protection stance was unchanged.)

Note what this paragraph is and isn't. It transcribes what international and Chinese authorities record about the rhinoceros — the animal, its legal protection, and its status in the wild. It is not a prescription, and it is emphatically not a suggestion to seek the horn out. We are recording, with sources, what the modern world has decided about a species it is trying not to lose.

On the medicinal claims themselves, we quote a conservation body rather than author our own verdict. The WWF states that ground rhino horn "is used in traditional Asian medicine for a range of ailments … despite having no proven medicinal properties," and notes that rhino horn "is made up of keratin — the same protein which forms the basis of our hair and nails."

Where modern practice went instead: water buffalo horn

There is a second modern fact worth recording, because it is the constructive one. When rhino horn was withdrawn, practice did not simply lose the category — it moved to a substitute. Water buffalo horn (shui niu jiao, Cornu Bubali) has been used in place of rhino horn since the 1970s and carries its own monograph in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. It is abundant, it is lawful, and it takes the place rhino horn once held in the cold, heat-clearing category — no rhinoceros required.

We record that shift as what it is: a modern substitution, sourced to modern pharmacopoeia practice, sitting beside — not edited into — the classical line.

Why the classics could never have weighed this

It would be an anachronism to read the old texts as callous. They weren't. They were working in a different world. When the Bencao Gangmu was compiled, the rhinoceros was not an endangered animal and there was no concept of a global species on the brink; there was no CITES, no Red List, no chemistry to say the horn is keratin. Judging and recording a substance then meant describing what it was taken to do, in the terms of the day.

The modern verdict is a different kind of statement, from tools and a global situation the classical authors never had. The classical line is an honest record of what one book wrote in 1596. The conservation facts are a record of what the world knows and has decided now. These are different claims — one historical, one present-day — and source-traceability is what lets you see which is which.

How MateriaTrace handles it: keep the record, source the rest

So rhino horn arrives with records that sit on entirely different ground:

1. the classical entry — a cold substance recorded for clearing heat, among other uses;
2. the modern reality — every rhino species protected, CITES Appendix I since 1977, the medicinal standard cancelled in China in 1993, and water buffalo horn used in its place.

Here is how we hold them, and it is the whole point:

• The classical entry stays exactly as written — the nature, flavor, and recorded uses, marked as the classical record and as historical record only. We don't quietly delete the Bencao Gangmu on its own page.
• The modern facts — the species' protected status, the trade ban, the 1993 cancellation, the water-buffalo-horn substitute — sit in a separate layer, each carrying its own source, never edited into the classical text, and never presented as a reason to seek the horn.

What we do not do is collapse the two into a single line, and we do not print anything that reads as "use this." The classical record is kept as a record of what one source wrote, flagged as historical and as coming from an endangered, internationally protected species — not as a present-day recommendation. Those are different claims, and keeping them visibly separate, each traceable, is exactly what "source-traceable" has to mean here.

Worth stating plainly: MateriaTrace records what sources say — classical and modern — and makes no treatment or usage recommendation. For rhino horn there is an additional line we will not cross: nothing here should be read as encouraging the use, purchase, or acquisition of a product from an endangered species. Where the modern world has protected a species and withdrawn a substance, we record that, its sources, and the lawful substitute, and leave any medical question with a qualified professional.

Why keep a record for something now banned

It would be tidier to erase rhino horn from the record the moment the law withdrew it. But erasing it would hide the most important thing this entry has to teach: that a substance can sit calmly in a 16th-century pharmacopoeia and, four centuries later, become the reason an entire family of animals is fighting for survival — and that the honest response was not to pretend the record never existed, but to keep it, flag it, and record beside it both the ban and the substitute. That lesson only survives if the original line survives next to the correction, each visible, each sourced.

See it on the entries themselves: open rhino horn (xi jiao) to read the classical line in place, flagged as historical and as an endangered species; the same treatment covers tiger bone, banned in the very same 1993 notice, and musk (she xiang), another animal product for which modern practice turned to a substitute. Tiger bone's full classical record, alongside bear bile and pangolin scale, gets the same source-first treatment in a companion piece on three more entries from protected species. For a plant the classics called "non-toxic" that modern science reads very differently, read about ma dou ling and aristolochic acid; for a mineral the old texts already argued over, read about cinnabar and mercury.

If this "every record clicks back to its own source" approach is useful to you, see what else is in MateriaTrace on the homepage.

MateriaTrace is a source-traceable, bilingual knowledge graph of Chinese medicine. It records how classical and modern sources describe each entry — each field traceable to its primary source, contradictions kept side by side — and makes no treatment or usage recommendations. Every record in this article can be checked on its entry page.