Glossary

Chinese medicine arrives in English wearing five different coats: Qi, chi, vital energy, life force, breath. That inconsistency is the first thing that loses a reader. So we fix one set of names — pinyin for the name, English for the explanation — and use it everywhere on this site. Below is that set, in the order you are likely to meet them.

A note on translation. Every translation is a decision. Where a term has no honest English equivalent we keep the pinyin and explain it, rather than borrowing a Western word that means something subtly different — because a borrowed word quietly imports a borrowed idea. Where we have translated, we have said so plainly in the definition.