shí qì
Also rendered: food qi (Literal, and qi is left untranslated by this site's rule) · grain qi (What the eating actually consisted of) · nutritive qi (Names what it becomes rather than what it is) · shi qi (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
What food becomes on its way through the body — the most reprinted passage in the chapter. Food qi enters the stomach and disperses essence to the liver, which in turn soaks the sinews. Its thick part returns to the heart, which steeps the vessels with essence; vessel qi flows through the channels, channel qi returns to the lung, the lung is courted by the hundred vessels, and essence is conveyed out to skin and hair. The next quotation runs the parallel itinerary for drink. What makes the passage worth watching is that nothing here is decorative: it is the account given for why the pulse at the wrist can speak for the whole frame.
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 | food qi | Their qi is never translated, and 食 qì compounds come out as food qi wherever the source is eaten rather than breathed. |
| Unschuld | food qi / the qi of the food | He keeps the genitive explicit when the sentence needs it. |
| This site | food qi | The chapter is following a thing from mouth to fingertip, and the translator's job is to keep it the same thing throughout. Grain qi would be historically truer to what was eaten and wrong about the category, which includes whatever else is taken; nutritive qi jumps to the end of the journey and thereby quietly claims that the itinerary has already succeeded. |
Search the glossary
Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
See all reading paths