By Mure Dickie
For two years after Lin Yiqin was sent to eastern Tibet’s Nyingtri country as the prefecture’s Communist party deputy secretary, he suffered chronic stomach problems.
Then Mr Lin, who hails from the coastal province of Fujian, tried locally produced “spotless white” pills, made of ash-roasted fruit, pomegranate seeds, roots and flying-squirrel dung.
“Before I came to Tibet I was not very familiar with Tibetan medicine,” he says. “But I found this medicine extremely effective and now I recommend it to people wherever I go.”
Altruism is not the only reason for Mr Lin to promote Tibetan pharmaceuticals, however. The nearby Qizheng Tibetan medicine factory is a vital local employer and taxpayer. And officials across Tibet see in the region’s traditional remedies a curative for a backward economy reliant on state subsidies, subsistence herding and agriculture.
Indeed, Tibetan medicine production is a growth industry identified by the government as an economic “backbone”. The privately owned Qizheng group says sales were up 20 per cent in 2003 and are likely to grow faster this year.
In Lhasa, the Tibetan Traditional Medical Pharmaceutical Factory – which claims its roots in a Buddhist health institute set up in 1696 – says revenues are rising at a similar rate.
Driving such growth is demand from ethnic Chinese, with tourists from “interior” provinces of China now accounting for around 60 per cent of sales, says Gachong, head of the factory’s sales department.
“It used to be that many people in the interior did not understand Tibetan medicine, but now more and more of them know about it – and more and more are buying,” says Mr Gachong, who like many Tibetans uses only one name.
“We get a lot of calls from people who want to be sales agents.”
Proselytisation by converts such as Mr Lin is helped in China by Tibet’s image as a mysterious and untouched “roof of the world” – themes stressed by state-sponsored promotion of the industry.
And Tibetan therapies, first codified in the 8th century by the revered physician Yutok Yonten Gonpo and closely entwined with local Buddhist dogma, are clearly distinct from Chinese traditional medicine. Illness is seen as a result of an imbalance of the three humours of wind, bile and phlegm, with treatments from butter massages to blood-letting. Medicines include not just high-altitude herbs and animal products but also earth, rock and metals.
Gyalpo, a doctor of traditional medicine in Lhasa, argues that Tibetan therapies emphasise “harmless” methods of treatment, with diet and behaviour adjustment favoured over prescriptions. But pharmaceutical sales are rooted in a more activist approach. Jiang Jun, a tourist from Sichuan province, spent more than Rmb1,000 ($120, €100, £65) – equivalent to about three times the average household’s monthly income in Tibet – in a Lhasa pharmacy after friends begged him to bring back more of the medicine that eased his mother’s rheumatism.
Sales of Tibetan remedies to China have a heritage. Ming dynasty emperors reputedly paid large sums for the fungus stems that grow out of buried caterpillars in Tibetan mountains – and digging up such infected caterpillars is an important source of income today.
But while most medicine has long been sold by weight, local companies want to widen margins by focusing more on processing, packaging and brand-building. The Tibetan Traditional Medical Pharmaceutical Factory is registering its Ganlu (or “sweet dew”) brand as a trademark. Although it still sells loose ingredients at its exotically scented warehouse, Mr Gachong says packaged medicine that can be priced 30-40 per cent higher is the future.
Still, some executives complain that medicine producers in Tibet remain hindered by restrictive regulation. And they admit promotion in China’s rich eastern provinces remains patchy and limited by lack of resources.
