A Day in Guilin
Or, Penis of Black Dog

by Prof. Barry Powell, for University Educational, Inc.

In Neolithic times, Chinese culture was clearly visible by 5,000 B.C. in the dry northern plains of the Yellow River Valley. It was only around the time of the Roman Republic, during the Han Dynasty, that the steamy south lands of the Yangtze River Valley were firmly incorporated under Chinese influence, as well as lands far to the south in the West River basin, which reaches the sea near Guangzhou (gwang jo, i.e. Canton – Hong Kong is just off the coast).

In the north the principal food crop is wheat, but there is barely enough water, and when the rains fail famine follows. But in the humid south, the fields fill with water and yield two or even three crops of rice each year. During the Han Dynasty the emperors connected the Yangtze River delta with the northern capitals by means of the Grand Canal, the longest canal on earth, which brought up rice from the south. The canal continues today to be the major transportation link between north and south.

The smothering heat overwhelmed us in the open airport of Guilin, south of the Yangtze. When you come out of the plane, you are overwhelmed by the backdrop of  bizarre, fantastic, stunning, steep-sided emerald-green mountains, some of the most sensational scenery in the world. Inside the airport building a lazy fan whirred ineffectually from the high ceiling. President Nixon visited Guilin in 1971.The Chinese built a special road just for him, from the airport to town, and today this is named Nixon Road in his honor (the earlier miserable track would have endangered face in the presence of the great man).

“We are going to build a monument to President Nixon, here in Guilin,” said the new local guide, who belonged to a local ethnic minority, whose language was first written down under the Communists, in Roman characters on street signs and, rarely, in advertisements. “There are only 20 million of us,” he explained.

The local guide didn’t look like the Han Chinese of the north, but more like the Chinese I had grown up with in Sacramento, California: short and stocky with round faces and dark skin. From the bus window we saw that all the people here looked different, and the women biking along the roads did not wear elegant dresses, and they did not attract your attention like the Han.

“You look different from the people in Beijing, if you don’t mind my saying so. You look like the Chinese I knew in America,” I said.

“In California? Yes, of course, because they all come from Guangzhou. They were taken off the streets there – they were nothing. That is why you call them ‘coolies,’ because in Chinese coolie means ‘bitter labor.’ They are not Han. And neither am I.”

We were not supposed to think about ethnicity, because it’s all anybody could ever think about, in China as much as in America.

“But why would you build a monument to President Nixon? In America, he is a criminal. Nobody likes Dick Nixon!”

“Why not? Just because of Watergate? But in China he is very popular. He opened up the West. He normalized relations.”

The oppressive heat, the rice paddies, the men wading in the water, the water buffalo, the mud houses -- they all looked like footage of the war in Vietnam with which we had grown up, and we half expected to see Viet Cong in black pajamas whizzing along the road in motor scooters, lobbing plastic bombs. The local guide said we were 300 miles northeast of the border with Vietnam.

On the next day we took a cruise down the Li River, which wended through the steep green fairy-tale mountains, famous in Chinese painting, which has celebrated them since the Song Dynasty (11-12th centuries A.D.) We had thought how artificial were these painted Chinese mountains, how stylized, but this is how they really were: unreal, misty, peaceful, dream-like, bella-bella, nostalgic. May it never end.

On the boat with us was the all-female Dragon Boat rowing team from Canada, which had just won the gold medal in Hong Kong. Some were lovers and unashamed held each other affectionately, watching the lazy waters.

On the reckless hillsides on either side, the first wild birds in China, small and brightly colored kingfishers, perhaps; the mountains were too steep even for the Chinese, so that these birds, at least, could find a foothold in a land overrun with humanity.

After the cruise our guide, Drin, suggested we visit a Chinese medical clinic, to see how traditional medicine was still practiced.

“But no extra charge, right?” I insisted.

“No extra charge!” Drin agreed.

The low-lying clinic stood across from paddy fields, a large red cross plaque on either side of the door, but the arm of one cross was torn away. Along the back of the entrance foyer, a shelf supported an imposing row of large glass jars, labeled in English; in one an intertwining of cobras preserved in some watery solution, and in others herbs, dried bats, and in the jar at the end, Penis Of Black Dog. There were two or three penises inside, and they looked just like what they were.

Somebody made a joke about the penises when a man wearing a white coat led us into a back room posted, ROOM FOR PROFESSOR TO DIAGNOSE.

“We should feel right at home,” said a fisherman-professor from Missouri.

We entered a sort of mini-auditorium in which 30 student seats faced a low podium behind which hung a poster, an anatomical drawing of an East Asian male.

The man left the room and Drin began to give us the Chinese names for the different parts of the body. He had also taught us to say Ma ma, hu hu, which means “horse horse, tiger tiger,” and means “so-so,” a phrase by which we sometimes characterized the local cuisine.  

“What’s that thing between his legs?” asked the woman from Lausanne.

Fortunately Drin didn’t have to answer, because the doctor returned to  announce that traditional Chinese medicine depended on an understanding of the electrical currents of the human body, interlaced currents, which when disturbed produce disease, and that while Western medicine is excellent for curing acute illness, Chinese medicine is superior in curing chronic illness.

“You hear of acupuncture, right?”

Who hadn’t heard of acupuncture?

“Is same thing, you see. And now ,“ said the man, pulling on a white coat, ”our Tai Ji Quan master will come in and demonstrate to you the powers of traditional Chinese medicine.”

He passed out a flyer which had descriptions in English of various categories of human ailments and Chinese cures for each, including multi-functional tonic pills, rheumatism pain pills, sinew-bone regulation liquid, enriching face cream, health care bag, skin disease killer, cream for burns and scalds, weight-loss cream and pills, stone-free tablets, damp-itching skin cure, vice clear pills, super hypertensor pills, hyperostosis tablets, specific prostate pills, satisfied sexual roborant, specific diabetes pills, anti-rhinitis pills, superfine earache pills, eye-protector pills, bynopathy pills, gastralgia pills, anti-bowel complaint tablets, anti-liver cancer capsules, anti-asthma pills, and a natural remedy for giving up smoking.

The doctor then passed out two black vinyl binders which contained testimonials, mostly in German, from satisfied customers.

In came the Tai Ji Quan master, a young man, maybe 18. Without announcement he began to make mysterious up-and-down-and-around gestures with his hands, turning first left, then right – a sort of martial arts exercise. Suddenly, he came to attention.

“Our Tai Ji Quan master has now assembled his power and we would like to demonstrate”.

The Tai Ji Quan master held up a double wire attached to a plug, which he inserted into an outlet on the wall while pinching tightly the naked wires, one in each hand. To prove the wires were hot, the doctor took up a light bulb from which dangled two wires. One he touched to the Tai Ji Quan master’s left hand, the other to his other hand, and lo, the bulb was brightly lit.

“Now please all join hands,” the doctor instructed, and everyone did except the divorce lawyer, who must have smelled a rat: she shook her head and crossed her arms decidedly over her chest. A third person, also wearing a white coat, came into the room, took one of the wires from the Tai Ji Quan master, and held the hand of someone in the front row, while the Tai Ji Quan master closed the circle by taking the hand of the next person down the row. Having arranged the group in this way, the doctor went round the room and in turn touched each person on the brow, just over the nose. Everybody shrieked. When he touched me I saw radiating circles of light emanating from some center between and above my eyes. It was an incredible sensation.

Now a fourth person came into the room, a middle-aged man with a sour expression, who sat on a wooden chair on the dais. Two nurses came in behind, wearing white coats, suspending between them from tongs a white-hot length of heavy chain. The room was filled with the smell of the heated metal. The middle-aged man got up and, on the doctor’s instruction, touched the white hot metal with his bare hand, and a sort of steam went up from it, followed by the smell of burning flesh. He had deliberately burned himself! The man was in obvious pain and the Tai Ji Quan Chi master came over immediately and rubbed the burned hand with an ointment. The burned man sat back down.

“We can cure many things with traditional Chinese medicine,” the doctor lectured, and certainly he had caught our attention. “Now, does anyone have any pain you would like cured?”

I urged my wife to volunteer, and she did so; for years she had suffered from sinusitis, and had recently been  butchered in an exasperating operation where doctors at a leading university hospital had entered her sinuses with a rotor and chipped away at the bone and whatever else. She was in hideous pain and bled for 10 days, and when it was over suffered as much as before. The Swiss woman, who suffered from arthritis in her shoulder, also volunteered.

The two women sat on chairs on the podium. The doctor worked on my wife, while an assistant worked on the Swiss woman. Holding what seemed to be the hot wire in his hand, the doctor handed the ground wire to my wife. Gently he asked about her problem, then ran his electrified hand over her temple, over her sinuses, above her nose. The Swiss woman, too, had closed her eyes, and both had blissful expressions and seemed nearly in a trance. At least somebody was taking their problems seriously.

While this was going on, another man in a white coat came into the room and instructed the middle-aged man with the burn to stand up. He showed his hand to the audience – not a mark on it.

My wife came back and sat down.

“How was it? Do you feel better?”

“Amazing – my sinuses are clear!”

“Now, you can buy these medicines, for any ailment, that will have the same effect as our electrical on-hands treatment,” the doctor was explaining. “These are the ones described in the brochure.”

Hands shot up around the room.

“Do you take MasterCard?”

“Absolutely! And Visa, too. Unfortunately, not American Express.”

“So you feel a lot better,” I said to my wife. “We better get some.”

The nurse had set up a MasterCard machine on the table. I bought two bottles of small black anti-rhinitis black pills, $50 each, but with a $10 reduction for buying two bottles at once. I opened one and took a deep whiff – the small black pills looked like rabbit droppings and smelled like dog shit.

“And how many should one take of these?” I pressed the doctor.

“Oh, 15 or 20. Take 15 or 20 in the morning, and again at night.”

“Fifteen or 20, eh? Does this provide relief, or is this an actual cure?”

“Oh no, actual cure! You will never suffer from rhinitis again.”

“One other question – do these pills contain penis of black dog?”

The man laughed.

“All ingredients secret!” 

“Please,” I implored, “don’t tell me why.”

This article is a chapter of Professor Barry Powell's  University Educational Travel  (UET) report, Innocents Abroad: An American Classicist in China. Prof. Powell, a member of the Classics Department of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was the host of a UET tour through China.