Seikei Zusetsu

Japanese agricultural encyclopaedia

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The Seikei Zusetsu (Japanese: 成形図説) is a Japanese agricultural encyclopedia compiled from 1793 to 1804 at the order of Shimazu Shigehide, the ruler of Satsuma Province (now approximately Kagoshima Prefecture). The aim was to improve agriculture in southern Japan. The authors were the scholars So Senshun, Shirao Kunihashira from the Japanese national Kokugaku school, the Confucian Mukai Tomoaki and Hori Monjuro, who studied Dutch and other Western knowledge in the context of the Rangaku. The encyclopedia originally consisted of one hundred richly illustrated volumes. However, because of two major fires, seventy wooden printing blocks were lost, so that in 1804 only thirty parts could be printed. These describe 109 Japanese agricultural crops from 29 plant families around 1800, sometimes with cultivars that no longer exist. The many chapters on farming methods are still current.^[1]

A copy of the work was gifted to Philipp Franz von Siebold.^[2]

In 2016 research, current crop cultivars were compared to the ones in the Seikei Zusetsu. Matches were found for 50 of the 109 crop species with the other 59 not documented in contemporary databases.^[3]

References

^ https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/Japanese_agriculture_19th_century
^ Abe Chatterjee, Shantonu; Van Andel, Tinde (2019). "Lost Grains and Forgotten Vegetables from Japan: The Seikei Zusetsu Agricultural Catalog (1793–1804)". Economic Botany. 73 (3): 375–389. doi:10.1007/s12231-019-09466-z. hdl:1887/81485.
^ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321026291_Crop_Diversity_in_19_th_Century_Japan_An_Analysis_of_the_Seikei_Zusetsu_agricultural_encyclopedia_gifted_to_Philipp_Franz_von_Siebold