A few blocks away from the whitewashed walls and blindingly bright fluorescent lights of a famous drugstore chain lay a row of decrepit-looking, dimly lit stores lined with dingy glass cabinets. These are crammed with a plethora of small bottles and boxes similar, but not quite the same, as the ones in you see on the shelves of the ubiquitous drugstore chain. But the more curious aspect of these stores is the area entirely devoted to traditional Chinese herbal remedies. There, glass jars and red tubs are labeled with characters mostly alien to the average Filipino, its names and purposes decipherable only to the Chinese-speaking dwellers of Manila’s Chinatown.
Chinese patent medicine, which are mass-produced, packaged, and sold in several Chinese drugstores around the world. Photo from this blog.
Once inside these stores, the overpowering smell of dried herbs and the auspicious clang of weighing scales transport you to the heyday of the Chinese apothecary, where the heady smells of ginseng and peony complement the sight of vials containing honey and dragon’s blood, which stood gleaming beside dried seahorses and shark’s tails.
Today, as more and people become aware of animal rights, mostly herbs are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Legend has it that a Chinese emperor named Shen Nong tasted a hundred different kinds of plants, testing their effects on himself so that he can use them to cure others of their illnesses. The first Chinese herbalists created several compendiums of plants, animals, and minerals that have palliative properties. Dragon’s blood, for example, is actually tree sap that is bright red in color, and it is used to treat diarrhea and dysentery. For diabetes and spleen disorders, white ginseng is used. Those with fever, cough, and colds are advised to take mountain bark. Red peony root is said to relieve lower back pain.
Traditional Chinese medicine is based primarily on the principle of finding the balance between yin (cold) and yang (hot) in the body. For instance, a body suffering from a sort of internal cold, which is characterized by certain symptoms, is treated by remedies that fall under the category of yang. The effectiveness of Chinese herbal remedies have to do with the complexity of plant compositions, such that side effects are minimized while healing effects are no less potent, if not more, than the isolated substances that comprise much of modern Western medicine.
“The Chinese are very much behindhand in their knowledge of medicine. Their methods, which are based on ignorance and superstition, are quite as absurd and primitive as were those of the Europeans of the Middle Ages,” a New York Times article said of traditional Chinese medicine, in an article dated February 1897.
Just some of the many Chinese herbs available in Binondo's Chinese drugstores. The austere pharmacist shooed Jorica Pamintuan away right after she took this photo, saying that taking photos were not allowed inside the store.
More than a century later, in the middle of a bustling, relatively modernized metropolis, a long line was snaking towards the counter of Ching Tay Chinese Drugstore in Ongpin Street, Binondo. Some had espasol-white hair and slightly hunched backs; others had faintly lined faces and slower gaits. Still others bore strong physiques and ruddy complexions. A bespectacled Caucasian man with a pot belly was first in line, hurriedly grabbing two bottles of a viscous, amber-colored, translucent liquid. Women in house dresses showed their prescriptions to the pharmacists at the counter as housemaids tailed their jewelry-clad mistresses, who were closely examining the tubs of pungent-smelling mushrooms and mountain bark on the counter. I wondered why the people inside the drugstore seemed to know exactly what they were doing, when it was an entirely different story for me. One look at the dizzying array of Chinese herbs was enough to knock me off my wits, let alone the smell. I patiently waited for the crowd to dwindle before inquiring at the counter.
“Where are these from?” I asked the pharmacist, indicating the glass jars filled with Chinese herbs.
“From China,” she answered tersely, as she resumed mixing herbs on the counter.
Undaunted, I asked the pharmacist if I could talk to the proprietor and ask about the herbs. She told me that the proprietor was not available at the moment.
“So, can I buy something for my cough and colds?” I inquired, after an awkward pause.
“You have to get a prescription from a Chinese doctor first,” she said. I understood this, plus a sharp reprimand at my friend not to take pictures of the herbs, to be a curt dismissal. Perhaps she reckoned I was wasting her time, coming there without a prescription. She was, after all, just one of the drugstore’s pharmacists; they only do the mixing and packaging.
The author skimming through a drugstore's list of common Chinese herbs. Where do we go from here? Photo by Jorica Pamintuan
Outside the drugstore and into the crooked streets leading away from Ongpin are women doing their laundry by hand in plastic basins and sun-tanned men eating their carinderia lunches with gusto, one foot raised. It was a weekday afternoon; the children were still at school. The residents of this part of Binondo are the ones you would least likely see along the corridors of Manila’s state-of-the-art private hospitals. Meanwhile, in the hidden corners of rundown buildings lurk the moneyed class of Binondo, sitting comfortably in their offices and, sometimes, in their temples. The smell of incense only slightly covered the familiar aroma of cash that seeped into the fading walls and antique furniture. Seeing these people buy cheap drugs and herbs in a dusty Chinese drugstore is just as likely as spotting the tricycle driver at the corner of Ongpin and Carvajal check in at the front desk of the posh St. Luke’s Medical Center.
Yet there they were, in that cramped little store, businessman and tricycle driver alike. If the combined effectiveness and cheapness of Chinese medicine draws in those of meager means, then that must also be what draws the infamously tight-walleted Chinese businessmen. Yet, the ubiquity of temples and feng shui in Binondo says more about what these people really want, and get, from Chinese remedies—something that is beyond generation and social class. These are modern-day citizens still beguiled by the mysticism of the past; they are hardly enchanted by seven-syllable, laboratory-crafted substances commonly found in the huge drugstore chains and prescribed by doctors of the government health center five minutes away from Ongpin. These are people of the 21st century, of less than charming times and places such as the sewage-drenched streets of Binondo, who still stand rapt at the idea of patrician healer-emperors and fire-breathing dragons.
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