All Posts tagged herbs

Visitors to Beijing will find street vendors offering a red berry snack coated with icy sugar. It’s called bing tang hu lu or icy gourd. It’s not really a gourd, but a Chinese hawthorn fruit. It’s a popular snack and is a traditional Chinese medicinal fruit. According to TCM theory,…

Angelica root (Radix angelicae sinensis) is a well-known blood-tonifying herb that’s especially good for women. The Chinese name dang gui means “ought to return”. In ancient china, women used the herb to promote fertility because bearing offspring was considered an important duty. Occasionally, when their husbands were on long trips,…

The reishi mushroom (Ganoderma lucidium) has recently become known as a medicinal fungus worldwide. Like other herbs, it goes by different names, in china, it’s called lingzhi. The word ling means spirit or mind, while zhi refers to mushrooms in general. Reishi is its name in Japan. It’s also sometimes…

Asian ginseng (panax ginseng), which includes Chinese and Korean varieties, has gained worldwide renown. Even its scientific name, panax, alludes to its curative effects. Panax derives from the Greek roots pan, meaning “all”, and akos, “cure”, referring to “cure all”, or “panacea”. According to Professor Shiu-Ying Hu, the earliest written…

More than 1,500 years ago, the meadow regions of the Tibetan Himalayan mountains were covered with a variety of grasses and flowering plants. Grazing cattle and sheep were drawn to an unusual mushroom-like grass. Over time, the herdsmen noticed a marked difference in the strength and agility of their herds.…

Could the tail of a turkey be good for your health? Or is this just another name for a fancy cocktail? It’s actually the common name for a particular mushroom. It’s called turkey tail because of its fan shape, with shades of brown, white, and grey on its upper surface.…