Monday, March 4, 2013

Chinese Pharmacy

I spend a lot of time wandering about the neighborhoods in Hong Kong when I am here, and I am not often afraid to just walk through a shop or restaurant that looks interesting.  Yesterday while hiking around Kowloon, I decided to check out a local pharmacy.  Not exactly Walgreens...


Chinese medicine has a 2000 year history, and much of it uses dried plant and animal parts as treatments.  You see a lot of things like the ones pictured above.  Dried scallops, various herbs, and a few things that look like they belong in a B-grade horror film.

The other side of the store had shelves filled with Ibuprofen vitamins and the like, but that did not make for a very interesting picture.  I'm not drawing any conclusions on the relative popularity of Western medicine here, but the traditional remedies took up by far the majority of the shelf space.  

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