The Shanhaijing (Itineraries of Mountains and Seas, compiled about the 1st century BC) occupies a special place among terrestrial descriptions surviving from ancient China. It is distinguished by the multiplicity of details provided for the described landmarks, plants in particular, and, at the same time, a remarkably systematized presentation of this voluminous data.

The core part of the text, the Wu Zang Shan Jing (Five Treasuries: The Itineraries of Mountains), provides an account of 447 mountains arranged into twenty-six itineraries. The itineraries, in their turn, are ordered with respect to the four cardinal directions and the centre. This system of itineraries covers the central part of the inhabited world focussed on the basins of the Yellow and the Yangzi Rivers, and delimited at each cardinal direction by a sea.

The spatial system of twenty-six itineraries has two main properties:

1) Each itinerary submits to a special group of local spirits.

2) The system of itineraries ascribes to each mountain a unique and precise “position”.

Therefore, all the attributes of mountains described in the text have to be regarded from the point of view of their placement in the sacred landscape.

The mountains are featured in a uniformly formulaic way according to recurrent characteristics. These characteristics are the plants, animals and minerals found on a mountain, and the river(s) emanating from it. As a rule, these beings and things have extraordinary properties.

Plants are the most important attribute of each mountain’s description, and many have healing effects. In the proposed paper I shall explore the distribution of plants among to the twenty-six cardinally-oriented itineraries, paying attention to the spatial arrangement of their healing qualities and its relation to the spatial arrangement of local spirits.

I shall demonstrate that the systematized arrangement of data in the Shanhaijing that inspired many Chinese and some Western scholars to refer to this text as to a compendium on botany, zoology, medicine, etc. is markedly different from modern science. In particular, the listed plants are part of a system that simultaneously embraces cosmological, religious, political, topographical and other dimensions which cannot be disaggregated, as they are part of a single, complexly interrelated whole. This system, however, provides a framework for the detailed and uniform description of plants with healing properties.