By Eric Brand

I'm writing this blog from China since I am on a trip to visit my teachers and our manufacturing facility. I have an insatiable appetite for books, so I thought I'd begin another round of the travel blog with a mini-guide to the best spots in Beijing for books on Chinese medicine. Every time I visit China I tend to buy as many books as I can carry, so I thought I'd share some tips on good spots for book shopping.

...

Beijing has a number of important academic institutions for Chinese medicine, most notably Beijing University of Chinese Medicine (Beijing Zhong Yi Yao Da Xue) and the Chinese Medicine Graduate School (Zhong Yi Yan Jiu Yuan). When it comes to books, each of these schools has a lot to offer for practitioners that read Chinese.

When it comes to textbooks and general reading material, the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine is a good place to start. There is a very small but very complete bookstore in the back of the university grounds. While the building itself is tiny, they have a profound collection of books on nearly every subject in Chinese medicine. The store is packed to the point that customers can barely squeeze through, and there is always a rotating selection of old (and often slightly battered) books that are half price. The normal textbooks and such are usually 20% off, and the diversity of the collection allows one to constantly discover new titles that other shops don't carry. For a really comprehensive collection of the normal range of books, this is the place to go.

For more unusual research, the Beijing Zhong Yi Yan Jiu Yuan is one of the best spots on the planet. A few years ago, I had some particularly good contacts there and they took us into the vaults to see some real treasures. I recall seeing original copies of the Nei Jing that were centuries old, and they literally have a physical or digital collection of virtually every extant Chinese medical title in existence (there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of premodern texts in Chinese medicine). The institute also has a profound computer system that stores terabytes of information for digital literature searches. Digital copies of virtually every published article in every TCM journal are accessible via a central archiving system, so one can literally research the entire range of modern journal articles with a single click.

The Zhong Yi Yan Jiu Yuan also has a few rare books for sale. For example, they have a limited edition reproduction of Lei Gong's Pao Zhi text, which was originally done in full color. The reproduction is a nearly perfect duplicate of the color and texture of the original, and all the art was done by hand. Only a few hundred copies exist, and each copy sells for over $2000. This is one of the first illustrated Pao Zhi texts in history and it is beautiful to behold.

The library at the Zhong Yi Yan Jiu Yuan can be searched by computer, and it is possible to view (and even print) copies of basically any text that has been unearthed throughout history. They print the copies and bind them with string in the traditional method, and I remember my teacher Feng Ye in Taiwan coming home with suitcases full of these rare manuscripts every time he went to Beijing. It is truly incredible that they can produce a copy of almost any book that has ever been found, and one sees them scanning new texts into the computer all day long.

Beyond these two schools, the publishing company Ren Min Wei Sheng Chu Ban She (PMPH) has an office in Beijing that has a copy of basically every one of the books that they publish. PMPH was the sole publisher of medical books during the communist era, and they have a huge collection of modern and classical texts available in the downstairs lobby of the five star hotel that doubles as their office. PMPH is the world's largest Chinese medical publishing house, and their shop is worth a visit if you need one of their books that is hard to find elsewhere.

Happy book hunting! Tomorrow I am off to Sichuan, where I will be meeting my teachers for some field research at the large herbal market in Chengdu. I'll keep blogging about my trip as it progresses, so keep visiting the Blue Poppy blog to join the adventure!