Herb Nerd's Paradise: 4 days in Anguo
2024 Travel Log to Anguo, China
It’s been 5 years since we last went to China, so my brother Hugh, sister Eva, and I were very excited to visit Anguo last month and see all the changes since the pandemic, and especially to visit with suppliers, partners, and friends.
After arriving in Beijing, we traveled to Anguo, the ancient herb capital of China and where our joint-venture herb manufacturing facility, Hebei Meiwei, has been in operation since 1995. We were pleasantly surprised by the new highway connecting the main freeway to Anguo, cutting our drive down from about 4 hours to a little over 3. The first time I went to Anguo in 1993, there was no freeway and often barely paved roads, making the trip from Beijng, more than 7 hours, excruciatingly slow, with bumpy hours through tiny hamlets, livestock, and small children roaming in the middle of the 2-lane road.
But back to the present: That evening, we settled into Anguo’s newest hotel, “Anguo International Grand Hotel”, which was built by the city government in just 6 months during the pandemic to boost the local job market and economy. The hotel, in keeping with the city’s herbal heritage, had classic Chinese medicine books like the Shang Han Lun, Nan Jing, and Qian Jin Yao Fang as room décor and instead of regular tea and coffee sachets, stocked herbal teas with Ju hua, Zhi zi, Jue ming zi, He ye, and Yi yi ren next to the coffee pot.
After a healthy veggie-laden breakfast the next morning, we piled back into the car and drove over to Hebei Meiwei. There was truly a feeling of homecoming as we pulled in front of the original building which, in the beginning, housed all our operations including herb processing, but now serves as offices, meeting rooms, and staff canteen. We were welcomed at the door by our joint venture partners, the Wang family. Its’ patriarch, Wang Yan Jun, has retired, but left his summer home in the cooler mountains to come see us. His son, Wang Hai Yang, now runs the company and has brought new ideas and energy along with a management style that took the company smoothly through the economic downturn and two lengthy government-mandated lockdowns during the pandemic.
In 2008, we completed construction of a 200,000 square foot manufacturing facility with a separate 4-story Quality Control building containing laboratories, and over the years we have added buildings with workspaces for the initial sorting and cleaning of herbs before they were brought into the manufacturing building for more thorough cleaning and processing. We now saw the newest buildings and workspaces built during our absence, including a 3-story climate-controlled warehouse, complete with a 9,000 square foot greenhouse on the roof for the sun-drying of herbs.
We also toured the new equipment additions in the extraction workshop, including more efficient extractors and condensers for extract powders and granules, as well as in the manufacturing building itself, whose map in the lobby showed the new GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) workshops on the second floor for pill, tablet, and granule manufacturing. We dressed in full body suits with hoods, face masks and shoe covers and went through the halls surrounding the actual workshops, seeing firsthand all the steps that went into making a finished product. That day, the line that had the most action was the bottling line, busy packaging capsules of a proprietary formula ordered by a local hospital.
We found more people working in the herb processing areas, as raw herbs tend to require a more hands-on approach. There was literally a ton of Huang qi being honey-roasted and laid out to cool and raked every 15 minutes or so. Hundreds of kilos of Dan shen were being sliced, thankfully by machine. (Though there are still some herbs sliced by hand). The sorting workshops were the busiest. Different rooms with Cao dou kou, Hei dou, Kuan dong hua, and Luo shi teng were being meticulously hand-sorted the day of our visit. Seeing industrious work reminded me of a comment made by Colorado acupuncturist Joshua Geetter, who toured Meiwei Hebei back in 2011. Upon seeing the painstaking sorting being done, Joshua said “I’ll never look at another bag of herbs the same way again.”
It was a blistering 94 degrees that day, and we found great relief walking into the new climate and humidity-controlled warehouses, one with raw materials warehouse and another with finished products. In the raw materials warehouse, we met the friendly Mr. Ma, who gamely consented to be photographed next to the pallets of herbs he was delivering.
The next morning, we took a drive to the herb fields around Anguo—leaving the hotel at 6:30 am to take advantage of the cooler 75-degree morning temps. We were accompanied by Mr. Kou, the now retired government agronomist who had been our consultant for more than 20 years. Mr. Kou not only knew his herbs, but also the herb farming community around Anguo. Mr. Kou is a native son, and over his long career, traveled all over China speaking at conferences and inspecting and training herb farmers in growing techniques and pesticide use. He recently retired to his hometown, where his daily five-mile walks at dawn take him all over the farmlands. Mr. Kou and I had a very lovely talk about his childhood reminiscences of Anguo, and about his yearning for “the good old days” when life was slower and simpler.
Our small group visited first with farmer Wang, who was out weeding his field of Fang feng. He arrived right before dawn to take advantage of the cooler weather and expected to go home around 10am before it got too hot. Looking at his relatively small plot, I asked Hai Yang what he thought Mr. Wang would make for his crop. Hai Yang replied that it really depended upon the market price in the fall when the Fang feng would be harvested, but that farmer Wang could make a couple of thousand yuan if he was lucky, though it could potentially go the other way. In my mind I divided 2000 by the current exchange rate of 7.25 yuan to the U.S. dollar and was sad that it came out to only $275 U.S. Hai Yang added that fortunately, elderly small farmers like farmer Wang don’t rely on the income from their herb farming and that it is mostly something to do as they wouldn’t want the family land to lie fallow. We noticed that farmer Wang also grew a lot of vegetables, so I concluded that his herb farming side gig was at least keeping him spry.
We also stopped and chatted with Mr. and Mrs. Zhang, who were out weeding their field of Dan shen. They used tiny hoes to quickly pull weeds and said that they weeded the Dan shen about once a week, this season rotating between their fields of Fang feng, Sang ye, Sha shen and assorted vegetables. I noticed that all the farmers we saw that morning looked to be past retirement age. For reference, in China blue-collar workers retire relatively early compared to us—50 for women and 55 for men due to the physical demand of their occupations, but also to make way for younger generations of workers. However, the farmers we met in Anguo that day have been working the land for generations, although their children and grandchildren often choose to leave the farm to work in less strenuous work in factories or go into business. The fate of the family plots when these farmers can no longer work and care for them remains to be seen; many families hope that the government or developers will buy their land for projects.
From the fields we went to the marketplace. Anguo, being the primary herb trading center for northern herbs, has three extremely large herb trading complexes in addition to all the individual shops and wholesale businesses that line the streets. We decided to go to one of the more “old school”, less fancy ones to get a visual understanding of the range of grades and fakes in the marketplace. Walking into the “Anguo Chinese Herb Wholesale Market” I was hit with nostalgia. Here, there weren’t any high-end counters specializing in ginseng, deer antler, pearls, or birds’ nest, or individual locker stalls ubiquitous in most herb markets around the country. These were just rows of open sacks of herbs on pallets, some with handwritten signs with herb names, and some with no signs at all. No prices were posted anywhere. It was about as old-school as I’ve seen in more than 20 years, and as we were almost the only “customers” in a hanger easily the size of a football field, the vendors were at their leisure, chatting, playing cards, and nibbling on melon seeds. A few more industrious vendors were weighing herbs into bags, but seemingly without any concerns about hygiene and cross-contamination.
Most were very friendly, as Hai Yang and Shi Yan Peng, Meiwei Hebei’s purchasing-turned-sales Manager pointed out the different grades available of many herbs, such as Dan shen and Yuan zhi. It was quite eye-opening for us since we’ve usually just carried the top grade of any herb. We didn’t know that there are more than 2 grades of this or that. They also explained that these extra grades not only made a range of price points possible, but it was a way of hiding fakes and non-Pharmacopoeia grade herbs among legit ones. I have never seen a more apt application of the adage “You get what you pay for” than in that huge room, and it reinforced my support of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia’s herb monographs being the law of the land and my relief that all our herbs go through rigorous authentication testing.
This is not to say that all the vendors were trying to cheat people, we also met plenty of earnest, hardworking entrepreneurs, like Mrs. Wang (and in case you’re wondering why it seems like everyone is surnamed Wang, it’s an actual fact that Wang is the largest surname in Hebei province, where it has been estimated that 1 out of every 10 people is surnamed Wang. Just to drive home the point, China has a list of the top 400 surnames, and its 2020 census showed that Wang is at the top of the list for all of China!). Anyway, Mrs. Wang is a purveyor of Sha ren among other herbs, and when I noticed her shelling them, she said that it was something to do, and she could charge more per kilo for whole shelled ones, which needed to be shelled by hand. Although she was quite adept at it, I was surprised when she said that she was able to shell 3 to 4 kilos a day.
That evening, we had a real treat. Not only did we eat delicious popsicles made from Shan yao (and undoubtedly a lot of sugar and cream), but dined at the fanciest herbal restaurant in Anguo. Given that Anguo is the ancient herb capital of China, this was saying a lot. The restaurant faced the new square built around the old Medicine God Temple. The last time we visited the Temple it had been surrounded by small homes and narrow crowded streets, and now there were boulevards and touristy stalls. It turns out that Anguo’s town fathers had decided it was necessary to turn Anguo into a tourist destination, where pilgrims seeking healing could pray and make offerings at the Medicine God Temple like the locals, and help the local economy through dining and shopping. I did my share by buying a hand crocheted bag inscribed with the iconic communist saying “the East is Red” from a street vendor (who crochets all her wares herself) for 25 yuan--about $3.47 US, and I swear that I didn’t haggle!
The fancy herbal restaurant was named Qi Shan Fang祁膳坊 and was lovely with imperial décor and walls covered with huge high-quality herb-themed brush paintings. We entered a private room and gawked at the 2-foot Ling zhi in the middle of the table. We dined on delicious fancy herbal foods (as befitting a fancy herbal restaurant) such as shredded Tian ma and Tian men dong in an orange reduction, pickled Sang ye sprouts, and lamb with Sha shen and chilis. With each dish, the manager lady informed us of the herbs in it and the medicinal qualities. All the food herbs I mentioned in a previous podcast "Exploring Fresh Local Food-Herbs" were represented, as well as others we don’t normally think of in cuisine.
The next day, we weren’t the only visitors at Meiwei Hebei. A group of about 110 undergrad students and 3 of their professors from the Hebei University of Chinese Medicine came for a tour of our manufacturing facilities and labs. The students were in their second year, all majoring in either Chinese herb pharmacy or TCM. They were bright and enthusiastic, and interestingly, there were about 90 female students and only 20 male students. When asked about their likely career paths, the TCM students expected to be hospital clinicians, whereas the pharmacy students had a wider range of answers: pharmacists of course, but also professors, drug researchers and big pharma sales reps. Their professors, one of whom attended grad school in Tianjin with Hai Yang, were also very interested in chatting with us “foreign” visitors, and we sat down with tea and had lively exchanges about the differences in health care approaches and systems and the state of TCM education in our countries. Professors Duan, Jing, and Xue recalled classmates who had immigrated to the U.S. and practiced acupuncture. The professors were amazed at the fees they collected--as even a very Senior TCM cancer specialist in a Beijing hospital charged only 500 Yuan (about $69 USD) for a consultation.
The Hebei University of Chinese Medicine is in Hebei’s provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, a little over an hour away. The students and professors were basically on a week-long field trip in Anguo, focused on learning herbs in the field. The University kept a teaching garden here in Anguo, literally a 5-minute walk down the street from us. The professors invited us to come see the garden, so off we went. The gated garden is about 39 acres, with 430 medicinal herbs being grown. Professor Xue oversees the garden and spends a lot of his time tending it, while living on premises in a small brick room. His love for the garden and passion about herbs was very apparent, and I thought about how he might have been the earthiest, “crunchiest” Chinese person I’ve ever met. He had a gentle, monkish vibe about him, and buzzed with energy when taking us on a tour of the garden, plucking, digging, and dissecting herbs for us to see. His knowledge and enthusiasm about herbs was really inspiring, and we learned that when he wasn’t teaching or tending the garden, he made lively videos and posted them on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) teaching folks how to grow herbs at home, about the medicinal qualities and functions, and how to cook them. Professor Xue was the ultimate herb nerd, and we adored him!
The pièce de résistance of Anguo’s transformation into a tourist destination is their new Traditional Chinese Medicine Culture Museum. We were lucky enough to be visiting during their soft launch; it was only their 5th day of being open. The museum is housed in the upper floors of a huge, newly built government building, and our jaws dropped when the elevator doors opened, and we were looking at a 2000 square foot lobby with a 40-foot glass ceiling. We loved the larger-than-life bronze statues of Chinese medicine heroes such as Bian Que and Hua Tuo—all arranged to look like a sort of TCM Justice League. We happily walked into the exhibits, which began with an introduction to TCM through ancient oracle bones with symbols for body parts. We wound our way through its emergence in ancient China through legendary figures like the Yellow Emperor, Shen Nong, and Fu Xi, with TCM’s development through each dynasty. Equal respect is given to herbal therapy, acupuncture, moxibustion, Qi gong, physical exercise, and tui na. One particularly lovely section has walls of beautifully preserved fresh herb specimens that look like works of art, and another display explains the medical traditions of China’s ethnic minority peoples such as the Miao, Zhuang, and of course the Tibetans. The museum did a great job of referencing TCM in all its forms--in art and poetry, in classical novels (there are mentions in the Monkey King’s Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Outlaws of the Marsh), and modern film and television series. The whole museum, as well as the entire city is truly an herb nerd’s paradise.
Those were the highlights of our 4 days in Anguo, which were otherwise mostly filled with delicious food and endless cups of tea and punctuated with discussions about herb quality, the state of the industry, and price fluctuations. Some of what we learned can be found in my sister Eva’s interesting and informative July 2024 Herb Market Update.
Although we have lots of photos (my brother Hugh took over 1100 photos and 50+ videos) we could only include a few here. You can experience more of our trip through photos and videos on Facebook and Instagram. Have a wonderful summer!
