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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.