A bloody encounter

All Harbin is known for is the Ice Festival and being asked about it was one of the ice breakers when I first got here. One month later, I started receiving surprised looks that I still had not gone but I had the perfect excuse, I was waiting for my partner to arrive and with the entrance ticket going for £ 30, I was certainly not going twice. Truth is that I also was not in a hurry…the only person in China I confided that was my Chinese teacher who smiled and told me ‘ah, don’t worry…it is just for the tourists…we don’t go there’.  When I finally came around to go, I enjoyed it a lot for all the wrong reasons.  It was like looking at something that it is so tacky that one cannot help but staring in awe. Surely there is something a bit perverse about going up and down ice slides at -25 degrees with “Gangnam style’  music pumping out loud surrounded by millions of bright lights while I was silently praying the epileptic seizures would not make a come back? I much preferred the ice statues and decorations scattered around the city, so much so that when two weeks ago I finally managed to leave what I call ‘The Enclosure’ (the university campus) I felt post concert like sadness to see that they were all gone due to the rise in temperature.

However at that same ice festival I had my first encounter with a lovely fruit used in Chinese medicine. As soon as I passed the entrance gates, I immediately immersed myself in the touristy mood and decided to buy an overpriced tanghulu (糖葫芦)/ fruit skewer which are very popular in the north east of China. Nothing healthy there as the fruit is covered with sugar syrup. As I started munching away my lips must have become numb by the fruit and the temperature because the deadly frozen syrup made his way into my lip without me feeling any pain. So for a while I leisurely strolled with blood pouring out until Kerry turned around to find that Dracula has taken my place. So my most vivid memory of the wonderful Ice Festival was trying to stop the bleeding while admiring the psychedelic activities all around me. 

My favourite fruit of the piercing skewer was 山楂 shan zha/ Chinese hawthorn. Once I started paying attention, I realised that it is everywhere. In drinks, snacks and jellies …I still have to come across the fresh fruit. It usually comes in a very sugary form (no surprise there) but I prefer it in dried form which is quite sour. It brings back childhood memories of stealing the lemon slices from the adults’ drinks. As there is nothing like experiential learning and because I find memorising single herbs much harder than formulae I decided to read up more about this lovely fruit.

I am trying to avoid Chinese medicine literature in English so I went to a shop to choose a book about herbs (and also to feed my books buying addiction). As usual, I got there without my Pleco ( The Dictionary/ my best friend here) so I had to use one of my random ways of picking a title with very limited Chinese/ knowledge of who is who apart from the very obvious ones. I chose a book on the use of herbs by 孟景春 Meng Jing Chun  because the cover had his mug shot and he looked suitably old. In addition he had other two books published (which, thinking about it, doesn’t mean anything but at the time I found reassuring) and, by quickly flicking through it, I recognised another doctor's name who I was told was good by someone who knows much much more than I do. So after such an informed choice and with my wallet only £ 2 lighter, off I went to read about shan zha whilst chewing on some. 

This book includes from some general info about shan zha taken mostly from Zhang Xi Chun, brief explanations on the author's personal take on the usage of this fruit for certain conditions and two case studies. In one of them, 孟景春 uses shan zha on its own and in high dosage as translated below.

Mou, female, 65 yrs old. First visit on 04/08/1983. Had been suffering with chyluria for 19 years. Patient tried Chinese and western medicine but to no avail. In the previous month the condition had worsened. Every time she urinated there would be a great quantity of chyle which was turbid and murky like starch, worse early in the morning, but no difficulty urinating nor pain. When eating oily and greasy food she would suffer from bloating of the stomach and abdomen with a sense of oppression, sloppy stool and the urine turbidity would get worse. The face and the eyes presented with deficiency puffiness, the four limbs were limp and painful. Pale tongue, white greasy coating; pulse thin and relaxed/moderate (缓). 
Diagnosis: spleen and stomach qi stagnation, spleen not transforming essences with fat flowing downward. Treatment consisted in strengthening the spleen, move and disperse stagnation.
The prescription consisted only of shan zha ground into a powder and made into pills with honey. 90 grams/day divided into 3 doses. After half a month the chyluria was completely resolved and digestion was better as well. (Patient stopped taking the prescription). A follow up visit two years later revealed that there had been no more relapses.

Commentary: shan zha is able to dissipate stagnation of oily and greasy substances. It enters the spleen  channel. It strengthens and moves spleen qi; it opens up the middle jiao. The spleen distributes the essence into the lung which supplies it to the one hundred vessels. The lung also unblocks and regulates the water pathways. By strengthening and moving the spleen, there is any more food accumulation and stagnation and therefore the water pathways are open and the source of the downward flow of fat is cut off.