Understanding the TCM tradition

The TCM tradition rests on a patient observation of nature, refined over more than two millennia. Where modern thought isolates a single molecule, it reads each plant as a set of qualities: its temperature, its taste, its orientation, its resonance with the seasons.

This grid of reading is not a science in the contemporary sense: it is a cosmology, a coherent way of ordering the living world, handed down from generation to generation by the great treatises, from the Huangdi Neijing (the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic) to Li Shizhen’s Bencao Gangmu, the summa of the pharmacopoeia completed in the sixteenth century. To understand these markers is to understand the logic of the BotaQi catalogue: every product listing carries their trace.

Four markers are enough to place a plant in this system: its thermal nature, its flavours, the Phases the tradition attaches it to, and the category of the pharmacopoeia it is filed under. The chapters that follow take them one by one; the last shows where to read them on a listing.

Everything, in Chinese thought, is read through the pair of Yin and Yang: shade and light, rest and impulse, coolness and heat. Neither opposed nor fixed, they complete one another, turn into one another and answer one another: the figure of the taiji draws their perpetual movement.

Between them circulates the Qi (气), often translated as “breath”: the dynamic weave which, according to the tradition, animates all things. The seasons, the hours of the day, foods, plants: everything is described as more or less Yin, more or less Yang, and by the way its breath unfolds. This is the vocabulary you will find everywhere on BotaQi, right into the reading offered by Nuwa, our guide.

The pair does not sort the world into two camps: it situates. A plant is never Yin in itself, it is more Yin than another, at a given moment, under a given gaze. That is why the catalogue never carries the mention on its own: it would have no term of comparison. What it carries are the scales of the three chapters that follow.

In TCM, every plant has a “nature”: a thermal leaning the tradition associates with it, independently of its actual temperature. Five degrees are distinguished, from the most Yin to the most Yang: cold, cool, neutral, warm and hot.

A plant of cool nature is traditionally associated with the Yin side: the loosening, the descent, the coolness; a warm or hot plant with the Yang side: the impulse, the rising, the heat. The neutral nature, in the middle, is held to suit every terrain. On each product listing, a coloured dot shows this nature at a glance.

The scale below is the catalogue’s own: five degrees, five inks, from the blue of the cold nature to the burnt earth of the hot nature. They are the same five inks on a product card, on its listing and in the filters; they never vary from one page to the next.

The tradition distinguishes five fundamental flavours: pungent, sweet, sour, bitter and salty. More than a taste in the mouth, each flavour describes in Chinese thought a direction of the breath: the pungent disperses, the sweet tempers, the sour draws in, the bitter sends downward, the salty carries into the depths.

Each flavour is moreover attached to one of the five Phases, which is why you will often see them side by side on our listings. One and the same plant frequently carries two or three flavours: it is their combination that makes its identity.

Perceived taste and classified flavour often coincide, but not always: the Wu Mei plum is sour in both senses, Gan Cao liquorice is sweet in both senses, but elsewhere it is the traditional classification that prevails over the mouth. On a BotaQi listing, it is always the classification that is given.

The heart of the system is the theory of the Wu Xing (五行), the five Phases, sometimes called the five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. Less substances than dynamics: Wood evokes the rising of spring, Fire the fullness of summer, Earth the centre and the turns between seasons, Metal the gathering inward of autumn, Water the depth of winter.

The Phases engender one another in an endless cycle (Wood feeds Fire, Fire produces Earth, Earth holds Metal, Metal enriches Water, Water makes Wood grow) and temper one another through a second cycle, called the control cycle. Each corresponds to a “sphere” of correspondences, and plants are traditionally attached to one or several of those spheres. It is this grid that structures our classification, and the reading of your “inner season” that Nuwa offers. Each card below opens the selection for the matching Phase.

To each Phase the tradition attaches a season, an orientation, a climate, a colour and a flavour. The table below gives the five most stable columns: they are enough to read a classification, and that is the only use this guide makes of them.

The traditional Chinese calendar doubles its count of lunations with a solar division: twenty-four segments of about a fortnight, the jieqi (节气), literally the “nodes of breath”. They follow the course of the sun, so they fall on the same dates each year to within a day, and since the Han they have formed the farming calendar of China.

Each fortnight bears a name that describes the state of the world rather than a date: Waking of Insects, White Dew, Frost’s Descent, Major Snow. Four of them open the seasons, four others mark the solstices and the equinoxes; the sixteen that remain name the passages. The tradition reads the year in this sequence, and ties to it ways of dressing, of cooking and of working the land.

BotaQi shows the current breath at the head of the home page, together with the reading the tradition gives it. All twenty-four are gathered below, in the order in which they fall.

The Chinese calendar therefore runs on two clocks. The lunar one sets the months and the feasts: New Year, the Lantern Festival, Mid-Autumn fall on a different Gregorian date each year. The solar one, the one of the breaths, sets the seasons and the work of the land, and shifts by no more than a day from one year to the next. Almanacs print the two side by side. The index below follows only the second, one season to a row, opening at the Beginning of Spring.

On each product, these markers are gathered into a clear profile: the French name, the Chinese name and its pinyin transcription; the thermal nature; the flavours; the Phases; the category of the pharmacopoeia to which the tradition attaches the plant.

The profile chips are clickable: one click on “Warm”, “Bitter” or “Earth” opens the selection of all the plants sharing the same quality, an invitation to explore the catalogue by affinity, the way one leafs through a herbarium. And if a name comes back to you in pinyin, in English or in Latin, the search bar understands them all.

The listing reproduced here is that of a real product from the catalogue. Seven markers are numbered on it: the three names, the nature, the flavours, the Phases, the category, the format with its price, and the note of caution that accompanies every page of the site.