In the early 21st century, East Asian medicines are uniquely situated practices in a world of rapidly accelerating change and the relative decline of the West: attaching to distinctive non-western cultures yet claiming universal applicability; emphasising age-old practices yet capable of forging synergistic links to some of the most innovative areas of modern technoscience. Still, East Asian medicines continue to be widely described as traditions, a label that automatically casts these practices in opposition to the modernity of biomedicine and science even as in clinical research and practice these boundaries are consistently being blurred. I argue that this specific historical moment offers a unique opportunity to examine afresh the nature of East Asian medicines and their historical development. Building on my existing expertise I propose to undertake a sustained programme of research that will seek to understand East Asian medicines throughout the last one thousand years in and on their on terms. Analysing how physicians in various locales seek to solve concrete clinical problems by engaging with bodies, researching pharmaceuticals, assembling them into recipes, and debating how to achieve consistent clinical effects, we intend to build up a picture of East Asian medicine as a landscape made up of distinct styles of practice that consistently merge in and out of each other. Working in this way from the bottom up, we will seek to overcome numerous limitations to our curren t understanding of East Asian medicines that directly stems from their fixation through the discourse of modernity.