China's traditional healing arts go back thousands of years. Traditional Chinese medicine, as practiced today and in past centuries, is based upon an array of theories and practices from both foreign and native sources. The history of Chinese medicine is said to go back as far as 5,000 years to the time of Shen Nung, a divine husbandman credited with the discovery of medicinal herbs. According to Chinese legend, Shen Nung, the Chinese father of agriculture and leader of an ancient clan, took it upon himself to test, one by one, hundreds of different plants to discover their nutritional and medicinal properties. Many of these turned out to be poisonous to humans. Over the millennia, Chinese have used themselves as guinea pigs in this same way to continue testing plants for their properties of inducing cold (han), heat (jeh), warmth (wen), and coolness (liang). They classified the medicinal effects of the plants on the various parts of the body and then tested them to determine their toxicity, what dosages would be lethal and so forth.

Chinese have a unique system of categorizing illnesses that is widely divergent from their Western counterpart. The philosophy behind Chinese medicine is that man lives between heaven and earth and comprises a miniature universe in the body. The material of which living things are made is considered to belong to the "yin" or female, passive, receding aspect of nature. The life functions of living things, on the other hand, are considered to belong to the "yang" or masculine, active, advancing aspect. Several main concepts are essential to understanding traditional Chinese medicine. Holism, or the concept that parts of a human body form an integral, connected, and inseparable whole, is one of the main distinguishing features of traditional Chinese medicine. Whereas Western medicine tends to treat symptoms in a direct fashion, traditional Chinese medicine examines illnesses in the context of a whole. Yin-yang philosophy and the theory of five elements form a system of categories that explain the complete relationships between parts of the body and the environment. Yin and yang represent two opposite sides in nature such as hot and cold or light and dark. Each of the different organs is said to have yin or yang characteristics. Balance between the two is vital for maintaining health. The five elements - earth, fire, water, metal and wood - are categories of characteristics into which all known phenomena can be classified.

You can visit a 400-year old drugstore-turned-museum that displays 6,000 years of Chinese medicinal history. View thousands of items covering specimen, tool, packaging, and other products related to Chinese medicine. Talk to an expert to learn about some of China's nearly-forgotten medicine secrets. ( Keep the lunch part out cuz it sounds tacky to put 6,000 years of medicine history and a free lunch side-by-side. )

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