This Dictionary is a result of a project, initiated in 1988, to generate an annotated English translation of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen, a seminal text on the theory and clinical application of ancient Chinese medicine. For the first time in the history of Western interest in the early origins of Chinese life sciences academic and non-academic users may resort now to a philologically legitimated dictionary focussing on the terminology of a single text corpus of ancient Chinese medicine reflecting the conceptual developments during a period reaching from the third century BCE to the eighth century CE.

Given the many relationships between medicine, philosophy, political ideology, as well as social and economic structures in Chinese antiquity as well as in the following centuries to the very present, this Dictionary will be an indispensable research tool for accessing these overlapping arenas of Chinese civilization. Even the terminology of today’s Traditional Chinese Medicine, as distant as it may appear from its conceptual and literary precursors of the Han through Tang dynasties, continues the legacy of the ancient past and requires, for a well-informed usage, profound knowledge of the terminology and conceptual beginnings in the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen.

To permit speedy access to the original context of the characters and character compounds listed in this Dictionary, a complete reproduction of the Chinese reference text has been added as Appendix A. It is marked by numbers referring to the pages and lines in the 1983 edition of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen. These page and line numbers reappear in the identification of each entry, and also in the three volumes with the annotated translation.

The present volume includes, as Appendix B, a complete list of all different characters that appear in the Su wen. They have been reproduced here in the sequence of their numbers of strokes and identified with their pinyin pronunciations. This way a quick survey informs readers whether a given character appears in the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen, and if so under which reading one may find its main entry.