dān nüè
Also rendered: dan malaria, left in pinyin (What both standard translations do; honest, but gives the reader nothing) · parching malaria (Captures 癉's heat and the wasting, at the cost of inventing an English the text never suggested)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Malaria with heat and no cold. The yin qi has been cut off first, so the yang qi breaks out alone: scant qi with fretting distress, heat in the hands and feet, a wish to vomit. The late passage locates it — inward in the heart, outward between the parted flesh — and names its end stage, wasting and scorching until the flesh is stripped off.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Wiseman & Feng | dan malaria | They transliterate, and gloss 癉 as heat in their dictionary entry. |
| Unschuld | dan malaria | Unschuld keeps the syllable and notes the reading of exhaustion as well as heat. |
| This site | dan malaria | We keep the syllable as we do for 消癉, so that the same graph is recognisable across the site, and we say in the gloss what it means here: heat, and the wasting that heat brings. The chapter's own definition — heat only, no cold, because yin is gone — is what carries the meaning, and we do not try to improve on it. |
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