thumb|250px|page=9|The pages of a printed edition of Bowuzhi Bowuzhi () by Zhang Hua (c. 290 CE) was a compendium of Chinese stories about natural wonders and marvelous phenomena. It quotes from many early Chinese classics, and diversely includes subject matter from Chinese mythology, history, geography, and folklore. The Bowuzhi, which is one of the first works in the literary genre of zhiguai "tales of anomalies; supernatural stories", records the earliest versions of several myths, such as the white yenü "wild women" living south of China in a society without men. Scholars have described th
thumb|250px|page=9|The pages of a printed edition of Bowuzhi Bowuzhi () by Zhang Hua (c. 290 CE) was a compendium of Chinese stories about natural wonders and marvelous phenomena. It quotes from many early Chinese classics, and diversely includes subject matter from Chinese mythology, history, geography, and folklore. The Bowuzhi, which is one of the first works in the literary genre of zhiguai "tales of anomalies; supernatural stories", records the earliest versions of several myths, such as the white yenü "wild women" living south of China in a society without men. Scholars have described the Bowuzhi as "a miscellany of scientific interest" and "an important minor classic".
==Author== The Bowuzhi author Zhang Hua (232-300) was a Western Jin dynasty (266-316) scholar, poet, and protoscientist. His biography in the (644) Book of Jin depicts Zhang Hua as a fangshi "master of esoterica" who was especially skilled at numerological arts, and a voracious collector of books, especially ones "strange, secret, and rarely seen". Many anecdotes in Six Dynasties period books portray him as a "learned arbitrator of 'scientific' knowledge". The (early 5th century) Yiyuan "Garden of Marvels", by Liu Jingshu , provides two examples. First, Zhang recognized dragon meat that was served by the author Lu Ji (261-303), who "once invited Zhang Hua to dinner and served minced fish. At the time the dining chamber was full of guests. When Hua lifted off the lid of the dish, he said, 'This is dragon's flesh!' None of the assembled guests believed him, so Hua said, 'Test it by steeping it in vinegar; something strange will happen.' When this was done a rainbow appeared above it." In a second anecdote, Zhang Hua demonstrated the cosmological principle of ganying "sympathetic resonance". During the Jin, there was a man who owned a large copper basin. Every morning and evening it would ring out just as if someone was striking it. When Zhang Hua was asked about this, he replied "This basin has a sympathetic affinity with the bell in the Luoyang bell-tower. The bell is struck every dawn and every dusk, and thus this basin resounds in sympathy. You could file away [a part of the basin] and thus make it lighter; the sound would reverberate inaccurately and the basin would cease ringing out of its own accord." The man did as Hua had advised, and the basin never rang out again. The Ganying leicongzhi "Record of the Mutual Resonances of Things According to Their Categories" is attributed to Zhang Hua.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).