The Little Brass Scale That Never Lies: Fifty Years Behind a Chinese Herbal Counter
A Quarter to Six, the Smell Wakes First
In this lane on the south side of Hangzhou, before daylight has climbed the wall, the first thing to wake is the smell.
Bitter, with a sweet afternote, mixed with camphor wood, old paper, and sun-dried leaves. It seeps out through the half-open door, thread by thread, onto the flagstones, onto the breakfast cart that has just come to a stop at the mouth of the lane. Old Zhou, who sells soy milk, steps on the brake, sniffs, and turns to the man beside him: that shop’s open.
At a quarter to six, Shen Baoquan is already inside. He lifts the door panels one by one out of the groove in the threshold and stands them against the wall. Which panel goes next to which is fixed; after so many decades his hands remember better than his head. By the fifth panel the smell can no longer be contained and the whole lane belongs to it.
The counter came down from the late Qing, its surface worn to a deep brown patina that feels like warm jade. He wipes it once with a damp cloth, then again with a dry one. Then he pulls open the drawer closest to hand, stirs the few medicines he uses daily, notes which compartment is running low, and files it away to report when the buyer comes.
At six thirty, Auntie Chen from the far end of the lane arrives. She is filling three doses. Standing outside the counter she says only, “the same prescription as always,” and he understands. She is in no hurry; she watches the medicine fall into the paper, one herb at a time, pays, and carries the packet slowly home, the paper cord leaving a faint line across her fingers. The first sale of the day is often finished that quietly.
The steam from the breakfast carts rises and mixes with the smell of medicine. It should be strange, and somehow it makes the lane feel solid.
A Man Who Cares About the Fraction
Shen Baoquan was born in 1958 and is sixty-eight this year. In 1975, at seventeen, he took over his father’s place as an apprentice in the shop. His teacher was surnamed Lu; everyone in the shop called him Mr. Lu.
The first thing Mr. Lu taught had nothing to do with identifying herbs. He put a dengzi — a small steelyard for medicine — into Shen Baoquan’s hand and told him to weigh out one qian of licorice. That took half a month. “If the scale isn’t level, the medicine isn’t right. Your hand shakes once and the taste in someone’s pot shifts by a fraction.”
The dengzi is a very small scale. Fine gradations are marked along a handle of bone; a brass pan hangs from one end, a brass weight from the other. The herb goes in the pan, the weight slides along the arm, and the reading counts only when the tail of the arm lifts exactly an inch. In the first year an apprentice memorized the arrangement of the drawers and learned the herbs; in the second year he practiced the scale until he could weigh to the fen without error; only in the third year was he allowed at the counter. The precious and fine materials — ginseng, fritillary, saffron — were out of reach then. The master weighed those himself.
In 1988 he spent three years as a buyer at the medicinal materials market, handling burlap sacks and platform scales every day. He came back to the counter. When the shop was restructured in the 1990s, half his colleagues left — some to drive taxis, some to sell apartments. He stayed.
He has a saying, delivered without hurry: “The medicine is a fixed number. People are what moves.” The dose is written on the prescription; how you fill it, how you explain it, when to ask one more question — that is the human part.
His two kinds of touch took fifty years to learn. His fingertips, laid along the arm of the dengzi, can feel that thread-thin tremor; his palm, holding a pinch of ground herb, knows coarseness, dampness, whether it has clumped. The first must be light, the second exact, and neither can be rushed.
His grandson works at an internet company and once installed a food delivery app for him. He opened it, looked, and never used it again. Two payment QR codes do sit on the counter, sealed in plastic, their corners curling.
A Hundred Drawers, a Materia Medica You Can Pull Open
The most commanding presence in the shop is the cabinet.
A wall of drawers stands one and a half meters tall — over a hundred of them, each divided inside into two or three compartments, one herb per compartment. The names are written on the drawer fronts in brush and regular script. Over the decades, a shallow hollow has been worn into the wood beside each name by fingertips: hundreds of pulls a day, in exactly the same place, right next to the label.
The arrangement follows rules the trade calls the doupu. Everyday herbs go at the middle level, reachable without bending or stretching, because those drawers open a hundred times a day. Light, bulky materials such as rice-paper pith and bamboo shavings go up top; heavy minerals and shells go below, where they keep the cabinet’s center of gravity steady. Herbs that counteract or restrain one another may not share a drawer or sit side by side. More critical still, herbs that look alike must be separated — prepared rehmannia sits three drawers from raw rehmannia, red peony at one end of the cabinet and white peony at the other, fritillary from Sichuan kept several herbs away from fritillary from Zhejiang. Between one drawer and the next lies an eye trained over decades.
Pull open the tangerine peel and a cool sweetness comes out. Mint lives in the top row and stings the nose. Angelica is sweet with something bitter underneath. Angelica dahurica opens in a burst of pungency. Licorice is all aftertaste; breathe it long enough and your throat turns moist. The base note of the whole shop is a blend no single herb owns, and anyone who has smelled it for years knows on entering the door that no perfumer could mix this.
On the drawer fronts of a Hangzhou shop, a few local names are never missing. Hangzhou white chrysanthemum, Zhejiang fritillary, figwort, white peony, atractylodes, corydalis, bamboo-leaf ophiopogon, Wenzhou turmeric — the old phrase is “the eight flavors of Zhejiang,” the region’s authentic medicinals. When older Hangzhou residents come in with a prescription, these are the names they say out loud.
The written names are read differently by different people. The prescription says Hangzhou white chrysanthemum; patients call it Hangzhou chrysanthemum. The prescription says figwort; old Hangzhou people say yuan shen. The prescription says corydalis; some will only recognize it as xuan hu. One herb carries three names — the doctor’s, the master’s, the patient’s — and whoever fills the prescription has to catch all three.
One Prescription, Three Doses: The Rules of the Hand
Filling a prescription begins with a sheet of paper.
Shen Baoquan takes the prescription and checks three things first: the doctor’s signature, the unit of measurement, whether anything needs special handling. Only then does he start. On the counter he lays out as many sheets of cut mulberry paper as there are herbs, one to a sheet, comparing as he goes, missing nothing.
Getting around the shop depends on the doupu: which drawer to pull, which to go to next. The route is ordered in his head, so he never doubles back. Weighing depends on the dengzi; precious materials are weighed and wrapped separately. Anything that needs breaking goes into the brass pounding tube for a few knocks — grinding to powder is a different matter, and if the prescription does not say so, nobody takes the liberty.
When he has filled a dose himself, he counts it again. Herb by herb, against the characters on the prescription, dose by dose. The trade calls this hui deng, “returning to the scale.” One wrong herb and what comes out of the pot is something else entirely; nobody dares skip this gate.
Incompatibilities form a red line, and though a dispensary hand may not know medical theory, the list has to be second nature. The old mnemonic lists eighteen clashes: pinellia, trichosanthes, fritillary, ampelopsis and bletilla against aconite; sargassum, knoxia, kansui and daphne against licorice; the ginsengs, asarum and peony against veratrum. If the prescription raises a question, the dispenser stops and asks the doctor to settle it.
Wrapping is another craft. Mulberry paper, folded on the diagonal, two corners tucked in, and the packet comes out with crisp edges, known in the trade as a “tiger head” bundle. One dose to a packet; three doses, three packets, tied with paper cord and squared off. Some medicines need their own note pinned on: “decoct first” — minerals and shells are hard, and go into the pot half an hour ahead; “add late” — mint and cardamom carry volatile oils and go in near the end, or the fragrance boils away; “decoct wrapped” — inula carries downy hairs and plantain seed is fine and floats, so both go in cloth; “melt in” — donkey-hide gelatin and similar gums are dissolved in hot decoction, never dropped into the pot. Shen Baoquan writes these notes himself, then reads them aloud to the patient.
At the foot of a prescription there is often a line in small characters, three slices of ginger and five jujubes — the yao yin zi, the “guide,” things already in the kitchen. He circles that line separately on the tag so nobody overlooks it.
The line he repeats most is this: decoct each dose twice, pour both batches together, and drink it morning and evening. Plenty of people, wanting to save trouble, boil it once and throw the grounds away. He says it every time, and has said it for decades.
The Cabinet Shrank, the Pouch Grew
The 1980s were the busiest years this lane has known. Queues formed at the dispensary window; a dose cost a few mao. In winter, when people tonify, a great brass cauldron was set up in the shop to reduce herbal paste, running all day, and a single winter produced several hundred batches. In those years doses were still written in qian and fen; around 1979 prescriptions switched to the metric gram, so when regulars brought in an old slip, Shen Baoquan had to convert in his head.
In the 1990s the hospitals’ Chinese medicine departments and pharmacies grew larger, and patients got used to finishing everything at one window — register, consult, collect. The street-level pharmacy felt itself bypassed for the first time. After 2000 the chain drugstores spread, and many simply removed the herbal drawers, keeping rows of boxed medicine and one clerk at one register.
The cabinet shrank. The pouch grew.
Now a QR code is taped beside Shen Baoquan’s counter: decoction and delivery. Hospitals and pharmacies run decoction centers where machines work in rows, sealing the liquid into vacuum pouches, delivered cold or shipped by courier to outlying districts. Office workers carrying a still-warm pouch onto the subway has become a familiar city scene. There is also the granule form: herbs extracted and concentrated into granules, weighed and mixed to the prescription, dissolved in hot water — no decocting, no pot to wash, packable for a business trip. In 2021 the state ended the pilot phase for formula granules and issued unified standards, and that road has run faster since.
The dengzi has not retired. Granules are weighed on an electronic scale that throws up a number in seconds; on the sliced-herb side of the counter, the old bone-handled brass-panned scale still works. Not long ago a young woman came to collect an order, gave the last four digits of her phone number, and he handed over a plastic pouch with a barcode on it, then wrote four characters on it in pen: take warm, after meals.
Old prescriptions still surface here now and then. A few years ago an elderly woman brought in a slip from 1983, the paper brittle, the doses still written in qian and fen. Shen Baoquan converted them, filled the prescription herb by herb, wrapped it, and handed it over. The slip, she said, had been her mother’s; it had sat in a drawer at home for more than forty years.
The Young Are Back, Carrying Sour Plum Drink
More young people have been coming in these past few years. Anyone can see it.
In the summer of 2023, a sour plum drink formula from a provincial hospital in Hangzhou went viral on social media. One dose cost a little over a yuan; young people flooded in to order, and the hospital’s system briefly could not keep up. After that came late-night tea, summer heat patches, herbal infusions for daily drinking, and old pharmacies opening new-style outlets selling goji berry lattes and tangerine peel americanos. The vocabulary turns over year by year, and Shen Baoquan cannot quite keep pace. He notices one thing only: more people are asking whether it tastes bitter.
A designer comes in almost every week, working until ten at night, filling a prescription sent for decoction. When she collects it she always asks whether they can put in less of the bitter part. His answer never changes: bitter is what medicine tastes like. It can’t be edited out.
The young return in a different way from the old. The old came with a prescription and asked whether it works; the young come with a phone and ask whether it is real. They are buying the herbs, and something behind them too — the solar terms, body constitution, authentic origin, the sense of a slower way of doing things. Shen Baoquan does not pass judgment. The notice for the winter paste season is pasted in the same old spot, with this year’s opening date on it.
Neither High Nor Low: A Lifetime’s Homework
Shen Baoquan says there is nothing romantic about the trade. Eight hours on your feet a day, more than three hundred days a year, rheumatism in the hands, and herb dust in the creases of your nails that never quite washes out. A lifetime of skill, summed up, comes to four characters: not high, not low.
The arm of the dengzi level, the brass weight in position, the herb neither heaped nor sinking. The dose was worked out by the doctor; the person filling it is responsible for one thing only — it must not be off.
No large characters hang on the shop wall. What has come down through the trade is a sentence: blending and preparing happen where no one sees, and the conscience keeps its own scale. It sounds old-fashioned now. What it describes is entirely ordinary: what standard do you hold your work to when nobody is watching.
Our generation rarely has occasion to weigh anything to the fen. Vegetables by the jin, takeout by the portion, coffee by the cup, time by “roughly” — roughly there by ten, roughly done next week. Life gets coarser in outline, and it grows harder to tell which portions actually matter. Convenience is the gift this era hands us. Only now and then, you cannot recall the last time you weighed something carefully, and when that was.
At six in the evening Shen Baoquan closes up. The herb dust left on the counter is swept into a cloth bag; when it fills up he sews it into small medicine pillows and gives them away. Then he slides the door panels back into their grooves, in reverse order, none out of place. The gaps between the panels narrow, the smell of medicine gathers itself and retreats indoors.
The dengzi goes back on its hook. The brass pan swings twice against the wall, and is still.