As jade was and still is the most favored stone in China, although never found within the boundaries of China proper, it was very naturally accorded wonderful medical virtues. An old Chinese encyclopedia, the work of Li She Chan, and presented by him to the emperor Wan Lih of the Ming dynasty, in 1596, contains many interesting notices of jade. When reduced to a powder of the size of rice grains it strengthened the lungs, the heart, and the vocal organs, and prolonged life, more especially if gold and silver were added to the jade powder. Another, and certainly a pleasanter way of absorbing this precious mineral, was to drink what was enthusiastically called the “divine liquor of jade.” To concoct this elixir equal parts of jade, rice, and dew-water were put into a copper pot and boiled, the resultant liquid being carefully filtered. This mixture was said to strengthen the muscles and make them supple, to harden the bones, to calm the mind, to enrich the flesh, and to purify the blood. Whoever took it for a long space of time ceased to suffer from either heat or cold and no longer felt either hunger or thirst. Galen (b. ca. 130 A.D.) wrote thus of the green jasper:[493] Some have testified to a virtue in certain stones, and this is true of the green jasper, that is to say, this stone aids the stomach and navel by contact. And some, therefore, set the stone in rings and engrave on it a dragon surrounded by rays, according to what King Nechepsos has transmitted to posterity in the fourteenth book (of his works). Indeed, I myself have thoroughly tested this stone, for I hung a necklace composed of them about my neck so that they touched the navel, and I received not less benefit from them than I would had they borne the engraving of which Nechepsos wrote. Ruby Sanskrit medical literature as represented by Naharari, a physician of Cashmere, who wrote in the thirteenth century, finds in the ruby a valuable remedy for flatulency and biliousness. Moreover, aside from these special uses, an elixir of great potency could be made from rubies by those who properly understood the employment of precious stones in the compounding of medicines.[494] This famous “ruby elixir” may have had little in common with the stone except its color, as such remedies were generally said to have been made by some secret and mysterious process, in the course of which all material evidence of the presence of any precious stone or stones completely disappeared. Sapphire One of the earliest specimens of English literature, William Langley’s “Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman” (written about 1377), contains a mention of the sapphire as a cure for disease:[495]