A Vanilla Bag Expels All Insect Pests——Let Aroma Permeate Your Dragon Boat Festival with Self-Made Sachet and Pray For Health and Well-being

At the flos sophorae blooming season, and when pomegranate trees are opening their buds, the Dragon Boat Festival is coming. As a traditional festival of the Chinese, it’s the first festival of China listed in world intangible cultural heritage. Profound Chinese culture is contained in Dragon Boat Festival. Making rice dumplings, dragon-boating racing, wearing sachet and hanging up wormwood bouquets to celebrate Dragon Boat Festival! Today, a group of people have spent an unforgettable Dragon Boat Festival at Sundun Hospital Area of Zhejiang Hospital.

The participants have successively come to the site since 8’clock in the morning, for the TCM Pharmacy is specially arranging the series activities on the day of Dragon Boat Festival with the theme “Let Aroma Permeate Your Dragon Boat Festival with Self-Made Sachet and Pray For Health and Well-being”. The activities not only including guess lantern riddles for gifts, but also including tasting the seasonable summer health-preserving tea, and everyone has personally experienced the “pure” Dragon Boat Festival sachet making. These sachets have offered all with an opportunity to feel the unique charm of traditional culture. The medias like Voice of Zhejiang and Zhejiang Economics TV, etc have come to the site to cover the event, so that more audiences could feel the strong atmosphere of Dragon Boat Festival, riddle guess, making sachets, getting to know traditional Chinese herbs, drinking health-preserving tea, what a lively scene!

At this moment, how could “Sister Xiaoyi’s TCM Herb Classroom” not show up? As an Outstanding Youth Civilization Banner, she is often exploring classrooms to take everybody get to know TCM herbs and to know the TCM culture. But this time the lecturer changes to a handsome uncle, Pharmacist Wu Shaokang from TCM Pharmacy of Zhejiang Hospital. The theme of this class is “Health-preserving by vanilla” sachets. The children are concentrating their attention on the class, and they cannot imagine such small sachets contain so plenty of culture.

Wu Shaokang tell them, sachet is also called vanilla bag, silk bag, cho, and lotus bag as well. Grind the aromatic TCM herbs into powders and put into the specially made cloth bag and wear them. It’s both a piece of artwork, and a healthcare method for preventing diseases. There is a very long history for sachet. In the sachets excavated from Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tomb, many spices like lily magnolia, cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, eupatorium, and galangal, etc. Different sachets are filled with different herb powders, then where to wear the sachet? Wu Shaokang says, it has its rules. Generally an adult wears it on chest (Ren channel) and waist (Belt channel); children wear it at the neck, waist and ankle; and the females could wear it beside navel or on lower abdomen to warm up channel and expel cold.

So what "precious stuff" contains in the sachets made today? There are stacks of ground herb powders on site, and what are they? Actually, these are the blast and mosquito repellent used by Zhejiang Hospital for many years. The ingredients including Agastache rugosus, eupatorium, rhizoma atractylodis, calamus, folium artemisiae argyi, radix angelicae, sandalwood and other aromatic herbs, with the functions of removing dampness by means of aromatics, repelling foulness and mosquitoes refreshing brain and spirit. It could be used for alleviating summer-heat and dampness, dizziness and chest distress symptoms, avoiding mosquitoes and pests, keeping calm and could also be used for preventing flu.

Both adults and kids are taking powders by themselves, and respectively filling them into the exquisite vanilla bags, tighten the bag pockets, and then the smart and aromatic sachets are ready. Is it difficult to get the skill for making sachets? The kids answer, not difficult! They are happily holding up the sachets, some of them have directly put them on their necks, and some others say they will take home as gifts to their grandpas and grandmas. It’s really a special gift for Dragon Boat Festival.

Go and taste the health-preserving tea of Zhejiang Hospital TCM Pharmacy after finishing the sachets. The health-preserving teas specially prepared according to 24 solar terms are always served at the entrance of the TCM Pharmacy in four seasons of a year. The day before Dragon Boat Festival is Grain in Beard, so the tea served to all is a Grain-in-Beard health-preserving tea. Mint, chrysanthemum, semen coicis and lily with light coolness and freshness. The Grain-in-Beard health-preserving tea has the functions of refreshing and clearing heat, tonifying spleen and keeping calm, and it’s particularly suitable for those in summer heat pathogen and vexation caused by heat.

Then, Sister Xiaoyi and other pharmacists take the kids to tour the TCM pharmacy, and personally experience the long-standing history of TCM herb culture through looking, touching, smelling and tasting the herbs.

“Wormwood banner in hand to hold all happiness, calamus leaves sword over door to kill all devils”. TCM Pharmacy has considerately prepared the wormwood leaves and calamus leaves for all, and they also have the functions of health-preserving and healthcare. Because the essential oils in two plants could repel mosquitoes and pests, they also have a certain functions of inhibiting and killing pathogenic microorganisms.

Let aroma permeate your Dragon Boat Festival with self-made sachet, feel the traditional culture and pray for health and well-being!