{
  "id": "balsamo-del-peru",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Balsamo del Peru: an American remedy misnamed, and the Spanish route that carried it to China and Japan",
  "summary": "The resin the world still calls balsam of Peru comes from Central America, not Peru. This object records what the tree is and where it grows, the Nahuatl name hoitziloxitl, the tapping technique and its yield, the gatherers who sold the sap on, the galleon cargoes that took it across the Pacific into Chinese and Japanese medical writing, the adulteration that followed it, and what became of it: a standard allergen in the European patch-test series.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "medicine",
    "botany",
    "pharmacy",
    "trade",
    "manila-galleon",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "central-america",
    "spanish-empire",
    "columbian-exchange"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "manila-galleon"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quina-cascarilla-del-peru"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "columbian-exchange"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "curare-del-orinoco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "piedra-bezar-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "copal-y-anime-de-la-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "liquidambar-xochiocotzotl-de-la-nueva-espana"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Where does balsam of Peru actually come from?",
    "Why is balsam of Peru called Peruvian if it is not from Peru?",
    "What is hoitziloxitl?",
    "How was balsam of Peru harvested?",
    "How did American medicines reach China and Japan?",
    "Why is balsam of Peru still used in allergy patch testing?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The name is wrong about the place. The balsam is obtained from Myroxylon balsamum var. pereirae, a leguminous tree of Central America, growing in particular along the balsam coast of El Salvador between Ajacutla and La Libertad, and also in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba, at elevations of roughly 300 to 700 metres. It is a different plant from the balsam of the Old World, Commiphora gileadensis, with which the name it inherited was entangled.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Two explanations of the misnomer are on the record and the object takes neither as settled. The study reports Albert Hale's account, that European ignorance of the continent made anything from the Pacific side \"apt to be called Peruvian, whether from Peru itself, from Chile, or the mysterious Potosi\"; and it advances its own, that the balsam was originally shipped from the port of Callao in the Viceroyalty of Peru and took the name of the place it was loaded rather than the place it grew.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The substance had a name before it had that one. The study gives the ancient native designation as hoitziloxitl, a Nahuatl term, which places the knowledge of the tree and its resin with the peoples of the region before any of the trade described here.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The technique is specific and is recorded in enough detail to be reconstructed. Rectangular holes are cut in the bark of the tree, between 25 and 28 of them, to a depth of 15 to 16 centimetres; for five to eight days the sap flows slowly but steadily and is taken up in very clean cloth; heat is reapplied after eight to ten days. A healthy tree yields between three and four pounds of sap in a year, and the operation is repeated annually.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "On who did the work, the record read here supports one sentence and no more: by the early to mid eighteenth century there were balsam gatherers living close to the trees, who collected the sap and sold it to merchants for further distribution. The study documents no terms of labour, no wages and no coercion in either direction, and this object asserts none. The silence is the state of this source, not a finding about the conditions.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The resin crossed the Pacific on the galleon trade. The study identifies cargoes of balsam aboard the San Joseph in 1772 and again in 1780, Nuestra Senora de la Luz in 1775, the San Andres in 1786, the San Jose in 1788, an unidentified ship in 1791 and the Nao Magallanes in 1809, and notes that it was shipped in coconuts, which is the origin of the trade term cocoa balsam. Confidence is held down here because two separate readings of the article gave inconsistent accounts of the port from which these cargoes sailed, so no port of departure is asserted.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "In China the balsam entered through the missionary channel rather than through the pharmacy. The term appears transcribed as ba'ershamo in Matteo Ricci's world map of 1602, the Kunyu wanguo quantu, and in Giulio Aleni's Zhifang waiji of 1623, and the Kangxi emperor, reigning 1662 to 1722, valued Western medicines, with interest falling away after the Qianlong era. The trajectory ends in a sentence the study quotes from the scholar Yu Yue, 1821 to 1907: \"I do not know where the country of Peru is located, and also do not know what kind of tree this balsam is.\" The author's conclusion is that the knowledge had become purely encyclopaedic and philosophical. The Chinese characters used for the transcription are not reproduced here because two readings of the article returned different graphs.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Japan took the opposite path. Arai Hakuseki, 1657 to 1725, produced a version of Ricci's map in 1708 and discussed the balsam with Dutch traders and in his own writing, and in the nineteenth century Japanese physicians systematically translated Dutch medical texts that referenced it, the Udagawa translations describing it as strengthening the nerves, preventing decomposition, acting as a laxative and treating gonorrhoea. The difference between the Chinese and Japanese receptions of the same American substance is the study's central comparison.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The uses recorded are wound healing, sword and knife injuries, skin diseases, colds, and smallpox, where it was used to prevent scarring; it served as a natural antiseptic and in the preservation of bodies. Value brought adulteration with it: the balsam was cut with raw sugar or with cacao husks diluted in water, and a test existed, since pure balsam solidified in hot water while the adulterated product floated.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The substance is still in the clinic, and not as a remedy. Balsam of Peru remains part of the European and Italian baseline series for contact allergy patch testing as a marker of fragrance sensitivity. In a multicentre study of 12,030 patients, 439 (3.6 per cent) reacted to it and 310 (2.6 per cent) reacted to it while not reacting to Fragrance Mix 1, with 68.1 per cent of clinically relevant balsam allergies negative to that mix. Its use in crude form has been almost abandoned because of that sensitising history, and only extracts and distillates are now permitted in cosmetics and consumer products.",
      "sources": [
        "guarneri-2021-myroxylon-pereirae"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What is not known is stated by the author and is repeated here rather than papered over: little information is available on the qualitative and quantitative chemical composition of the balsam; whether there were special merchants and merchant networks engaged in its provision and cross-oceanic distribution \"remains a question to be investigated\"; and on how and when the oil was used in military circles the textual evidence is described as \"scanty\". The American end of this transfer — who gathered, on what terms, and how the knowledge passed from Nahuatl-speaking users to Spanish shipping — is not established by the source read for this object.",
      "sources": [
        "schottenhammer-2020-peruvian-balsam"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Ask any general reference about balsam of Peru and you get a fragrance allergen with a one-line note that it comes from El Salvador. What almost nothing in English puts in one place is the whole arc: that the name records a port and a European confusion rather than an origin, that the resin had a Nahuatl name before it had a Spanish one, that the tapping was 25 to 28 holes cut 15 centimetres into the bark for three or four pounds a year, that named galleons carried it across the Pacific between 1772 and 1809 in coconuts, that it reached Chinese medical writing through a Jesuit world map and Japanese medicine through Dutch translation, and that by the nineteenth century a Chinese scholar could still cite it while saying outright that he did not know where Peru was. The object also does what the sources force: it states that the labour question is unanswered by the study it rests on instead of filling it in from either direction, and it ends with the modern clinical figures, which are neither a vindication nor an indictment but are what happened to the thing.",
  "confidence": 0.75,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-11",
  "body": "The interesting thing about this substance is that its name is a mistake that\noutlived every institution involved in making it. The tree grows on the\nPacific side of Central America; the resin was carried on Spanish shipping;\nand by the nineteenth century a Chinese scholar could quote the name in a\nmedical compilation while stating plainly that he did not know where Peru was\nor what tree this was. The commodity travelled further than the knowledge\nattached to it, which is the ordinary condition of transfers of this kind and\nworth saying without either celebration or indictment.\n\nTwo limits are worth stating at the top. The study this object rests on is\ncentred on the Asian reception rather than on the American origin, so it is\nthin exactly where an account of indigenous knowledge and of the terms on\nwhich the sap was gathered would need to be thick; nothing is asserted here\nabout those terms. And the modern claim — that the substance is still a\nroutine allergen in dermatology — comes from clinical literature and says\nnothing whatever about the history.\n",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/balsamo-del-peru",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/balsamo-del-peru.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Balsamo del Peru: an American remedy misnamed, and the Spanish route that carried it to China and Japan",
    "description": "The resin the world still calls balsam of Peru comes from Central America, not Peru. This object records what the tree is and where it grows, the Nahuatl name hoitziloxitl, the tapping technique and its yield, the gatherers who sold the sap on, the galleon cargoes that took it across the Pacific into Chinese and Japanese medical writing, the adulteration that followed it, and what became of it: a standard allergen in the European patch-test series.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/balsamo-del-peru",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-11",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "\"Peruvian balsam\": an example of transoceanic transfer of medicinal knowledge",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7650155/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Myroxylon pereirae (balsam of Peru): Still worth testing?",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8453940/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Balsamo del Peru: an American remedy misnamed, and the Spanish route that carried it to China and Japan"
  }
}