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CHINA DIARY APRIL 2011:VISITING MAYWAY IN ANGUO

Rebecca Clarke

Rebecca sent the following report and photos byiPhone, following her visit, as part of a group, tothe Mayway herb processing facility in Anguo. Thevisit was in response to an invitation by Mayay UKto the RCHM. It was part-funded by the company.Editor.

24 April 2011: I am on location in China. Thanksto Mr Jobs for the life-simplifying google maps withGPS, and for the Chinese-English-Chinesedictionary. I have been much assisted by theiPhone which is nearly as good as a laptop and lightenough to backpack with as I move on from Beijingand Anguo to outer Mongolia for the Royalwedding. Here is a diary of the past few days.

Day 1: My first week in China, before our visit toAnguo, I stayed in a Hutong, an alley or backstreetin a traditional guesthouse and hired a properBeijing bike. The day of the tour to Anguo Ichecked out, dropped off my bike and headed fromthe hot, dusty, chaotic yang of Beijing to the cool,calm, clean yin of the Sheraton.

We all reported dressed in our finest for thewelcome dinner. A fine occasion with an amazingtraditional performer whose changing mask face wecould not fathom. Yvonne Lau, the president ofMayway, introduced the key players: the MaywayHubei and Lanchou staff, as well as Ken Lloyd forMayway UK. Many key USA employees were alsointroduced. Yvonne raved about each one as theywere introduced, rightly so as I learned, becausethey were a fabulously friendly, smart andconscientious crew.

Day 2: Great day to be on a bus, it is overcast andthere has even been a little rain. The first day sinceI have been in China where blue skies have notpresided. We were honking our way along thehighways to one of the herb capitals of China sincethe Song dynasty 1,000 years ago.

A well received restwas taken at theinauspicious lookingHua Yuan Hotelrestaurant for lunch.Here we weretreated to the first ofour Chinese HerbalDietary Therapy meals. Oh such delights....HongZao and deer tendon; Mai Men Dong and shrimp;Tian Ma and fish; Shan Yao and black wood earfungus to name just a few. Delicious andinformative, each dish came with a description ofit's therapeutic uses.

We arrived at the Mayway Anguo factory and hadan informative talk by Yvonne Lau and the GeneralManager of the facility Mr Wang Yang Yun. Wewent through a little of Mayway's history; howYvonne's father had set up the plant in 1995 as ajoint venture with Mr Wang. They talked about theaims of that enterprise and some strategies forachieving them. They wanted to provide safe,authentic, scientifically sound and environmentallyfriendly Chinese herbs.

The first big challenge they faced was the commonpractice of sulphuring herbs--not one they wishedto follow. It is unsafe for a small proportion ofherbal recipients, but unsafe for all those involvedin the processing of the herbs and for theenvironment.

They have systematically addressed problems ofpreserving different herbs without sulphur through

Mayway staff at the arch over theentrance to Anguo

Hua Yuan hotel: Skye Sturgeon demonstratesstuffing a bun with pickle

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the formation of a research committee. This yearthey received an innovation award for their workwith unsulphured Shan Yao.

They address the use of pesticide residues andheavy metals by training growers in GoodAgricultural Practice. This was explained in muchgreater detail on the last day by a translation froma report by a consultant to Mayway who isgovernment trained. More of that later. Wild craftedherbs are chosen from the most clean and pollutionfree areas. There is also attention to thesustainability of gathering these herbs. Only theright herbs based on the Chinese pharmacopoeiaare sourced, without substitution. Di Dao Cao: theherbs grown in the area best suited to them andempirically considered the best for medicinal valueare used. Looking to the future the next goal isorganic herbs but this is very difficult at present. Awonderful example given by Yvonne was that ofginseng. She talked to a ginseng farmer and askedif he would grow organically to which he replied ifyou pay for the crop yield I would get withconventional means I will grow it for youorganically. Asked how much the yield might be hereplied he did not know but maybe 10%. Yielddrops of that scale with increasing demand for avery valuable crop is not a desirable outcome. Intruth the benefits/downfalls of the use of thedifferent pesticides are as yet not wholly resolved.Some are BAD. Some are not. Most lie on thecontinuum. That is is a whole big subject!

Following the theory we got to the exciting bit, thefactory, the production of herbs. Very surprisinglymanual. Machine assisted, enormous human effort;never will a bag of herbs look the same again.Willy Wonka style, it was chocolate factory delight,seeing, smelling and smiling. But people weremanually moving boxes, shovelling herbs, washing,slicing... Ze Xie, Yu Jin, Sang Bai Pi were all beingprocessed. Some were being chopped by machine,fed in by hand. Huang Qi was being hand sliced,

two people sitting together grating much likeshaving parmesan on a large and rootish scale.

It is mind boggling to think of processing herbs thisway, to think of working this way. Human rights isever an issue with China and surely these arerepetitious tasks but it seems Mayway is a goodemployer. They pay good wages, the workingconditions are excellent, they have regular breaks,lunch provided and an 8 hour working day.

On from washing, cleaning and slicing was fryingand dry frying which allows the herbs to beprocessed as is appropriate. From receiving theherb to vacuum sealing and nitrogen bagging aherb should be 3-4 days. The drying processdepends on the herb, it can be dried on a conveyorfrom 20-90 minutes. Herbs can be dried in a heatcabinet or if the microbial testing suggests a highload they will be "super dried" at a high heat toreduce the microbes.

There is further processing and sorting. It may befan sorting or machine sorting or, as we saw,individual humans sorting though Bai Zi Ren, forexample rejecting individual grains based on colourand shape.

Next for raw herbs is packaging. People withmachines work to weigh each bag, seal it thenremove the air, double seal in nitrogen and box upfor transportation to the UK. Another stream ofherbs is for domestic distribution and another forinternal processing into raw herbs, raw powders,concentrated powders and granules. The packagingwe saw was into 10g bags of Ban Lan Gen fordistribution in domestic hospitals.

After the factory tour we headed out to the fields.Growing in Anguo we saw green, grassy shoots ofFu Xiao Mai, She Gan iris with laterally flattenedleaves, Zhi Mu's new flower heads appearing,Chuan Xiong with coriander like leaves and JieGeng roots being dug from deep in loamy clay one

Yvonne Lau and Wang Yang Yun

One of the clean areas of herbproduction

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by one. The herbs grown in this particular familyowned acres of farm include Ju Hua, Shan Yao, ShaShen, Bai Zhi, Mu Xian, Shan Yao and Zi Hua DiDing.

From here we travelled back to Baoding foraccommodation in the solar capital of China to anentirely solar run stunning hotel. We ate well,drank a little and rested our weary well filledminds.

Day 3: A highlight for us all I think, a trauma forthe diligent Mayway staff trying to keep us thevisitors, or them the locals all safe....whichever! Atthis herb market over the course of a year they sell2300 different herbs, perhaps 1000 at any onetime.

Downstairs were the plant herbs but upstairs wasto be the grotto of grotesque. Actually it was fine.

There were ants, worms, scorpions, sea horses andsome very very cool 'shrooms. There were some Iam not sure what, one amongst those was thepenis and testicles of deer. Suffice to say we all hada ball; people appearing at the end of our time inthere with cinnabar and pearls... all of us heedingthe warning that customs would not look kindly onany indiscretion of the animal /plant type.

On we went to the museum of TCM which,unsurprisingly, was more informative to the fewwho read Chinese but of interest to us all. Who canresist the bronze points man?

Next was the Herb God Temple. A place to pray: tohelp us heal those we treat; to thank for the toolswe have; for knowledge; for compassion? And whoknows what everyone else asked for. Apparently amilitary healer healed a princess and so when hedied the father of the princess, an Emperor, gavehim god status and this is his temple. It was a

Digging Jie Geng

Antlers

Herb market

She gan

Herb market

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beautiful and peaceful place, a wonderful contrastto the bustle of the market.

After a medicinally delicious lunch with Gou Qi Zi,Sheng Di Huang, Bai Guo to name my favourites,we went back to the factory and toured the qualitycontrol and powder making facilities. SkyeSturgeon the Quality Control manager took usthrough the labs showing us the various stages oftesting for everything from bacteria, pesticides andheavy metals to identification, using a range oftools predominately referring back to the mostcurrent Peoples Republic of China Pharmacopoeia.Testing includes on-farm organoleptic testingthrough HPLC to atomic tests.

Into the clean area... not just super clean bootiesand masks but whole slippery suits and hepa filtersto visit the powder making. Through double doorsand chambers to an inner sanctum where microbiallevels are, well, 1,000th of something if the colonyis producing units per million. Rare anyway. Few ofus were allowed at a time, to ensure the load didnot get high enough to necessitate a shut down ofproduction and delays in getting your herbs out toyou. We saw the whole process from adding rawherb to water for decoction through to spray dryingand powders being bottled, heat sealed andlabelled. It was a fascinating combination of thesimple and the technological.

Food and sleep and food again; bus delayed untillater in the day for our return to Beijing wecontinued our education. More formal, lectures, butso inspiring. Our own, and by that I mean UK, KenLloyd talked about herbal substitution. He made theUS practitioners feel privileged in their access tothe materia medica but demonstrated clearly thatthis art has been needed from the time of thewarring states to any foreseeable future as, fromgovernment to supply chain to extinction, we maybe required to implement these skills.

Skye talked about powders and the distinctionbetween a powder concentrate and concentratedpowders. Would need a whole article in itself to dojustice but he explained misconceptions on labellingand dosage. As with all good lectures determined topursue knowledge, he ended with the linesexpressing how much more we need to know.

Yvonne finished up with taking us through GoodManufacturing Practice as it is implemented inChina. A government trained inspector whoconsults for Mayway wrote a report that Yvonneshared. The details transmitted dealt with theminutiae of howa herb is planted, cut, shaded orharvested. What fertilizer should be used and whenand how it should be watered. Research is in placeto produce evidence based best practice.

Pest management was the most surprising aspect.A committee is formed who evaluate the threat ofdifferent species and come up with a national planand educate the farmers as to what action shouldbe taken at what time to combat the pests. Thismay be pesticides but it could be encouragingbirds, introducing fungus or using light or sound.

I must honour Tao at the end of this who, inresponse to a beautifully evocative question aboutthe heart of Chinese medicine had us all near tears.He expressed how much being here with the peoplewho grow and manufacture the herbs had meant tohim and how they show the heart of the medicinein how much love they have for what they do.

I suspect I speak for us all when I say how magicalan experience this has been for all of us. From theamazing place, to the uniquely privilegedexperience of being welcomed with open hearts anddoors to see the inner workings of the products weplace our trust in. It seems they are entitled to thattrust. This is a company who do act with heart andare willing to show and share, not afraid torecognize weakness but demonstrate such strengthand belief that you are convinced. They do what iswithin their power to make the product all we couldwant it to be and about a 20 times more than weknow it should be. They have earned a lot ofrespect from me with regard to Mayway USA andChina. I bought from them anyway but that wasn'thow I got to be a part of this trip. Whether it be aspractitioner, dispenser or council member I wasimpressed. It is a hard business and goodintentions are not always outcomes but I do believethat their intentions and efforts deserve oursupport.

Thanks to all the amazing people who were on thetrip as well, I am privileged to have been amongsuch an inspired, educated and passionate group ofpeople.

Mayway Anguo staff bidding farewell