Acupuncture

Acupuncture spread from China to Korea, Japan and Vietnam and elsewhere in East Asia.
Around ninety works on acupuncture were written in China between the Han Dynasty and the Song Dynasti and the in 1023, ordered the production of a bronze statuette depicting the meridians and acupuncture points then in use.
However, after the end of the Song Dynasty, acupuncture and its practitioners began to be seen as a technical rather than scholarly profession.
It became more rare in the succeeding centuries, supplanted by medications and became associated with the less prestigious practices of shamanism, midwifery and moxibustion.
Portugues missionaries in the 16th century were among the first to bring reports of acupuncture to the West.
Jacob de Bondt a Danish surgeon travelling in Asia, described the practice in both Japan and Java.
However, in China itself the practice was increasingly associated with the lower-classes and illiterate practitioners.
The first European text on acupuncture was written by Willen ten Rhijni a Dutch physician who studied the practice for two years in Japan. It consisted of an essay in a 1683 medical text on arthritis; Europeans were also at the time becoming more interested in moxibustion, which ten Rhijne also wrote about.
In 1757 the physician Xu Daqun described the further decline of acupuncture, saying it was a lost art, with few experts to instruct; its decline was attributed in part to the popularity of prescriptions and medications, as well as its association with the lower classes.
In 1822, an edict from the Chinese Emperor banned the practice and teaching of acupuncture within the Imperial Academy of Medicine outright, as unfit for practice by gentlemen-scholars. At this point, acupuncture was still cited in Europe with both skepticism and praise, with little study and only a small amount of experimentation.