This paper deals with the problem ofthe foreign translations of Pen-ts’ao Kang-mu or the Great Pharmacopoeia compiledby the outstanding physician Li Shi-zhenin the Ming dynasty.In the last three de-cades serveral articles concerning the foreigntranslations of this great work written bysome authors such as Wang Ji-min andChen Cun-ren hold the view that the full textof Li’s work was translated into Latin

French

Japanese

German and English

andquite a number of other papers quote orfollow their assertion.In order to identifythis

the author of this paper has checkedup the original texts of various sources con-cerning the foreign translations of Pen-ts’aoKang-mu

and found that only certain partsof Li’s work were translated into French

English and German languages in and afterthe eighteenth century and a whole Japa-nese translation appeared in the first half ofthe twentieth century.