International audience Describing the processes and pedagogical activities that took place within the framework of medical apprenticeship in late imperial China raises a number of issues that have already been addressed in this volume. Firstly, we know very little on the practical processes of teaching in premodern traditions and even less on how pupils or beginners actuallylearned. While teaching schedules were at times defined by masters, we have very little evidence of how teachers and beginners put them into practice. Secondly, when sources related to a teaching/learning situation do exist, a second problem is one that derives from attempting to understand these sources and the activities they support from the pointof view of our modern experience of learning and teaching. Against this latter problem, the posture Pierre Hadot adopted in his analysis of the philosophical texts of Antiquity, illustrated by his well-known injunction “toute oeuvre doit être placée dans la praxisdont elle émane” (every work must be replaced in the praxis from which it emanates) appears attractivewhen analyzing the sources that were written in relation to medicalapprenticeship in pre-modern China. This is why while focusing on oneparticular text, devoted to teaching medicine at the beginning of thenineteenth century in China, I have found it important to reconstruct thesocial, material, cultural environment in which this text is thought to havebeen written and to replace the modalities of teaching and learning lyingin this particular text into the wider landscape of medical instruction inlate imperial China. As it will appear in the discussion, this landscape wascomplex even though an imperial institution existed that was intendedto set the rule.