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When most people think of the use of animals in traditional systems of medicine, what springs to mind is one kind or another of megafauna such as rhinoceros, bears, sharks, and others. Sometimes more mundane creatures such as pangolins are included. However, invertebrates and substances produced by them have been used in Asian systems of medicine since the earliest records of materia medica from the region were created. Animals used range from shellfish and crustaceans to various insects and insect products such as cocoons, honey, and beeswax. In terms of their role in the food chain, and as pollinators, invertebrates are as crucial to the health, indeed the survival, of ecosystems in Asia and elsewhere as are megafauna. Loss and degradation of habitat is probably affecting more invertebrates than medicalization. Still, the expansion of medicalization in Asia and beyond is contributing to the danger many populations of invertebrates currently face. This article gives an overview of the place of invertebrates in Vietnamese traditional medicine and then presents a case study of two varieties of honey- and beeswax-producing bees found in northern mainland Southeast Asia and southern China: Apis dorsata F. and Apis cerana. © C. Michele Thompson, 2026. Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV
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In Vietnamese medicine, gia truyen ("family recipes") refers to a set of texts, primarily in chu nôm (demotic Vietnamese characters), that preserves local knowledge about how practitioners in a specific family-based medical circle could use various plants and other materia medica to cure disease. This article traces the history of the transmission of gia truyen in the 19th and 20th centuries. It suggests that prior to the 1920s, gia truyen were written anonymously to protect the author's identity in the face of the Nguyen dynasty's repression of ch? nom writing. In the 1920s, precisely at the time that hán-nôm writing was being eclipsed by education in French and quoc ngu (Romanized Vietnamese), Vietnamese medical practitioners experienced a renaissance in the writing of chu nôm gia truyen. Moreover, chu nôm writing in the gia truyen genre continued until at least the 1990s. ©SOAS University of London 2017.
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The editors of Fragrant Frontier have produced an impressively researched book on the contemporary growers, in northern Vietnam and Southwest China, of three spices—star anise, black cardamom, and cinnamon, each of which has local, regional, and international economic importance—as well as the human links in the global commodity chain of these spices. This volume is much more coherent than many edited volumes, and readers should not skip any of it, as there are nice little surprises waiting here and there in the text.A good example is the “Preface and Acknowledgements” section, as this not only provides interesting information on how the volume came into being but also links to websites and scannable QR codes for “story maps” on the three spices and the places mentioned in the rest of the volume. This is a nice touch that gives this volume about the recent situation of farmers, local traders, marketplace workers, street vendors (of both the spices and foods prepared with them), wholesalers, exporters, and state officials a very contemporary feel. These story maps are only the first of an extensive number of relevant, well-done, and well-used illustrations including photographs, maps, and tables inserted throughout the following chapters.
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