Seikei Zusetsu

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You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Japanese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,312 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:成形図説]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ja|成形図説}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Seikei Zusetsu (Japanese: 成形図説) is a Japanese agricultural encyclopedia compiled from 1793 to 1804 at the order of Shimazu Shigehide, the ruler of Satsuma Province (now approximately Kagoshima Prefecture). The aim was to improve agriculture in southern Japan. The authors were the scholars So Senshun, Shirao Kunihashira from the Japanese national Kokugaku school, the Confucian Mukai Tomoaki and Hori Monjuro, who studied Dutch and other Western knowledge in the context of the Rangaku. The encyclopedia originally consisted of one hundred richly illustrated volumes. However, because of two major fires, seventy wooden printing blocks were lost, so that in 1804 only thirty parts could be printed. These describe 109 Japanese agricultural crops from 29 plant families around 1800, sometimes with cultivars that no longer exist. The many chapters on farming methods are still current.^[1]

A copy of the work was gifted to Philipp Franz von Siebold.^[2]

In 2016 research, current crop cultivars were compared to the ones in the Seikei Zusetsu. Matches were found for 50 of the 109 crop species with the other 59 not documented in contemporary databases.^[3]