🔗 Hallucinogenic Plants in Chinese Herbals

🔗 Medicine 🔗 China 🔗 Plants 🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs

For over two millennia, texts in Chinese herbology and traditional Chinese medicine have recorded medicinal plants that are also hallucinogens and psychedelics. Some are familiar psychoactive plants in Western herbal medicine (e.g., Chinese: 莨菪; pinyin: làngdàng, i.e. Hyoscyamus niger), but several Chinese plants have not been noted as hallucinogens in modern works (e.g.,Chinese: 雲實; pinyin: yúnshí; lit. 'cloud seed', i.e. Caesalpinia decapetala). Chinese herbals are an important resource for the history of botany, for instance, Zhang Hua's c. 290 Bowuzhi is the earliest record of the psilocybin mushroom xiàojùn 笑菌 (lit. "laughing mushroom", i.e. Gymnopilus junonius).