《全芳备祖》之我见

“Quan Fang Bei Zu” is a compiled work mainly for folklores, poems and other literary works concerning some common plants with some botanical information in it. It is certainly not a pure botanical work, covering no more than 240 species of plants, and thus has little use as a reference book in indexing names even in a primitive sense. Therefore “Quan Fang Bei Zu” could not be considered as a botanical dictionary. Xu Wen-xuan and his co-workers’ argument that “Quan Fang Bei Zu” was the most perfect ancient botanical codes and records till then is not convincing. Actually “Tu Jing Ben Cao” is of higher value than the book under discussion from botanical point of view.