Different plaques are put up in the Guangxing Hall TCM Center on Jianguo Road of Hangzhou. Recently these plaques have attracted a lot of foreign visitors from around the world, who have travelled a long distance not for seeing a doctor, but for seeing the plaques.

What kind of plagues are so interesting? It turns out that Zhan Qiang, a renowned TCM practitioner of Zhejiang and the vice president of Hangzhou TCM Hospital, is interested in collecting plaques. He has spent nearly 20 years in collecting more than 260 plaques with “TCM elements” from different provinces across China.

Mr. Zhan told the reporter that the TCM plaques collected by him can be roughly divided into three types, namely plaques hung at clinics, sign boards hung at the gates of drugstores or halls, and plaques of merits which were sent by patients to doctors as a gratitude for curing their diseases or praising the doctor’s merits. Plaques with inscriptions like “Ju Jing Liu Fang (橘井流芳)” and “Bian Shu Tuo Xin (扁术佗心)” are in fact used by ancients to describe the benevolent mind and heart of the doctors.

The 260-plus plaques are a category of exhibits in the TCM Center such as various prescriptions, medical appliances and tools and ancient medical books, which are popular among the lovers of TCM culture from around the world. He wished to let more people realize the profoundness of TCM culture and make more people understand and love TCM culture through such exhibition and cultural exchange.

Executive Editor: Ke YE

Translation: Ke YE, Wenjin CHEN