By Eric Brand

While perusing the Chengdu herb market with my teachers, I saw some very nice specimens of whole herbs that had not yet been sliced for decoction. I got a lot of authenticated samples to bring back for our little herb museum at Blue Poppy, and among the many interesting discoveries was a huge burlap sack filled with crude Wu Jia Pi (Acanthopanacis Cortex).

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There are many herbs that I have only seen in their sliced form, and it is always interesting to see the wide range of slicing methods that are used in different markets. Most of the products that we are used to are sliced in the Hong Kong market style because Cantonese importers supply the bulk of the U.S. market. In mainland China, many herbs are sliced differently, which gives them a slightly different appearance (for example, Bai Shao and Huang Qin are often sliced horizontally rather than longitudinally). When one sees the whole herbs, the differences are even more dramatic because the unsliced product often looks completely different than anything that we are used to.

At any rate, when I saw the Wu Jia Pi, I was surprised to see its true appearance because I realized that I had almost never really seen the genuine product before. The photo above was taken in Taiwan for our book Concise Chinese Materia Medica, and it reflects the slicing method commonly used for decoctions in Taiwan. By contrast, the item that we have in the West is nearly always an adulterant. The adulterant is a vine from a heat-clearing plant called Niu Bai Teng (derived from Hedyotis hedyotidea (DC) Merr). The adulterant is obviously not a root bark and it has slightly white veins at the center. Unfortunately, this misidentified medicinal is almost the only thing that we can find in the West.