There are several herb gardens in Hong Kong. There is one in the Botanical Gardens, close to the seat of government. There is another in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, an institution traceable in part to the revolution of 1949, when mainland scholars were scattered to the four winds. But the one that always caught my attention is tucked away, on one of the many paths winding through the Lung Fu Shan Country Park.
With its abundant references to medicine, the garden at first glance seems like a portal into another era. In the English-speaking world, while herbs still adorn the kitchen shelf, their relationship with healing has taken on archaic associations. In China, where the very word is often expressed through the characters for “medicine” and “grass”, several hundreds of herbs still play an important role in traditional healthcare practices. But few young people nowadays could name many of them, or would come across them.
If gardens exist on a spectrum, this one is on the wilder end and, as though in concert with the forgetting of their names, the herbs have not always seemed in their best state. Last winter, to the extent that it occurs in Hong Kong, nettles had sprouted and the loose grass was trampled. The pots were weathered, and some had fallen over. Only a few flashes of purple — possibly thistles — broke up a jumble of stalks and leaves.
Over four years of occasionally passing the garden, I had never before seen anyone tending to it. But this time there were two men, one middle-aged and one elderly, and at least a foot shorter. Many of the herbs had been stolen in the past few years, explained Alfred Ho, 54, the younger of the two.
They were part of the walking group that had established the garden decades earlier. A small wooden stand on the premises displayed laminated cards of various herbs: firecracker vine, which is sweet and neutral; Chinese mesona, which is bland and cold; and white mugwort. There was artillery clearweed, goosegrass, four-o’clock, peppermint, xiao qing and sea cups.
“Use only as prescribed by the physician,” a sign said.
The other gardener, who was born in 1934, did not speak a word of English, and his native Cantonese seemed to be rooted in the land itself. There was an unmistakable cheerfulness about him, as though he were in just the right place. Chan Siun-kuen, as it turns out, knows all about herbs.
“I want more and more people to know [about them],” he later told me.
Nicolette Perry, who has a PhD in pharmacognosy (the study of medicine from natural sources), runs the Dilston Physic Garden in Northumberland, which has around 700 medicinal plants. She recalls being “amazed” on a trip to Kenya last year; there were “five-year olds saying ‘I’d take this tree and take this leaf and prepare it and drink it’”. But of Dilston’s estimated 2,000 visitors a year, “many are unaware of the traditional and modern uses” of herbs, she says, especially compared with other countries.
The UK, which now displays herbs largely for ornamental or educational purposes, is just one example of a wider disconnection. It “used to have its own huge historical indigenous knowledge” of herbs, but this was “essentially lost” after the chemical revolution of the 19th century.
“We’ve moved from rural to urban areas,” she says. “That’s also added to our lack of knowledge. We haven’t been able to grow them [in quantity or variety] like we used to.”
Chan Siun-kuen had followed that trajectory himself, having moved to the urban metropolis of Hong Kong from rural southern China in 1949, when he was still a teenager. It wasn’t until his forties, after 25 years working in a print manufacturing company, that he began to rediscover the countryside.
In the 1970s, the territory’s industrial boom, which later spread to mainland China, led to worsening pollution. Chan took up hiking in the hills, finding in his fellow walkers a shared enthusiasm for the area’s plant life. He had also started to volunteer for the district council, helping with fire prevention. “At that time, many of the buildings were still made of wood,” he recalls.
The area in which he hiked, now full of well-marked trails leading up to Victoria Peak, was a different matter back then. The landscape was frequented by the triads, a set of powerful underground societies that operated outside of the law. They laid out furniture and offered breakfast, lunch, dinner and, for a fee, games of mah-jong. When the government wanted to establish a country park in the late 1990s, Chan, who had been hiking past them for years, became a middleman.
“It was very complex,” he says. He told the triads the government’s new country park would be “for the people”, and they “are not the enemy of the people”. Eventually, they moved out.
By now more and more people hiked in the morning: there was a group, the Morning Walkers’ Association, of which Chan was appointed chair in 1999. Around a 10-minute walk from the mah-jong tables they planted a garden, with the assistance of the Hong Kong government and Hong Kong University, to promote herbs and Chinese medicine. They established “around 300 species”, says Ning Wang, assistant professor in the School of Chinese Medicine, who was involved in the project about a decade ago.
Today, labels feature Latin, English and Chinese descriptions. Cactus, for example, is written as “angel’s palm”, and is described as “bitter”, “cold” and “moving qi and activating blood”. The language draws on the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, which is still widely used in pharmacies on the mainland. Many cards include the character qi, which Wang says is considered as “the foundation that builds our body” in Chinese medicine.
For Chan, this was not new territory. “After I started the garden,” he says, “I learnt about Chinese herbs again.”
As a young child, the hills Chan Siun-kuen used to climb in Guangdong were different from those of Hong Kong. He used to go with his father, who previously worked as a bone-setting doctor, treating dislocations. But given food shortages caused by the Japanese invasions of the 1930s, he instead needed to work as a farmer.
He would point out and collect herbs as they walked. There was a large herb shop in Guangzhou that he sometimes visited, Chan tells me.
Traditional medicine, which goes back “thousands of years”, is “closely related to Chinese history and Chinese culture”, says Wang. Shennong, one of the mythological rulers of ancient China who is said to have taught humans the use of the plough, is the reputed author of one of the first texts documenting the uses and benefits of herbs. The 16th-century naturalist and acupuncturist Li Shizhen categorised more than a thousand.
At a public herb garden in Shanghai, there is a statue of Li . “Some people may be familiar with Chinese medicinal herbs, but they don’t know their uses,” says a 71-year-old woman, sitting on a bench outside the garden with her granddaughter and her friend. “Older people like us know about it.”
Mugwort, she explains, can be dried in the sun; dandelions reduce inflammation; leeks are also a form of medicine. “People of my generation learn from their elders,” she adds. Anyway, when she was growing up in the countryside of the 1950s, she says, how could she and her siblings ever afford to see a western-style doctor?
Chan’s was an interrupted childhood. His father was killed by Japanese soldiers, who had seized Guangzhou in 1938. At the age of eight, with four siblings, he became a farmer himself. By his early teens, he could carry 100 jin, an amount equivalent to roughly 50kg. When the war ended, his mother took him to Hong Kong, where it was “easier to survive”. He stayed on alone, though she eventually moved herself, decades later.
There is one memory of the mainland that stays with him. One of the family’s cows had fallen ill, and he recalled a herb to help in such situations. He used it, and it lived. His father had taught him, in the hills behind the village.
“There were no cameras back then,” he says. “But I still remember his face.”
A garden lost and a garden regained, and still Chan Siun-kuen cannot rest. Twice a week, with his friend Alfred Ho, he goes to the Lung Fu Shan herb garden. The herbs may keep getting stolen, which saddens him, but whoever it was at least saw a certain value in them, he says.
There are fewer herb gardens of this kind now, Ho suspects. He says many of the group’s members are getting old; they have sent a proposal to the government to help further develop the garden, so that they can pursue their mission of promoting Chinese medicine and herbs.
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It is not that there is no interest; what seems to be forgotten may in fact be too deeply ingrained. In China, a video that lists by name dozens of herbs recently went viral. “It turns out that the countryside by my hometown is covered in gold,” wrote one online commenter. “In Sichuan we fed them to pigs and cattle,” says another. Nicolette Perry cites a similar sentiment. “You definitely get people saying my grandma used to use this,” she says of items such as the garden’s liquorice root.
At Hong Kong University, Wang, who also is from Guangdong, says that he has used the Lung Fu Shan garden to teach students. His university is installing a new herb garden. But much of the knowledge of herbs is in Chinese society conveyed through “the culture within the family”. They might be used in soups, just as elsewhere a drink might once have contained a tincture.
There are an estimated 10,000 types of plants and animals that can be used as medicinal resources in Chinese society, Wang says, compared with only around 1,000-2,000 that are used in “clinical practice” as medicines. Many of them survive “as a folk medicine in the community” but are “not really recorded as in the Chinese medicine textbooks”.
“The knowledge can be preserved still,” he adds. “[It’s] just not preserved in a very systematic way.”
For Chan, there was no time for school. But the earliest lessons still provided the deepest instruction. If you ask him the name of the plant he fed to his cow, a lifetime ago, he can remember it instantly. It is planted in a garden, shielded by trees, on one of the many paths winding through the Lung Fu Shan Country Park.
Cing sing syu. You need to take the wood of the plant, clean it, chop it very finely, mix it with rice, and then into a congee. And now, no translation is needed, because the language is ancient, and it is in his hands. This is how you hold the cow’s nose, and this is how you push down on its tongue, so that it will not reject the cure, so that it will, against all the odds, survive.
Thomas Hale is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent
Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao
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