One of the moments that sticks most in my mind from my China trip is the evening that we spent visiting herbal pharmacies in the town of Xian (think Terra Cotta Warriors). The first pharmacy we went into was an old fashion herbal pharmacy with little booths on one side for patient interviews and the herbal room with the wooden drawers full of raw herbs on the other side across the waiting area. The walls of the waiting room were lined with benches for patients. On one wall were pictures of the eminent specialists that had consulted there and lists of the per unit prices for different herbs. In the pharmacy area women standing at the counter were filling prescriptions using a hand scale and putting the piles of brightly colored ingredients together on rubber mats, one for each day if the patient was taking it home to cook or in larger batches if it was going to be cooked at the pharmacy. Several people asked to take pictures but the man in charge said that they were getting ready to move to a modern new facility and didn’t want to be photographed in the old space.

Around the corner we went into another pharmacy, this one carrying both herbs and western style pharmaceuticals. On one side the shelves of boxes and bottles of medicines, on the other the wooden drawers and trays of herbs. While we were looking around 2 Australian boys walked in. The boys were in China on a school trip and one of them had a bad cold. Their teacher had sent them out to get something for the cold symptoms; they had been walking around in the dark and drizzle for half an hour showing people a piece of paper with the character for Pharmacy written on it and getting pointed in various different directions. I suspect they were more then a little relieved to find a store full of English speaking herbalists and even more importantly the bilingual Dr. Tao. Dr. Tao’s services were immediately volunteered by the group and he did an intake standing there at the counter with the boy and 8 eager interns. As he wrote the herbal script he translated the comments of the store owner who was sure that a westerner could not take such a bitter potion. As everyone in the group had taken or was taking something very similar (everyone had a cold at some point during the trip) we were not convinced. The boy paid for his prescription and went off to see the sights for an hour while it was boiled up for him. Helping the boy get an appropriate herbal script for his cold symptoms seemed like the most natural thing in the world, after all we were in an herbal pharmacy in China, it was only after wards that I wondered if perhaps his teacher had just meant for him to track down a bottle of the local version of NyQuil?