The classical texts

The 361 channel points that AcuiQ catalogues, and that a WHO working group fixed in its standard nomenclature, were not set down in one book. The channel system, counted covers the modern standard. This page covers the texts it descends from: a run of works over some 1,700 years, most of which recorded more named points than the one before and tried to fix where they were. The table gives the counts the sources below report; the sections after it say what else each text added and what is known about who wrote it.

Before the needle: the Mawangdui texts

The oldest channel texts so far recovered describe vessels without points. Two silk manuscripts from tomb 3 at Mawangdui in Changsha, excavated in 1973 from a burial dated 168 BCE, are known as the Cauterization Canon of the Eleven Vessels of the Foot and Forearm and the Cauterization Canon of the Eleven Yin and Yang Vessels. A 2017 study of the excavated texts by Huang Chang and colleagues at Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine sets out what they contain: each of the eleven vessels has a start, an end and a course, but no acupoints, and the treatment named is moxibustion, burning moxa made from mugwort on or near the skin, rather than needling. The same study counts twelve channels and 160 points in the later Huangdi Neijing, and notes that a bamboo text excavated at Zhangjiashan in 1983–84, the Book of the Vessels, collects the same material. Donald Harper’s translation and study of the Mawangdui medical manuscripts (1998) renders them in English. Vivien Shaw and colleagues read them, in a 2022 paper in The Anatomical Record, as descriptions of the physical body and the oldest surviving anatomical atlas, which predate and inform the later acupuncture texts. Moxibustion covers the technique.

Huangdi Neijing

The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is named after a legendary ruler, and both sources below treat it as a compilation. China’s nomination of the text to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, made by the National Library of China, describes it as the work of many physicians over centuries, its main part written in the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) and supplemented under the Qin and Han; elsewhere the same document dates the original compilation to the 2nd century BCE. It consists of two parts, the Suwen (Plain Questions) and the Lingshu (Miraculous Pivot), each of 81 chapters. The nomination assigns health preservation, physiology, pathology, diagnosis and treatment principles to the Suwen, and the channels, the location of points, needles and acupuncture and moxibustion technique to the Lingshu. It records that the text circulated in manuscript until it was printed in the 9th and 10th centuries, was edited by the Northern Song government’s Bureau for Revising Medical Works, set up in 1057, and that an edition printed in 1339, held by the National Library, is the earliest and best-preserved now extant.

Paul Unschuld’s study of the Suwen, as its publisher describes it, traces the text to the final centuries BCE, when numerous authors wrote short essays on health and illness grounded in the new theory of vessels, and follows it to the 11th century, when the text known today emerged. It also covers a body of climatological doctrine that the Tang editor Wang Bing added. Unschuld’s translation of the Lingshu, subtitled the ancient classic on needle therapy, prints all 81 chapters with notes on how the text may have changed over time. The two dating accounts differ in emphasis, the Warring States in one and the last centuries BCE in the other, and agree that the received text is a compilation, edited long after it was written.

Nanjing

The Classic of Difficult Issues takes up problems left open in the earlier writings. The publisher of Unschuld’s translation dates its compilation to the first century CE, describes it as an unusually systematic account of health care built on yin-yang and Five Phases doctrine, and names its discussion of pulse diagnosis and needle treatment as the most important thing in it. The four examinations describes pulse diagnosis as the WHO terminologies now define it.

Zhenjiu jiayi jing

The Systematic Classic of Acupuncture and Moxibustion was compiled by Huangfu Mi (215–282), a physician and historian of the Western Jin. A 2022 profile in Science and Technology Daily dates the compilation to 256–260 and describes a 12-volume work assembled from the Huangdi Neijing, the Suwen and a Zhen jing (Needle Classic). It counts 349 point names in it, 189 more than the Huangdi Neijing, and gives the book’s purpose as correcting the errors in point names and locations that had accumulated in the earlier books. The profile calls it the earliest systematic book on acupuncture and moxibustion. An English translation by Yang Shou-zhong and Charles Chace was published in 1994.

Wang Weiyi’s manual and the bronze figures

In the Northern Song, the imperial medical official Wang Weiyi compiled the Illustrated Manual of Acupoints on the Bronze Figure and had two life-size bronze figures cast to go with it. Lara Wendel of the German Museum of Medical History in Ingolstadt, writing in Bayerisches Ärzteblatt in 2025, dates the casting to 1027 and says Wang had studied texts that listed differing numbers of points before settling on 354. Each figure separated into front and back halves; the channels were cut as fine grooves and the points pierced as holes labelled with their names. The figures were used for teaching. Contemporary accounts, she writes, describe the holes being sealed with wax and the figure filled with water: a student who found a point with the needle drew water.

The Chinese medicine museum at Hong Kong Baptist University gives the same year, a height of 170 cm and a weight of about 200 kg, and calls the figure the first national standard for channels and points. It counts 657 acupoints carved on the surface, each about 1.2 cm deep, against Wendel’s 354; neither source explains the difference. The manual itself was reissued under the Ming, and the Wellcome Collection holds woodcuts from the 1443 edition, among them a diagram of the proportional body measurements used to locate points, in which the cun is set by the proportions of the patient’s own body. Measuring in cun covers that system.

Zhenjiu dacheng

The Great Compendium of Acupuncture and Moxibustion was compiled by the Ming physician Yang Jizhou, whom the Wellcome Collection’s catalogue records as active 1573–1619, and completed in 1601. Its second book is a collection of odes on acupuncture, which Richard Bertschinger translated as The Golden Needle (1991). The compendium also became a base for Western teaching. The publisher of Manfred Porkert’s Classical Acupuncture says the textbook’s core and structure are drawn from the Zhenjiu dacheng of 1601.

What the texts do not settle

The counts in the table are not counts of the same thing. The Science and Technology Daily figure for the Zhenjiu jiayi jing counts point names, the Hong Kong museum counts acupoints carved on a figure, and the 354 and 657 given for the same bronze figure show how far two counts can diverge. The dates of the earliest texts are scholarly estimates that differ by source. Every text here reached modern readers through later editors and printers, so a reading of the Huangdi Neijing is a reading of the Song government’s revision. The tradition was also interrupted: Frederick Kao, writing in WHO’s magazine World Health in December 1979, records that Qing officials in 1822 ordered medical colleges to suspend the teaching of acupuncture. The modern standard of 361 points was agreed by a WHO working group in 1982, and AcuiQ writes them as codes rather than classical names; Reading a point code and Point names in translation cover both.