The book Disaster Relief Materia Medica was published in the early Ming Dynasty. It is the earliest monograph on agronomy and botany in the history of our country, and it also makes a comprehensive summary of the utilization, processing and treatment of plant resources. It has certain influence on the development of botany, agronomy, medicine and other disciplines in China.

There are many versions of "disaster relief herbs", including 15 and 6 kinds in China. The original book "Herbal Medicine for Disaster Relief" was published in Kaifeng in the fourth year of Yongle (AD 1406), but this edition has been lost.

In the fourth year of Jiajing (A.D. 1525), Taiyuan, Shanxi Province was published for the second time, which is the oldest carved version popular today, and it is divided into four volumes. In the thirty-fourth year of Jiajing (AD 1555), Lu Dong, a native of Kaifeng Prefecture, republished the book according to the second edition, but mistakenly thought that it was written by his son Zhu Youdun ().

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Zhu Kui is undoubtedly the first botanist who paid attention to famine relief and studied wild vegetables based on people's livelihood in China's herbal research. Decades after Zhu, another man named Wang Pan began to look for edible wild vegetables. His potherb cookbook recorded 60 kinds of potherb, which not only had explanations, but also compiled poems and illustrations.

Less than a hundred years after Wang Pan, another man named Zhou also began to study wild vegetables, also to save the famine. He wrote a Record of Wild Vegetables.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Xu Guangqi compiled the Complete Book of Agricultural Administration, which included Zhu Yun's Herbal Medicine for Famine Relief. On the basis of summing up the experience of his ancestors, he got more than 60 kinds of wild vegetables. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Baoshan, a native of Wuyuan, went deep into Huangshan to build a house. He spent seven years writing records of wild vegetables.

The study of wild vegetables for famine relief can be said to run through the whole history of Ming Dynasty. With the influence of these studies on people's lives, the wild vegetables that are usually ignored and will come forward when encountering difficulties have been widely promoted, and almost every family has mastered the collection and consumption of several wild vegetables.

People's Network-Zhu Yuanzhang's fifth son likes to grow wild vegetables and study the problem of wild vegetables to save the famine.