50 Fun Facts About Traditional Chinese Medicine

Which Chinese therapy left the round purple bruises seen on swimmer Michael Phelps's back at the 2016 Olympics?

Cupping uses heated cups to create suction on the skin, an effect put down to the air inside cooling. Shaquille O'Neal and tennis player Ben Shelton have used it too.

Which Chinese invention, named huoyao or 'fire medicine', was first mixed by alchemists seeking an elixir of life?

Gunpowder was originally developed by Taoists for medicinal purposes and was not used in warfare until around AD 904. Its sulfur and saltpeter were already familiar ingredients in Chinese remedies.

Chinese healers blew powdered scabs up patients' noses centuries before Edward Jenner to protect against which disease?

Smallpox scabs from mild cases were powdered and puffed up the nostril in the hope of a mild but protective infection. China has the oldest documented use of the technique, dating to the 16th century.

Yartsa gunbu, a fungus prized in traditional Chinese medicine, sprouts from the mummified body of which creature?

A caterpillar of the ghost moth is infected on the Tibetan Plateau; the fungus kills and mummifies it, then sends up a stalk from the corpse. A pound of top-quality yartsa reached US$50,000 in 2012.

Tu Youyou won a 2015 Nobel Prize after a 1,600-year-old Chinese herbal recipe led her to a drug for which disease?

Malaria drug artemisinin comes from sweet wormwood. Tu isolated it after reading a handbook written in 340 by Ge Hong, which said to steep the herb in cold water and so pointed her to a low-temperature extraction.

Which animal's hide is stewed into ejiao, a Chinese remedy so sought after that African countries have banned exports?

Donkey numbers have fallen steeply as a result: Botswana's herd dropped 70% between 2011 and 2021. Uganda, Tanzania and Senegal are among the countries that banned exports to China.

Which 5,000-year-old Alpine mummy has tattoos at acupuncture points, made long before the practice arose in China?

Ötzi the Iceman carries 61 tattoos, many at points where needles are placed for lower back and abdominal problems. He lived at least 2,000 years before acupuncture's earliest use in China.

Which drink do Chinese legends credit to Shennong, the mythical 'Divine Farmer' said to have tasted hundreds of herbs?

Tea, in the legend, dates from 2737 BC, and the story fits its early history: tea drinking may have begun in Yunnan, where the leaves were used for medicinal purposes.

Which animals are kept in cages on farms in China and Vietnam so their bile can be drained for traditional medicine?

Bears are the only mammals that produce significant amounts of ursodeoxycholic acid, the active ingredient in the bile. The giant panda is the exception: it makes none.

Which animal, thought to be the world's most trafficked mammal, is hunted so its armor can go into Chinese medicine?

The pangolin may account for as much as 20% of all illegal wildlife trade. It is the only mammal covered in large protective scales, the part the traffickers are after.

Which pair of opposites in Chinese medicine began as words for the shady and sunny sides of a hill?

Yin and yang first named the shaded northern slope and the bright southern one. Chinese physicians apply the pair to the body too: the back and upper body count as yang, the lower body as yin.

Which of these completes the five phases of Chinese medicine, alongside wood, fire, earth and water?

Metal is born of earth in the generative cycle, as the ground yields minerals, and in turn gives rise to water. Wood here means the growth of trees more than timber itself.

In Chinese medicine, the word qi is usually translated as 'vital energy', but which of these does it literally mean?

Breath, air or vapor is the literal meaning of qi. The traditional character contains the sign for rice, a hint at the steam that rises from it.

What are the channels called along which qi is said to flow, linking the acupuncture points of Chinese medicine?

Meridians are said to include twelve principal channels tied to the organs, plus eight 'extraordinary vessels'. Scientists have found no evidence that any of them exist.

Which body part does a Chinese medicine practitioner inspect for its color, shape and coating as a guide to the organs?

The tongue of a healthy person, in this system, is pale red or pink with a thin white coat. Practitioners also note its moisture, its cracks and any teeth marks.

Where on the body does a Chinese medicine practitioner feel the pulse at three positions known as cun, guan and chi?

The wrist gives three positions on each arm, named inch, gate and foot, all felt along the radial artery. The first lies closest to the hand and the third furthest from it.

Which root, prized as a tonic in Chinese medicine, has a name whose first syllable is the Chinese word for 'person'?

Ginseng comes from the Chinese renshen; the second character is used for a forked plant root. Wild plants take years to mature and are being dug up faster than they can reproduce.

Which camphor-and-menthol ointment grew out of a remedy devised by a Chinese herbalist in 1870s Rangoon, Burma?

Tiger Balm began as Ban Kin Yu, 'Ten Thousand Golden Oil'. Herbalist Aw Chu Kin asked his sons on his deathbed to perfect it, and in 1918 it was renamed to give it broader appeal.

Which US president's delegation to China watched surgery on an awake patient said to be numbed by acupuncture alone?

Richard Nixon made the trip in 1972. It later emerged that such showcase patients were picked for their high pain tolerance and often received morphine secretly through an intravenous drip.

Which Chinese leader backed traditional medicine in 1950 although, by his own physician's account, he never used it?

Mao Zedong did not personally believe in it, his physician Li Zhisui recalled. His government nonetheless revived traditional medicine, legalized previously banned practices and sponsored its integration with Western care.

Moxibustion, a heat therapy of Chinese medicine, burns which dried herb, ground to a fluff, on or near the skin?

Mugwort is aged, ground and often rolled into a cigar-shaped stick for the purpose. Practitioners claim its heat drives out cold and dampness and can even help turn breech babies.

Which Chinese therapy, known in English as 'spooning' or 'coining', strokes the skin until red marks appear?

Gua sha joins the Chinese for 'to scrape' with a word for the bruise-like marks left behind. Ceramic spoons, coins, jade stones and water buffalo horn all serve as tools.

Which red berry, used in Chinese medicine and grown mainly in Ningxia and Xinjiang, is also called the wolfberry?

Goji grows on a boxthorn shrub in the nightshade family, the group that also contains tomatoes, potatoes and peppers. Nobody knows where the English name wolfberry came from.

Which 'living fossil' tree, used in Chinese medicine since the 11th century, has leaves now sold as a memory supplement?

Ginkgo owes its Western spelling to a centuries-old transcription error of its older name. Trials show little benefit from the supplements, except possibly in dementia.

Which small fish, sold dried in Chinese medicine shops for impotence and wheezing, has the scientific name Hippocampus?

The seahorse is widely taken despite a lack of clinical trials, and is also used for pain and to induce labor. In the living animal it is the male that carries the eggs, up to 1,500 at a time.

Rhino horn, prescribed in Chinese medicine for fevers and convulsions, is made of which protein?

Keratin is also the stuff of hair and fingernails, so the remedy has been compared to drinking nail clippings in water. The idea that China takes the horn as an aphrodisiac is a common misconception.

Acupressure bands sold to travelers press on P6, an acupuncture point of Chinese medicine, to relieve which symptom?

Nausea after surgery was reduced by stimulating P6 in a Cochrane review, though it rated the evidence as low in quality. P6 is one of the most thoroughly investigated acupuncture points of all.

Kampo, adapted from Chinese medicine since the 7th century, is the traditional herbal medicine of which country?

Japan owes it to its Buddhist clergy, who for centuries carried Chinese medical knowledge home and treated both the elite and the general population. Kampo also took up acupuncture and moxibustion.

What were the farmers called who, after basic training, took modern and Chinese medicine to villages from 1968?

Barefoot doctors took the name from southern farmers who worked shoeless in the rice paddies while also practicing medicine. Some were folk healers or recent school leavers.

Which legendary ruler lends his name to the Neijing, the 'Inner Canon' treated as the founding text of Chinese medicine?

The Yellow Emperor appears in it questioning six of his ministers, across two books of eighty-one chapters each. It has been a core source of doctrine for more than two millennia.

Ear acupuncture reached China only in 1958, a year after its invention by Paul Nogier, a neurologist from which country?

France is where Nogier imagined a fetus-shaped figure projected onto the ear, each body part matched to a point. The scheme runs contrary to known anatomy and physiology.

Which nation's East India Company employed Willem ten Rhijne, author of the first full Western treatise on acupuncture?

The Netherlands sent ten Rhijne east as a company physician, where he met practitioners of the needle. His treatise of 1683 urged Europeans to investigate the method further.

Which Chinese herb, known as ma huang, was banned from US dietary supplements in 2004 after a series of deaths?

Ephedra contains ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the stimulants behind both its weight-loss appeal and its dangers. Extracts stripped of ephedrine are still sold legally.

Which root, called gancao or 'sweet grass', is added to Chinese herbal formulas to 'harmonize' the other ingredients?

Licorice gets its sweetness from glycyrrhizin, a compound 30 to 50 times sweeter than sugar. Chinese herbalists use a related species, Glycyrrhiza uralensis, rather than the European plant.

Which bracket fungus, known in China as lingzhi, has been revered for over 2,000 years as the 'mushroom of immortality'?

Reishi carries a Chinese name, lingzhi, that means 'divine mushroom'. An early herbal sorted the fungi into six colors, each said to benefit the life force in a different part of the body.

Which Chinese remedy for coughs and sore throats yields a sweetener about 250 times sweeter than sugar?

Monk fruit is luohan guo in Chinese, 'arhat fruit', after the enlightened monks of Buddhism. It first appears in 13th-century monastic records from the Guilin region.

Cinnabar, a scarlet mineral found in some traditional Chinese medicines, is the main ore of which toxic element?

Mercury is refined from cinnabar, which also gave painters the brilliant red pigment vermilion. The danger is old news: its toxicity was recognized as early as ancient Rome.

Arsenic trioxide, a poison known to Chinese medicine as pi-shuang, won US approval in 2000 to treat which cancer?

Leukemia of the acute promyelocytic type responds to it. Chinese researcher Zhang Tingdong and colleagues began investigating the old remedy against the disease in the 1970s.

Aristolochia, a Chinese medicinal herb, was found in 1990s Belgium to cause rapid failure of which part of the body?

The kidneys failed in a group of women at a Brussels clinic who had all taken the same weight-loss supplement. The plant's acids were later tied to cancer and to a long-puzzling disease in the Balkans.

Which extinct ape was first identified from two molars sold as Chinese medicine in a Hong Kong drugstore in 1935?

Gigantopithecus was named by Ralph von Koenigswald, who spotted the teeth on sale as remedies. During the Second World War he hid them in a milk bottle buried in a friend's backyard on Java.

Which relics bearing the earliest known Chinese writing were ground up as medicine until a scholar noticed them in 1899?

Oracle bones were dug up by villagers and sold as 'dragon bones', a remedy made by grinding fossils into tonics and poultices. Wang Yirong, chancellor of the Imperial Academy, is credited as the first to see the marks as writing.

In Chinese medicine, which organ is called the ruler of all the others and is said to store the shen, or mind?

The heart is matched with the fire phase and is said to govern joy. Its powers supposedly peak between 11am and 1pm on the Chinese body clock.

Which of the Six Excesses of Chinese medicine is blamed for symptoms that come on fast and wander around the body?

Wind patterns also bring itching, tremors and a blocked nose. The excesses can combine, so one person's common cold is read as wind-cold and another's as wind-heat.

Guilinggao, a Chinese medicinal jelly also sold as a dessert, was traditionally made with the shell of which animal?

The turtle originally used was the three-lined box turtle, now critically endangered and extremely expensive. Makers have switched to commoner species, and some dessert versions contain hardly any shell.

Which Chinese massage, related to shiatsu, takes its name from words meaning 'to push' and 'to lift and squeeze'?

Tui na also uses shaking and percussive strokes. Traditional Korean medicine knows the same technique under the name chu na.

Which Chinese art of posture, movement and meditation got its modern name around 1950 to stress health over mysticism?

Qigong pairs qi with gong, a word for work or cultivation. The label gathered a broad range of old self-cultivation exercises under one name while playing down their spiritual side and elite lineages.

Which Han-dynasty surgeon is recorded as the first in China to operate under anesthesia, using a potion mixed with wine?

Hua Tuo called the potion mafeisan, but the recipe was lost with all his writings. The warlord Cao Cao had him executed for feigning his wife's illness to avoid treating him.

Which Ming-dynasty physician spent 27 years compiling the Compendium of Materia Medica, a guide to Chinese remedies?

Li Shizhen filled it with 1,892 entries, 1,100 illustrations and 11,000 prescriptions. He wrote eleven other books as well, among them a study of the pulse.

Yunnan Baiyao, a secret-formula Chinese powder donated by the thousand to soldiers in 1938, is used mainly to stop what?

Bleeding wounds were its battlefield use: inventor Qu Huanzhang gave more than 30,000 bottles to Chinese troops at the Battle of Taierzhuang. His widow later donated the recipe to the government.

Which Beijing pharmacy, founded in 1669, became the sole supplier of herbal medicines to the Qing imperial court?

Tong Ren Tang was set up by Yue Xianyang, a senior court physician, and held the palace monopoly from 1723 until the dynasty collapsed in 1911.