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When you learn biological classification for Class 11, the story usually starts with Linnaeus. Yet about two centuries earlier, a physician in Ming China built a ranked system for sorting nearly two thousand plants, animals and minerals used as medicine. This post covers who Li Shizhen was, what his compendium contains, how its classification worked, a quick estimation exercise using its real numbers, and one famous "quote" about it that does not hold up.
Who was Li Shizhen?
The UNESCO Memory of the World nomination for the Bencao Gangmu describes Li Shizhen (1518-1593) as a medical expert of the Ming dynasty who began working in the Royal Hospital as a medical official. It says the compendium took him 27 years and that the first draft was finished in 1578.
A 2026 review in Frontiers in Pharmacology by Tung-Hu Tsai adds that he was born into a family of physicians in Qizhou, in present-day Hubei Province, and that his 27 years combined field research, clinical observation and the study of earlier texts. The review says the compendium critically revised more than forty earlier materia medica works.
What is in the Bencao Gangmu?
According to the UNESCO nomination:
52 volumes of text, plus 2 volumes of illustrations with 1,109 pictures
about 1.9 million Chinese characters
1,892 kinds of medicines and 11,096 prescriptions
for each substance, details such as its name, origin, appearance, cultivation, collection, processing, preservation and potency
The edition UNESCO registered was block-printed in 1593 by Hu Chenglong in Jinling (now Nanjing), and the nomination calls this "Jinling edition" the source of all later versions. Other scholars give a 1596 publication date, as the Frontiers review does; the difference is worth knowing if you see both. UNESCO inscribed the compendium on its Memory of the World Register in 2011, as the Frontiers review notes. The nomination records that the book reached Japan in 1606 and was translated, in full or in part, into more than 20 languages.
How did Li Shizhen classify medicines?
The Frontiers review describes a ranked system: kingdom, then department, then category, then species. It says the compendium places its 1,892 substances into sixteen departments and sixty categories, grouped into inorganic, plant and animal kingdoms. The UNESCO nomination calls its classification "almost 200 years earlier" than Linnaeus's taxonomy.
Tsai is careful about what that comparison means. He calls his comparisons with Linnaeus and Darwin "structural and analogical in nature" and says the two traditions came from very different intellectual frameworks. Li Shizhen was organising medicines for physicians, not building a theory of how species are related.
Worked example: how big is the compendium?
Use the UNESCO numbers to get a feel for the scale.
Substances per category. 1,892 substances in 60 categories gives 1,892 / 60 = about 31.5 per category.
Prescriptions per substance. 11,096 / 1,892 = about 5.9 prescriptions for each substance on average.
Pages. The nomination says each page of the Jinling edition has 12 lines of 24 characters, so 12 x 24 = 288 characters per page. Then 1,900,000 / 288 = about 6,600 pages of text, a rough estimate since headings and blank space are ignored.
Pictures. 1,109 illustrations for 1,892 substances is about 0.59 pictures per substance, so not every entry was illustrated.
Estimates like these are the same skill you use to check whether an answer in physics or chemistry is the right size.
Did Darwin really call it an "ancient Chinese encyclopedia"?
The UNESCO nomination says he did. The Frontiers review, however, says that although Darwin has been "anecdotally reported" to have described it that way, "this attribution remains unverified". Unless you can find the words in Darwin's own writing, do not quote them as his. This is a useful habit for any essay or project: a famous line repeated in many places is not the same as a line you have traced to its source.
Common mistakes when revising classification
Thinking classification began with Linnaeus. Ranked systems existed earlier; Linnaeus is credited with binomial nomenclature and a standard set of ranks.
Mixing up ranks and groups. "Category" is a level; "herbs" is a group at that level. Keep the two ideas apart, as with kingdom (rank) and Plantae (group).
Assuming old systems were evolutionary. Li Shizhen's groups were practical, not based on common descent.
Our post on Bentham and Hooker's plant classification shows how a later natural system was organised. If taxonomic ranks keep blurring together, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing, so you can revise each one separately.
What can a student take from how Li Shizhen worked?
Check old sources against observation. UNESCO notes that he corrected many earlier mistakes about medicinal substances.
Build a structure before you add detail. Departments and categories made 1,892 entries searchable.
Stay with a big project. Twenty-seven years is extreme, but the lesson scales: steady work on one well-organised notebook beats scattered notes.
Practice routine: take one NCERT chapter on classification, sort 20 organisms into a three-level hierarchy of your own, then compare it with the textbook's and note where you differ and why.
Next step: make a one-page table of the seven Linnaean ranks with one example group at each level, from memory, then check it.
