Why did the palace wait 188 years for a pharmacy? Beijing's old firms | Shenzhou · Beijing 02
《神州大地》第 3 集 · 語言：English · 時長：17:19
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In the first year of the Yongzheng

emperor — 1723 — an order came out of

the palace. A medicine shop outside the

front gate was to send medicine to

the court on schedule: once every three

months, without delay.That order stayed in

force until the Qing dynasty ended.

One hundred and eighty-eight years.

Eight emperors.A private shop on a

commercial street. Why would the palace wait

for it?

At the end of the last film

we said the next stop was Yangzhou.

We are still in Beijing.

We did not change our minds.

This city's archive does not fit into

one film.Names, the axis, the canal

that was one thread: who built this

city.There is another thread: who traded

here, and what made them last.

That thread has to be finished before

we can leave. Yangzhou — we are coming.

Start with the name of the street.

In the Ming dynasty, under the Hongzhi

emperor, every lane junction in the capital

was fitted with a timber fence,

opened at dawn and shut at night,

to keep thieves out.

Outside the front gate ran a lane

called Langfang Fourth Lane. The shopkeepers pooled money and

built a fence taller than anyone else's.

In time people stopped calling it Langfang Fourth Lane.

They called it Dashilan — the Great Fence.

The map of the capital made in

the Qianlong reign prints exactly those three

characters.Walk further in, and you pass

a run of shop names.

Take them one at a time

each is a sentence an owner wrote

about himself and left hanging over the

door.Neiliansheng, founded in 1853 by Zhao Ting,

from Wuqing in Tianjin, making court boots.

Nei means the inner palace.

Liansheng is a wish for the customer:

that he rise three ranks in office.

A shoe shop wrote its customers' careers

into its own name.

Ruifuxiang takes its name from a story

in the Records of Searching for Spirits:

the blood of the qingfu insect,

mother and child, smeared on coins

money that flies home after you spend

it. The insect is the source of

wealth; rui and xiang are auspicious.

It opened in Jinan in 1862 and did

not reach Dashilan until 1893.

Quanjude, 1864. Yang Quanren, from Jizhou,

took over a fruit shop that had

closed. The fruit shop had been called

Dejuxuan. He turned the three characters around:

Quanjude. His own name held the character

quan; jude means to gather virtue together.

He did not invent a name.

He took one that had already failed

in that very spot, and turned it

around.Liubiju has two accounts.

One says: of the seven things a

household must open its door for

firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce,

vinegar, tea — the shop sold everything except

tea. The other says the two characters

refer to six rules in the old

brewing method: the grain must be uniform,

the yeast sound, the steeping clean,

the vessels good, the heat right,

the water fragrant. Both describe a shop

telling you how it works — one by

what it sells, one by how it

makes.And Duyichu: by tradition, the one

shop in the capital that had not

closed on New Year's Eve in 1752.

The name it received was given by

an emperor. Duyichu means "the only one"

a claim so large that only someone

else could confer it.

Back to that order from the palace.

The shop it was looking for had

been founded by a man named Yue

Xianyang.He was from Cixi in Zhejiang,

born in 1630. In the early Qing he

served in the imperial medical office as

a minor clerk — eighth rank, handling documents

in and out. Not a famous physician:

a clerk. For years his work was

moving paper — petitions in, orders out.

He spent his twenties watching how the

palace wrote things down.

In 1669 he left the bureaucracy, opened a

dispensary outside the front gate on West Damochang Street,

and named it himself: Tongrentang — the two

characters tongren meaning "universal and refined".

He was thirty-nine, with no reputation to

trade on.Thirty-three years later his third

son, Yue Fengming, did two things.

In 1702 he moved the dispensary to Dashilan

and made it a shop.

Four years after that he gathered his

father's formulas into a book — the family's

recipes for pills, powders, ointments and pellets

and published the Tongrentang Medicine Catalogue.

An old firm publishing its own recipes

is already unusual. What he did next

is the reason this film exists.

In the preface to that catalogue he

wrote twenty characters. They were not written

for other pharmacists. They were written for

customers:"Though the preparation is tedious,

I dare not spare the labour.

Though the ingredients are costly, I dare

not cut the materials."

Two clauses, each saying I dare not.

Twelve words in the English, twenty in

the Chinese — and not one of them

is a boast. A shop that had

already been trading for more than thirty

years took its own standard and wrote

it down, in public, on paper,

where any customer could hold it against

him.

But a sentence written on paper only

spends like money if someone will stand

behind it.Seventeen years after Yue Fengming

wrote those twenty characters, someone came forward

to stand behind them.

Not a rival. The palace.

In 1723 the palace set up an imperial

dispensary and needed a private shop to

supply ingredients and prepare medicines for the

inner court. The shop chosen was Tongrentang.

The weight of that is not in

the word imperial. It is in the

fact that it was a set of

rules that could be checked.

You needed a pass issued by the

imperial household department to enter the palace.

The shop's owner had to post a

personal bond — putting his own estate behind

every single ingredient. Delivery had a deadline:

once every three months, without delay.

And at every step — selecting, mixing,

preparing — someone was watching.

Those rules ran for one hundred and

eighty-eight years, through eight emperors — Yongzheng,

Qianlong, Jiaqing, Daoguang, Xianfeng, Tongzhi, Guangxu,

Xuantong — until the dynasty fell.

Where did the money come from?

This has to be said carefully.

No source I can find proves that

supplying the palace brought a specific number

of customers. What the sources do show

is something else: the firm's reputation stopped

being something it could assert about itself.

A Qing-dynasty notebook leaves one line

travellers from the provinces arriving in the

capital bought Tongrentang's medicines, its borax paste

and its Wanying pills above all,

as gifts to take home.

The buyers were travellers, buying to give

away. A medicine bought as a gift

has left the shop's own street and

gone home in someone else's luggage

reputation travelling without the shop saying a

word.The other half of the money

came from how the shop was built:

front shop, back workshop.

Medicine sold at the front, made at

the back — the workshop stood on West Damochang Street,

mixing pills, powders, ointments and pellets in-house,

under the rules laid down in that

1706 formula book. Counter and workbench were

one business, and the customer could see

the whole of it from the doorway.So

why did these shops all gather outside

the front gate?In the Yongle reign

this area was called langfang — the name

itself says the buildings were put up

by the court to attract merchants.

Under the Qing, Manchu and Chinese were

housed separately: no markets, no theatres inside

the inner city, so trade pushed outward.

The provincial guild halls were built here

too. A merchant arriving from another province

lodged at his guild hall, found people

from home, learned the rules of the

trade — all of it running on that

one network.Add the temple fair at

the Guandi temple outside Zhengyang Gate:

the days pilgrims came were the days

customers came. Courting merchants, the divided city,

the guild halls, the temple fair

four things stacked on top of each

other, and the street is what they

stack into.

But the people doing the daily work

in these shops were not the owners.

Entering an old firm as an apprentice

usually took an introduction from someone from

your home district and a signed contract

with a master. You began with sweeping

the floor and watching the counter.

The term of service had a name

of its own: "three years and one

festival" — three years, plus one more solar

term. Note the extra season.

The old trade would not let you

stop on the day you finished learning;

you worked one season past competence,

so nobody could say you left the

moment you were useful.

Craft passed by word of mouth and

by hand.How large was the system?

In the Republican period, one garment-workers' association

counted 13,300 workers — and 5,500 apprentices.

In an ordinary trade, three or four

masters to one apprentice.

The rules were also written into the

accounts. Old firms commonly kept three-settlement books:

accounts closed at Dragon Boat, Mid-Autumn and

the New Year. A long-standing customer in

good standing could open a ledger and

buy on credit — credit running on the

same clock as the shop's own year.

Through the Republican years the medicine shop

was still trading outside the front gate.

But the city around it changed its

name first.In 1928 the government moved south

and Beijing was renamed Beiping — centuries of

capital status, gone. Beiping had lived on

the spending of the imperial clan,

the banner households and the officials;

it was a political consumption city.

When the capital left, the spending left

with it. The newspapers of the day

put it plainly: within half a year

there was "population falling by the day,

commerce failing by the day", and closed

shops multiplied.That is the whole lesson

of this act in miniature.

The shops had not got worse at

their work. The customers they had been

built to serve stopped arriving.

A business that had spent two hundred

years getting the rules right could still

be undone by a change in what

the city was for.

After 1937 it was harder still.

The collaborationist regime ran grain rationing;

the ration was a "mixed flour" cut

with bean cake and bran.

Cloth and other goods were brought under

cartel control at fixed prices.

For a pastry house like Daoxiangcun,

oil, sugar, flour and rice were all

held back, and turnover fell month after

month. Quanjude held on until 1948, then inflation

and officers who ate without paying nearly

finished it.The real turn came in

the 1950s.In 1954 Tongrentang became the first

firm in Beijing's medicine trade to enter

joint state-private ownership. In January 1956 the whole

city followed, and in a single day

17,963 private businesses changed their character.

The method was to assess the assets,

fix the shares, pay a fixed rate

of interest, and run the firm jointly.

One requirement was quite specific: during the

transition, keep the existing way of producing

and trading as far as possible

because the value of an old firm

lay precisely in those unchanged rules.

That instruction is itself evidence.

Someone, at the time, understood that the

rules were the asset.

The change came anyway.

In the early years of joint operation

some old firms cut their range and

quality wobbled. That was written into later

research reports, and it produced protective measures:

traditional lines were to be kept,

old techniques retained, old masters supported.

Today the system still sets a price

on the old names.

In September 2023 the Ministry of Commerce and

four other departments published the results of

their review of China Time-Honoured Brands:

of 1,128 names, 1,000 passed, 73 passed

with conditions, and 55 were removed.

Note the word removed.

The official wording is not "struck off".

Removed means it used to be on

the list. Getting on took history.

Staying on depends on whether those rules

are still being kept.

The Ministry of Commerce named its first

batch of China Time-Honoured Brands in 2006.

In 2011 Dashilan was designated the country's first

"China Time-Honoured Brand cluster".

Figures from the Xicheng district people's congress

in 2022 put twenty-six such names in this

area; by 2024 Beijing as a whole had

274.Read one way, those numbers are

a scorecard. Read another: everyone still on

the list is someone who has not

yet lost the rules.

And the "three years and one festival"

never stopped. Tongrentang runs a master-technician studio

today, where intangible-heritage inheritors take apprentices for

a full three years before they qualify.

Neiliansheng still works one master to one

apprentice, and in 2008 its thousand-layer cloth-soled shoemaking

entered the national list of intangible cultural

heritage. The names changed.

The rules are still running.

If you want to go: take subway

Line 2 or Line 8 to Qianmen

station, leave by the southwest exit,

walk north into Dashilan Street. The east end meets Xianyu

Kou, and that stretch holds Duyichu,

Bianyifang, Tianxingju and Changchuntang as well.

The street is not only shops.

Daguanlou, Sanqingyuan, Guangdelou — the cinemas and opera

houses are here too.

The Ruifuxiang facade, Qianxiangyi, Xiangyihao and the

old industrial hall are listed as Major

Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the

National Level, under the heading "Dashilan commercial

buildings".What is protected is not just

the buildings. It is the way of

doing business that lived in them.

Dashilan put this city's other order on

display: not who holds power, but who

can be trusted to keep it.

From one pill, one pair of shoes,

one bolt of cloth, one duck,

Beijing accumulated something harder to demolish than

a city wall — credit.

A wall is defended by whoever holds

it at the time.

Credit is defended by everyone who ever

gave it.And the story of this

street is not finished.

Walk further, and it is Beijing after 1860

which needs a different set of questions.

This is our reading, not the record

of the histories. The full transcript is

at sylogs.com.

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Source: sylogs.com