Zhang Bo-Duan (984–1082) is revered as one of the founders of Taoist internal alchemy, and Liu I-Ming (1734–1821), an 11th-generation master of the Dragon Gate direction of the school of the Fullness of True, became famous as a brilliant interpreter and the best commentator on this difficult-to-understand esoteric tradition.

The book contains a complete translation into Russian of a general treatise on the language of alchemy “Resolution of Doubts about the Language of Images” by Liu I-Ming and a small but capacious classic text by Zhang Bo -Duan “Four Hundred Hieroglyphs of Golden Cinnabar” with a parallel commentary by Liu I-Ming. These works reveal the essential meaning of traditional images of internal alchemy and describe the entire alchemical process of obtaining “golden cinnabar”, based on genuine understanding, in simple and understandable language. The picture of the world in the traditional Chinese worldview is discussed in the introductory article; a general outline of the textual tradition of the “cinnabar canons”, starting with Wei Bo-Yang (2nd century), is given in the appendix.