Bencao House
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Food as medicine

Mulberry leaf

桑叶Sāng Yè

四气 Nature
Cool · 凉
五味 Flavour
Bitter · Sweet
归经 Channels
Lung · Liver
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 桑叶

Mulberry leaf is cool, bitter and sweet, and belongs to the Lung and Liver channels. It is an autumn item. Chinese medicine reads the dry throat, gritty eyes and short dry cough of a dry autumn as a Lung matter, and mulberry leaf is the mildest thing in the cupboard for it. The leaves sold are the ones picked after the first frost.

A few dried mulberry leaves, brittle and sage-grey, photographed on warm plaster.
Morus alba · Leaf, picked after the first frost

Morus alba

四气 · Nature

  1. cold
  2. cool
  3. neutral
  4. warm
  5. hot
Cools 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 · Liver
Part used
Leaf, picked after the first frost
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 桑叶

In the canon

What the texts say

The mulberry fed the silk industry for three thousand years, so its leaf was never scarce and never expensive, and Chinese medicine used it accordingly — as an ordinary autumn item rather than a rare one. It is in the Shennong Bencao Jing, c. 200 CE, and its classical instruction is unusually specific about when to pick it.

Shennong Bencao JingThe Divine Husbandman’s Classic of Materia Medicac. 200 CE

Bitter, sweet and cold. It clears wind and heat from the head, and brightens the eyes.

Upper class, among the woods

The specific instruction is 霜桑叶 — frosted mulberry leaf, gathered after the first frost has been on it. The traditional reasoning is that frost concentrates the leaf’s cooling character. Whether or not that holds, the practice fixed the leaf firmly in the autumn calendar, and autumn is the season Chinese medicine associates with dryness: a scratchy throat, a tickling cough with nothing behind it, eyes that feel hot and gritty, skin that has started to flake.

The best-known formula containing it, from the Qing dynasty, pairs mulberry leaf with chrysanthemum for exactly that picture — a light, early-stage, upper-body complaint, drunk warm and briefly. The two items are so often used together that Chinese shops sell them pre-mixed, and the entry after this one is the other half of the pair.

In a kitchen

How it is actually used

Mulberry leaf is not a food; it is steeped and the leaf discarded, and it tastes green and faintly bitter, closer to a herbal infusion than to tea. The domestic Chinese version pairs it with pear, which is the autumn fruit in this system and the standard answer to dryness in the throat.

Mulberry leaf and pear water

Two cups30 minutes

6 g · about 2 tbsp
Dried mulberry leaf, crumbled
1 whole
Firm pear, cored and cut into chunks, skin on
700 ml · 3 cups
Cold water
10 g · 2 tsp
Rock sugar, optional
  1. Simmer the pear chunks in the cold water for twenty minutes, lid on, until the fruit has gone translucent at the edges and the water tastes sweet.
  2. Take the pot off the heat, drop in the crumbled mulberry leaf, and cover it for five minutes only. Boiling the leaf makes it harsh and green.
  3. Strain out the leaf. Leave the pear in and eat it — the fruit is half the point of the pot.
  4. Drink it warm. In China this is an early-autumn drink, made for a week or two when the air turns dry, and then put away again.

Steeping alone works if you have no pear: leaf in a cup, water off the boil and stood a minute, five minutes covered. It will taste distinctly of hedge. The pear is there to make it drinkable and because it belongs to the same season.

Who it is for

Who it suits, and who it does not

This is a seasonal, short-run entry rather than a daily habit. Cool and light, aimed at the head and the throat, and used in Chinese practice for a week or two at the turn of the season rather than through the year.

Tends to suit

  • The dry weeks of early autumn, when the air changes.
  • A tickly, unproductive cough and a scratchy throat.
  • Eyes that are hot, red and tired at the end of the day.
  • A hot, tight head after a long stretch of screens.

Tends not to suit

  • Anyone who runs cold, with cold hands and loose stools.
  • A wet cough with plenty of phlegm — this is for the dry kind.
  • A weak digestion that reacts badly to cold food and drink.
  • Anyone taking medication that manages blood sugar — see below.

Honestly

What to know before you start

The reading

Mulberry leaf 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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