Chinese Herbal Medicine Shop

Visitors to Hong Kong should not miss the local Chinese herbal medicine shops. That's the must-go of my friends visiting here if I am to walk them around town. Usually, the shop owners are friendly to especially foreign visitors, explaining to them the weird stuff in the shop in great detail.

The person in the first photo is the owner of the old-fashioned Chinese medicine shop, Wing Hong. He inherited the business from his old dad. So what can we find in his shop?

The picture below shows horns hanging from the pole immediate below the roof. They are cut from the deer which are made into some Chinese tonics or medical wine conducive to blood circulation.

In such an old-styled shop, there are lots to hold your interest. There are probably lots of antiques too. The wooden bench shown below can go to a museum. When the roadside cooked food stores were still ubiquituous throughout the old Hong King, the likes of it were common sights with coolies squatting on and having their quick meals.

Now there are not a lot of places where you can find such a piece of furniture. What is it for in Wing Hong? Every single Chinese Herbal Medicine shop in the territory runs in a way that a Chinese herbal medicine practisioner is paid a meagre wage for attaching to the shop, giving consultation service at a very cheap price. In return, a part of the profits from the herbal medicine sold to patients goes to the practisioner. The benefits are both way. Certainly by now you may have guessed that the wooden bench is for patients waiting in the queue for consultation. You are right.

And look at the following picture and there you see some aged big glass jars in which sweets and candies are stored. For what? They are to be given out to patients to go with the Chinese medicine. Those medical tonics can be extremely bitter in taste.

The plates, by the way, floating above the jars are traditional scales for giving accurate measurement of the quatity of herbs to be used in the tonics.

And the picture below shows where the herbs are. There isn't any indication whatsoever on the drawer to tell what is in which. The shop people are trained to memorise the exact location of each herb.

And guess how the people get the herbs in the top rows of drawers? By a simple, intuitive and sensible way:

Step on the drawers and climb the way up! Another interesting thing about these drawers is that they are built with the tenon construction which requires no nailing. If you know enough, the Chinese people in history were experts in wooden construction. The ancient pavilions and houses as you may have seen in the Forbidden City were built with the tenon construction too, meaning that no nailing was needed.