láo yào
Also rendered: medicated wine (Says what the wine is for) · drug wine (Closer to the Chinese order of the two halves) · wine in which a drug is carried (Expands the compound into a sentence) · lao yao (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Wine in which a drug has been carried — the chapter’s prescription for numbness, given together with pressing and rubbing. The chapter’s fourteenth chapter already established the book’s suspicion of wine as a drink and its respect for wine as a medium; here the two are settled into one practice, and the practice is chosen because of where the trouble lies: numbness is reached neither by the needle nor by a draft taken inward, so the drug is carried in through the skin. Read alongside the chapter’s other prescriptions and the principle is constant — the treatment is chosen for the tissue, not for the named disease.
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 | medicinal wine | They render 醪 as wine and 藥 as medicinal, which is the standard clinical reading. |
| Unschuld | wines with drugs | He keeps the two nouns side by side rather than subordinating one. |
| This site | medicated wine | 醪 is unfiltered wine — liquor and lees together — and it is chosen because it carries something. 'Medicinal wine' suggests the wine itself is the medicine; here it is what the medicine travels in. |
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