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Holiday Herbal Market  by Mo Rui Qiu
W hile the rest of the country is hosting dragon boat races, and
telling the story of the poet Qu Yuan during the Dumpling
Festival, the Jingxi Zhuang people have a tradition of their own. Sure, just like the rest of China, the Zhuang are making and eating small triangular sticky-rice dumplings wrapped in leaves. Yet, they are also coming from far and wide to the Jingxi county town to buy and sell traditional herbal medicines. I met people who had traveled all the way from a neighboring province to sell wares.
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A little bit of everything sold at this market!

Booth after booth was selling very interesting things, for example: tree bark, mushrooms, dried snakes, dried frogs, and even dried lizards splayed on a stick. Some hawkers were selling more edible things like natural honey, tea flower leaves, and lotus root flour cookies.

As I looked at the variety of medicinal herbs, I saw the “Kidney Supplement Fruit” (补肾果), which is advertised for men in order to cure the following ailments: weak kidneys, lower back pain, arthritic pain during damp and windy weather, weak limbs, pain in

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A woman eagerly rubs on the free samples.
the shoulders, pain in the joints, strengthen the lower back, and to strengthen the male genitalia. It sells for 80 yuan ($12 USD) per 500 grams. The customer needs to buy the dried fruit and boil it up into an edible form.

Another stall was selling Dāng Guī, (当归) a dried herb root that is said to improve blood circulation, low energy levels, irregular menstrual flows, insomnia or hyper-dreaming, blurred vision, and arthritis due to damp and windy weather, and supplement blood and stamina levels. Wow, this seems to be quite a powerful herb!

A balding man with a long scraggly beard sold his medicine in a liquid form and called it “Living Buddha Musk Liquor” (麝香活佛酒). His potion is aimed to treat things like: headaches, stomach aches, toothaches, inflammation, itchy skin, injuries from falling down or being hit, arthritis, shoulder pain, numbness in the limbs, bone

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This is one strong root!
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Dried lizards promoted for medicinal properties.
growths, among other things! Patients are instructed to rub the ointment on their body at least three to four times a day, for ten to fifteen minutes each time. At several stalls around the market, I saw elderly people enthusiastically trying free samples of these ointments.

We asked several of members of the older generation about the origins of this herbal market. While one of them said the tradition began only in 1990, others said it went back several generations. People started to congregate for this medicine market because it was a holiday when everyone already had a day off work. It was also thought of as an auspicious day for selling medicines.

One older gentlemen told us that he had arrived at the market two days earlier in order to get his space set up. Nearby relatives were supplying him with food to eat during the market days. He guessed the most expensive medicine sold there was called “Golden Money Lotus” (钱黄莲), for curing liver inflammation. At his own stall he was selling over twenty kinds of herbs, aimed to treat illnesses ranging from liver problems to stomach problems. He expected to be able to earn over 300 yuan ($45 USD) from this venture.

If you’re shopping for traditional herbal medicine, you’ll want to be in Jingxi during the days this market convenes!