The humble herbalist helping China’s rural poor
ON cliffs where lush and thick forests blot out the sky, with a knife and bag in hand, Mi Shicai walks among the bushes searching for Chinese herbal medicines.
Mi, 71, is a retired rural teacher who has also served as an herbalist for 46 years and has cured thousands of complicated diseases such as lung perforation by using herbs.
The herbalist lives in Lukuidi, a poverty-stricken village with around half of its residents subsisting below the poverty line, in Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
From sunrise to sunset for three consecutive days, Mi gathers herbs in the mountains at about 2,000 meters. He eats food carried from home and sleeps in caves at night.
“Wild animals such as bears, snakes, and boars are frequent sights,” Mi says. “I just walk away and do not disturb them. At night, I often make fires to scare away these animals.”
Picking herbs, slicing them and then crushing them with a mortar and pestle, the old man skillfully makes dozens of medicines.
“I don’t make a diagnosis,” Mi says.
“People come and tell me their symptoms or diseases and I give them medicine accordingly.”
For traumatic injuries like fractures, contusions and sprains, the patients can just apply the medicine to the affected body part, but for internal diseases, they need to boil the herbs and drink the tisane (herbal tea).
The elderly man has never asked for or accepted a penny from his patients for decades.
“I have upheld two principles throughout my life, one is sparing no effort to save lives and the other is doing it for free,” Mi says.
Everything began with an accident. In 1971, when 24-yearold Mi was a rural teacher at Wangmadi Primary School, he was wounded by an accidental gunshot to his right arm.
Bleeding profusely, Mi was sent to hospital immediately. After a week, his condition was still serious.
“Doctors recommended amputation to save my life,” he recalls.
Learning in the mountains
Mi was introduced to an 80year-old herbalist named Jifu Meipa who helped disinfect the wound and applied a pharmaceutical herbal medicine but refused to accept any money for the treatment.
“In just days, the wound began to heal,” he says.
Mi admired the doctor and decided to become his student as “villagers in the mountains lack doctors due to inconvenient transportation infrastructure.”
During the summer of 1972, Mi accompanied Jifu learning how to distinguish and pick herbs in mountains, studying the properties, curative effects, and pharmaceutical rules of the herbs.
When he returned to work, he studied dozens of books about herbalism and traditional Chinese medicine including “Compendium of Materia Medica” as well as the secret mixtures he learnt from Jifu.
Since then, healing the wounded and helping the needy have become his second job.
“I taught children during the day, met patients at noon or night in my dorm, and prepared lessons until midnight,” he says.
On the weekends and during summer and winter vacation, Mi would go into the mountains to collect herbs.
“The village needs him and he is well respected,” says Li Sinan, senior official of the village.
Even though it is only accessible by a 30-minute walk along a path just two hands wide, after a multiple hour drive through mountains, Mi’s home is often visited by patients he has treated.
“His story is spread by word of mouth from migrant workers and those who have left the village,” Li says.
It is hard work for an elderly man, according to his son Mi Tianwu. “Sometimes he stands the whole day, busy with the herbs.”
“We all understand and support him. I am learning from my father to ensure that his skills can be passed down, but it requires talent and hard work,” Mi Tianwu says.
Mi Shicai retired from teaching in 1999 and devoted himself to his herbalism.
“I’m not lonely. I just want to do more and help more,” he says.