In China, new hope for the “children of the stars”

As early as in the seventh century, what we now call autism had already been recorded in China. During the Sui Dynasty (581-618), Chao Yuanfang, an imperial physician, wrote in Zhubing Yuanhou Lun (On the Etiology of Diseases), of the so-called hun se (muddle-headed), yu chi (language delay) phenotype, saying it was “clinically manifested in a child’s lack of speech and neurodevelopmental retardation”.