We are in mid-January, the height of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. As colds and flus are prevalent now, I thought I’ll follow up from a previous blog about healing lessons in the London Chelsea Physic Garden.
In that article, I mentioned about growing up in a culture of mysterious concoctions of Chinese medicinal herbs. If you’ve every passed by one of these shops in a Chinatown near you, or on your travels to the Far-East, you probably felt the same about these places. The Chinese medicine shop is a mysterious store. Strange things hang from above or laid out on the counter. Dark wooden drawers fill the room from floor to ceiling it. Even if they are modernised with glass cabinets, these medicine shops still retain that olde-worlde mystique.
You can simply walk in and state what ailments you seek to cure, and the pharmacist will dispense the appropriate herbs. But this is daunting for most people, and someone came up with the brilliant idea of pre-packaging these herbs for the more popular formulations. One can now walk into the local supermarkets and get tonic packets. After using these packets for years, I have decided to puzzle these out. What are they exactly? Are they all the same? If not what’s the difference? What exactly do they do?
Like always, I grabbed a few random packages off the supermarket shelf in Singapore. When I got home I studied their contents. Two of them evidently had different contents to the other three. These other three were tonic soup to strengthen your body. The ingredients meant nothing to me. You’d know from my previous blog that I am a plant pleb. Nevertheless, the scientist in me decided to tabulate my findings and see if there is a trend. Are there any common herbs? Here’s what I found.
| Name in English | Name in Chinese | Chicken Tonic Soup A | Chicken Tonic Soup B | Brain-Enhancing Soup |
| Fruit (Goji Berries or wolfberries) | 枸杞 | x | x | x |
| Polygonatum Odoratum (Solomon seal) | 玉竹 | x | x |
|
| Discorea Opposita (Chinese Yam) | 淮山 | x | x | x |
| Codonopsis Pilosula (Poor Man’s ginseng) | 党参 | x | x |
|
| Astragalus Mebranaceus | 北芪 | x | x |
|
| Angelica Sinensis | 当归 | x | x |
|
| Ligusticum Chuanxiong | 川芎 | x |
|
|
| Nelumbo Nucifera | 莲子 | x |
|
|
| Ginseng | 人参 | x |
| x |
| Liquorice | 甘草 | x | x |
|
| Agaricus blazei murrill mushroom | 姬松茸 |
|
| x |
| Lucid ganoderma | 灵芝 |
|
| x |
| Membranous milkvetch root | 黄芪 |
|
| x |
| White peony root | 白芍 |
|
| x |
| Phyllanthus ussuriensis rupr et maxim | 密甘草 |
|
| x |
| Indian bread fungus (Tuckahoe or poria coccus) | 茯苓 |
|
| x |
At a glance, you can see that 70% chicken tonic soups contained the same ingredients, and the ‘Brain-Enhancing Soup’ had almost entire different herbs. However, out of the list of sixteen herbs, there were two herbs that were present in all three: Goji berries and Chinese Yam. This is a good starting point to learn about Chinese medicine.
This is what’s inside Chicken Tonic Soup A and Brain-Enhancing Soup. Can you identify the goji berries and Chinese yam?
Chicken Tonic Soup A
Brain-Enhancing Soup
Here’s what I found online.
Goji berries is easily available in supermarkets. Tesco sells 100g for £2. It’s rich in zinc, vitamin A and C, hence boosting your immunity. It is a good source of protein as contains all the eight essential amino acids. The red colour is an indication of richness in antioxidants. These are just some benefits. To read more, check out these two articles from Health-line and Medical News Today.
Chinese Yam is rich in vitamin B1 and C. It is also a good source of amino acids and important minerals such as zinc, iron and copper. One of its many uses is for treating coughs. Like goji berries, there is a lot more it can do. Here’s a link if you want to read further.
Let’s delve more into one of the soup packets.
Brain-Enhancing Soup is my translation from the front label, but on the back label it states the soup function as “Enhances Immune system, Improves digestion and Revitalises body”
This is what the packaging, front and back, looks like.
Inside the mysterious items are individually packaged.
You can see them more clearly without the individual packets. Armed with the ingredients list at the back of the packet, I went online to identify the contents. I am confident I got five of them correct. In fact I was so confident I had identified the Astragalus (Membranous milkvetch root) that I labelled it in the photo, until I googled up white peony root and Phyllanthus ussuriensis rupr et maxim. All three of them looked the same to me – like dried up ginger. At this point, I noticed there were eight original individual packages, but on the ingredient label, nine herbs were listed. Obviously the packers couldn’t tell the difference either.
As for the last item lucid ganoderma, all the pictures are of huge and complete fungi, none of which looked like what was in my packet. Below is a picture of one of them. I can make a guess from the colour, which one do you think it is?
My late grandmother visited Chinese medicine shops to get ‘medicines’ and ‘tonics’ for us. In fact, when I was old enough, she’d send me to run these errands. Sometimes, if there was only one item, she’d tell me what she wanted. I’d repeat it parrot fashion until she was confident I would come back with the right herb. If she needed more, she’d write it on a piece of paper for me to show the man in the shop. I could not read it; to a five-year-old the swirling joined-up handwriting of Chinese characters was difficult to decipher. Yet the man always knew what she wanted and he knew exactly which drawer to open. He’d weigh the amount in the old-fashioned scales. I wanted to be as knowledgeable as my grandmother, or the Chinese medicine shop man. I dreamed that one day I’d swagger into the shop and ask for herbs X, Y and Z because I needed to treat ailment Q.
This interest inspired my middle grade book, Secrets of the Great Fire Tree, where my main character embarked on a journey to find a cure from a rare tree. I also mentioned consulting physicians and prescription of herbs in my story. Some of my characters used herbs to cure their ailments. Hopefully this article gives you some context of the world my characters live in.
Have you ever taken anything “good for you” without knowing exactly what you are consuming? Have you ever wondered what it is, or why it is medicinal? Tell me your experiences.
Secrets of the Great Fire Tree will be published by Aurelia Leo in May 2019.
* I am grateful to the man in the Chinese medicine shop for his kind permission to take photos.
