By Chang Xu
If you were stocking up on disaster relief supplies, what kind of reference would you want by your side? Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852) reads like just such a survival guide. Compiled during and after the turmoil of the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), this text wasn’t intended solely for military use, despite what its title suggests. In the preface, the compiler Luo Shiyao explained that the collection grew out of his personal encounters with everyday illnesses.[i] His project belonged to a longer literati tradition in which scholars compiled and published practical encyclopedias and daily-use compendia, creating their own textual museums of useful knowledge. Since disease during military campaigns could be especially debilitating, as Luo observed, remedies proven effective under such extreme conditions then held particular value for the wider public, meeting an urgent need for survival in wartime.[ii]

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The manual contains 679 recipes, organized into six sections (see Table 1). What began as a personal collection of useful prescriptions unexpectedly revealed the remarkable efficacy of “expedient recipes” (bianfang). These recipes arguably relied only on ingredients that were familiar and accessible to readers: beans, chestnuts, vegetables, tea, and other mundane materials. They didn’t require rare or costly components, nor did they depend on professional diagnoses or individualized modification. Yet, when followed as directed, they consistently produced immediate, reliable results. In effect, the manual empowered its users to be their own doctors, as Yi-Li Wu also noticed in the case of women’s medicine.
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Section | # of recipes |
Preparedness for the Unexpected | 26 |
Preventive Defense | 45 |
Treating Injuries | 117 |
Curing Illnesses | 309 |
Rescue and Relief | 71 |
Miscellaneous Addenda | 111 |
Total: 679 |
Fittingly, most of the recipes focus on treating injuries and illnesses, reflecting the compilation’s original purpose. But it is the recipes for preparing food and drink for the unexpected that appear first—framing the two as the foundation of survival. To underscore this point, Luo drew on a grim catalog of historical episodes, including accounts of cannibalism during sieges and famine, to convey the urgency of such knowledge.[iii] In response, he assembled a diverse range of recipes from pharmacopeias, medical texts, and agriculture manuals, offering practical strategies for preserving food, reducing consumption, identifying substitutes, and finding safe drinking water.
The first group of recipes, all titled “Method for Avoiding Grain and Preventing Hunger During Military Marches,” offers strategies for reducing food intake while sustaining the body during prolonged periods of deprivation. One of them reads:
Astragalus root (huangqi), 3 qian (approximately 11.19g)
Red halloysite clay (chi shizhi), 3 qian
Dragon bone (fossilized bone), 3 qian
Siler root (fangfeng), 5 fen (approximately 1.9g)
Processed aconite root (wutou), 1 qian (approximately 3.73g)
Roast [the ingredients] until dry, then pound in a stone mortar one thousand times. Refine [the resulting powder] with honey to form bullet-sized pills. When traveling urgently with no time to prepare food, eat a full meal of rice beforehand, then take one pill to sustain a journey of 500 li (approximately 165 miles). Two pills will keep you going for 1,000 li.[iv]
For readers who found the ingredients in this recipe uncommon or difficult to obtain, the manual offers more accessible alternatives. One recipe, for instance, recommends steaming asplenium trichomanes (tiejiao fengwei cao; literally, iron-foot phoenix-tail grass) together with black beans. Eating five to seven of these infused beans is said to keep hunger at bay for an entire day.[v]

Beyond simply reducing food intake, some recipes go further by offering ways to transform inedible materials into food. One recipe, quoted from the renowned pharmacopeia Ben cao gang mu (Systematic Materia Medica), describes how to render rock edible:
Gather white stones from mountain streams, and boil them in juice from scallions or with the root of sanguisorba officinalis (diyu). Once cooked, they become as soft as taro and can serve as a hunger remedy. This is called “stone soup” (shigeng).[vi]
Likely originating in Daoist texts, “stone stops” carried cultural weight in literati writings and poetry as part of the cuisines of transcendence. While Daoist sources emphasized absorbing the qi of stones produced through this cooking method, Luo’s inclusion of this recipe highlights its practical utility rather than its association with longevity-inducing nourishment found in other texts. [vii]
Food poisoning was another major concern addressed in the treatise. As Luo noted, there are cases where troops suffered from consuming poor food, resulting in swelling, shortness of breath, and death. In the “Rescue and Relief” section, therefore, he gathered guidance on identifying toxic plants and animals, as well as detecting contaminated water and spoiled fruits. He warned that if a dead animal’s mouth remains closed, its liver appears dark, or its flesh is marked with black spots, the meat should not be consumed.[viii] In this part of the collection, the focus shifts from treating the ill to equipping readers with the knowledge to avoid contaminated food in the first place.
Luo Shiyao’s effort to compile practical knowledge parallels the work of late Ming scholars who sought to collect and classify natural objects, as Benjamin Elman has discussed. Amid the twin crises of warfare and illness, Luo’s manual offered not only remedies but also a structure for navigating chaos, something tangible readers could hold onto. By using recipes, Luo drew on what Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata have identified as the strengths of medical formulars in transmitting knowledge: their modularity and experiential basis made them easy to adapt and share.[ix] Yet such recipes typically required learned physicians to turn a generic formula into a specific prescription. Luo’s collection attempted to break from that model. His emphasis on expediency—on accessibility, broad applicability, and consistent outcomes—shifted the power of care from professional practices to ordinary individuals. It was a solitary act of hope, an effort to make order out of chaos, and to leave behind something enduring when so much had already been lost.
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[i] The author did not specify the types of illnesses he had experience in the preface. However, based on the section “Curing Illnesses,” the compilation addresses various conditions such as coughing, colds, diarrhea, headaches, toothaches, lower back pain, as well as ulcers and skin diseases.
[ii] Luo Shiyao羅世瑤, Xingjun fangbian bianfang 行军方便便方Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852), Preface, 1a.
[iii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Preface, 1b.
[iv] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.
[v] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 1b.
[vi] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.
[vii] Luo, Xingjun fangbian bianfang, Vol. 1, 3b.
[viii] One of the example could be found in Lin Hong 林洪 (1127-1279), “Bai shigeng” 白石羹 (White Stone Stop), in Shanjia qinggong 山家清供 Simple and pure cuisine of Master Mountain Dwelling, https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%B1%B1%E5%AE%B6%E6%B8%85%E4%BE%9B.
[ix] Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.” Isis 108, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 20. https://doi.org/10.1086/691411.
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Chang Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research interests cover the global history of medicine, the history of military technologies, and the interconnections between human and non-human bodies. She is currently working on a monograph derived from her PhD research at Washington University in St. Louis, which examines medical practices in military organizations during the Qing’s territorial expansion.