The History of Saffron in China: From Its Origin to Applications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Saffron ( Stigma Croci ) is an autumn-flowering perennial plant, and its use has a history of over 3500 years. Saffron has often been considered as the costliest medicinal plant, a premium spice, and the best dye with a golden yellowish color. Iran currently produces the finest quality saffron and dominates its global production (>90%). Other countries such as Australia, Canada, the USA, China, and some countries in Central Africa, produce saffron at a lower yield. In China, saffron is celebrated as “red gold” owing to the red stigmas of the flower and its price, which is comparable to the price of gold. Saffron has been one of the most attractive traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbs in the Zhong Guo Yao Dian (《中国药典》 Chinese Pharmacopoeia ) since its inclusion in the 2005 edition. The earliest use of saffron in TCM was recorded in the Ben Cao Shi Yi (《本草拾遗》 Supplement to Materia Medica ) written during the Tang dynasty (741 A.D.). However, saffron grown in inland China has been widely mistaken as originating from Tibet. This is because its Chinese name begins with “Xi” or “Zang,” which sounds similar to its Tibetan name (“Xi Zang”). In this review, we clarify the origin of saffron and its introduction to China and summarize its various applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".