Bencao House
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Food as medicine

Ginger

生姜Shēng Jiāng

四气 Nature
Warm · 温
五味 Flavour
Pungent
归经 Channels
Lung · Spleen · Stomach
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 生姜

Ginger is warm and pungent, and Chinese medicine assigns it to the Lung, Spleen and Stomach channels. Fresh ginger, 生姜, is what the tradition reaches for to warm a cold middle, settle a queasy stomach, and push a chill back out in its first hour. It appears in more of the Shanghan Lun’s 398 clauses than almost any other kitchen item.

A knuckle of fresh ginger root and three thin dried ginger slices, photographed on warm plaster.
Zingiber officinale · Fresh rhizome, sliced across the grain

Zingiber officinale

四气 · Nature

  1. cold
  2. cool
  3. neutral
  4. warm
  5. hot
Warms gently

五味 · Flavour

sour
Gathers and holdsLiver
bitter
Drains and driesHeart
sweet
Fills, slows, harmonisesSpleen
pungent
Disperses and movesLung
salty
Softens and sends downKidney
归经 Channels
Lung · Spleen · Stomach
Part used
Fresh rhizome, sliced across the grain
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 生姜

In the canon

What the texts say

Ginger is one of the oldest written items in the Chinese kitchen, and it entered the record twice. The Shennong Bencao Jing, compiled around 200 CE, lists dried ginger, 干姜, among its 365 entries. Fresh ginger, 生姜, is recorded a little later, in Tao Hongjing’s Mingyi Bielu of about 500 CE. The tradition has kept them apart ever since: dried ginger is hot and stays in the middle of the body, fresh ginger is warm and moves outward toward the skin. A Chinese cook uses fresh. A Chinese herbal shop sells both, on different shelves.

It is older than either book. The Analects, compiled by the fourth century BCE, records that Confucius was never without ginger at table — a sentence commentators have argued about for two thousand years, and the earliest surviving note anyone made about a Chinese person’s daily eating.

LunyuThe Analectsc. 400 BCE

He was never without ginger when he ate, though he did not eat much of it.

Book 10, chapter 8 — Confucius at table

The book that made ginger structural rather than merely present is the Shanghan Lun, written by Zhang Zhongjing around 200 CE after an epidemic killed most of his clan. Of its 398 clauses, fresh ginger and jujube appear together in a large share, almost always as a pair and almost always at the end of the list: the two items that keep the rest of the pot from being harsh on a stomach. That pairing is the reason the preparation below has dates in it.

Bencao GangmuThe Compendium of Materia Medica1596

Ginger is pungent but not rank. It drives off what is foul and settles what is turbid.

Juan 26, among the vegetables

Li Shizhen filed ginger with the vegetables rather than the herbs when he printed the Bencao Gangmu in 1596 — 1,892 entries gathered over twenty-seven years — and that filing decision is, in a sense, this whole silo’s argument. He did not think he was writing about medicine when he wrote about ginger. He thought he was writing about dinner.

In a kitchen

How it is actually used

In our clinic kitchen in Hangzhou, ginger is not brewed on its own. It goes into water with split red dates, which is the oldest and plainest pairing in the tradition and also the only version most people will drink twice. On its own it is hot and thin. With dates it is round.

Ginger and date water

Two cups15 minutes

15 g · 5 slices
Fresh ginger, unpeeled, cut across the grain
30 g · 6 whole
Dried red jujubes, each split to the stone
700 ml · 3 cups
Cold water
  1. Cut the ginger across the grain into rounds about as thick as a coin. Leave the skin on — Chinese kitchens hold that the skin is cooler than the flesh, so peeling makes the whole thing warmer.
  2. Split each date down one side with a knife, right to the stone. An unsplit date gives the water almost nothing.
  3. Bring everything to a boil in a small pot, then drop it to the barest simmer for ten minutes with the lid set ajar.
  4. Strain into a cup and drink it warm. It should taste sweet first and hot afterwards, in that order.

If it tastes only hot, there was too much ginger for the dates. If it tastes only sweet, the dates were not split. Chinese kitchens make this in the morning and rarely after the middle of the afternoon, on the reasoning that a warming drink late in the day leaves you awake at midnight.

The other everyday use is even simpler: three slices dropped into anything being steamed or braised — fish, chicken, greens that have come straight from the refrigerator. Chinese cooking reads cold as something a dish carries into you, and ginger is the standing correction for it. You will find it in almost every steamed fish in China for exactly that reason, not for flavour alone.

Who it is for

Who it suits, and who it does not

Ginger is warming, and warming is a direction, not a virtue. It suits a person who is running cold and does not suit a person who is already running hot — which is why the same cup that makes one reader feel settled makes another feel scratchy and thirsty by lunchtime.

Tends to suit

  • Hands and feet that stay cold in a warm room.
  • A stomach that turns over after cold drinks or food straight from the fridge.
  • The first hour of a chill, when you are shivering and have not warmed up.
  • Queasiness in a car, on a boat, or on the first morning of a long trip.
  • Period cramps that ease when you put something warm against them.

Tends not to suit

  • A red face, a hot head, and a thirst that plain water does not settle.
  • Night sweats, or waking hot in the small hours.
  • Heartburn or reflux that is already troublesome.
  • A dry cough that has been going on for weeks without phlegm.
  • Skin that is hot, red and irritated at the time.

Honestly

What to know before you start

The reading

Ginger suits some people and not others

This page describes a food. It cannot tell you whether it belongs in your week, because it knows nothing about how you sleep, eat or feel the cold. A reading does: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English by a physician licensed in China for US $39, sent within 48 hours.

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