All Over the Place: Pharmacy, History
Issue 28: Small Shops and the Hong Kong Museum of History
Gurt Goes to…the Pharmacy (originally published February 23, 2019)
If you walk around nearly any neighborhood in Hong Kong that has street level businesses, you will see a shop that looks something like this:
Or this:
For ease of reference I will refer to them as the local pharmacy and Western-style chain, respectively. Local pharmacies appear to be small businesses, while major chains Mannings and Watsons are the most commonly encountered Western-style chain.
You can fill a prescription at both kinds, and both carry the same general sundries (oral hygiene products, over the counter medication, beauty products, etc.). Many American brands are present here alongside Asian brands, such as Darlie, a toothpaste with an unfortunate racial past (and present). Its name in English was changed in 1989 to make it more acceptable (i.e., not a slur), but its name in Cantonese still translates as “black person toothpaste”. If you buy one brand of toothpaste in Asia...you should probably make it any other brand.
The chains tend to carry more of the cookie tins for Chinese New Year, while the local pharmacies will carry an eclectic assortment of other goods, including laundry detergent and packaged foods, at significantly better prices than chain grocery stores. This may be due in part to a de facto duopoly between ParkNShop and Wellcome that controls about 75% of Hong Kongʼs grocery market. Regardless, I do some of my grocery shopping at local pharmacies, where I am able to get a 400 gram package of Digestives for $12 HKD as opposed to a 250 gram package for $17 HKD at the grocery store. (Digestives are English “biscuits” that taste like less sweet Scooby Snacks and make an easy and filling breakfast in place of cereal and milk, which are both pricey here.) And where there is one local pharmacy there will be others, making comparison shopping easy as well. I usually do it in part because the stores often sell the same things, and in part because itʼs kinda fun. Whatʼs mundane at home is exotic abroad.
Both are smaller in size than their American counterparts (as are most stores here), but the local pharmacies seem to embrace it more by packing as much stuff as possible into as small a space as possible and also placing things outside the business.
In the Western-style chains you can usually stick at least one elbow out without hitting the shelves, but the local pharmacies arenʼt as roomy. It can be a real challenge squeezing past someone in the aisle (or in some cases getting through the aisle in general, as there will be boxes of yet more merchandise in the way).
Western-style chains are present in both malls and to a lesser extent street level shops, but local pharmacies are usually in street level shops. Curiously, the clerks in local pharmacies are almost always men. Go figure.
If youʼre wondering where the pharmacies are that sell herbal tea made from all sorts of...things, those will be covered in a future post on traditional Chinese pharmacies, as those look very different. And smell different.
Adam: I never ended up doing a post about traditional Chinese pharmacies. I cannot vouch for the effectiveness of their treatments, but I can attest to their peculiar scents and eclectic mix of dried ingredients of all sorts.
I think “Whatʼs mundane at home is exotic abroad,” is easily one of the biggest selling points of travel overseas. Even if you don’t think you can stomach a trip to a snake soup shop (not bad, actually), an ordinary grocery story or pharmacy can still yield fun.
Alex: There was a great increase in local pharmacies in the early 2010s because of the milk powder scandal in China in 2008. People from mainland China would come to Hong Kong to buy lots of cans of milk powder because milk powder in Hong Kong was more reputable than milk powder in China after the scandal happened. The sudden increase of local pharmacies and parallel importers were not really welcome. Areas close to the border were crowded. Local businesses were also getting eliminated by the local pharmacies, because they could afford higher rents with more profits from mainlanders.
This ultimately led to a situation where tourism and retail in Hong Kong relied too much on mainland China. Recently, Hong Kong’s government proposed monthly fireworks to boost tourism. Honestly, I don’t see how fireworks attract more tourists. At least, I’ve never thought of visiting a city solely because of fireworks. The closest would be festivals in Japan, but it’s about the whole festivals instead of just the fireworks.
Ironically, the tides may have turned in terms of parallel importing. More and more Hong Kongers are travelling to Shenzhen, a border city in China next to Hong Kong, and visit Sam’s Club for groceries. Reasons are that Hong Kong has no warehouse style retail stores and the price level in Hong Kong is skyrocketing compared to the one of Shenzhen. I live 20 minutes away from a Costco here in London but I’ve yet to visit it. I may one day go and see if warehouse style retail stores are really this attractive.
Why HK has Victoria Harbour (and not Victoria Harbor) (originally published March 1, 2019)
In Tsim Sha Tsui, next to a shiny building that is half blue and half pink (I assume itʼs having fraternal twins), is the Hong Kong Museum of History. This free museum, with eight main sections in its permanent exhibits starts in the prehistoric past and ends with the handover of Hong Kong to the Peopleʼs Republic of China.
The museum starts with a neat looking walk through rock features with rock samples from Hong Kongʼs volcanic history, followed by the ecology of Hong Kong and major biomes and species (both historical and current).
Artifacts from ancient Hong Kong followed, with Stone Age tools and Han dynasty vases, and exhibits on the traditional culture of Hong Kongers. While many residents of Hong Kong today are descended from immigrants leaving China during its turbulent 20th century, an indigenous population of multiple ethnic groups remains in outlying areas. Historically, the status of the ethnic groups depended on when they arrived in the area, with the oldest residents occupying the best farmland, and the newer groups farming poorer land, or in the case of the Tanka (referred to in the museum as “Boat Dwellers”) resorting to living on their ships.
The next area looks at a watershed moment in the history of Hong Kong: its cession to the British Empire. How did jolly old England get what at the time was described as “a barren Island with hardly a House upon it”? Drugs. Lots of drugs. And a few fancy clocks.
Initial trading during the European Age of Exploration led to Britain and other European powers having a huge trade imbalance with China. While the ethnocentric Europeans were fascinated by what they considered to be exotic Chinese porcelain and other goods, the (also ethnocentric) Chinese were less than enthused by what Europe was producing at the time and confined traders to specific port cities. This lack of interest forced European traders to pay for expensive Chinese goods in gold and silver, and this outflow of cash worried European governments.
The British had some success in selling extravagant clocks to wealthy Chinese, but not nearly enough to lower the trade deficit, so they then tried importing opium from their holdings in India. Opium had been present in China, but not in such large quantities, and the sudden influx disrupted Chinese society. Attempts were made to restrict and eliminate opium, but by and large failed. Eventually, Chinese authorities seized a huge supply of opium from the traders themselves and dumped it into the ocean. This was seen by the British as an affront to their traders, and along with other minor inflammatory incidents led Parliament to declare war on China.
The First Opium War was easily won by the British, and as part of a very unequal treaty forced China to give it the island of Hong Kong in 1843. This would be followed by the Second Opium War, where the British gained the Kowloon peninsula in 1860, and the 1898 lease of the New Territories. And thatʼs why harbor here is spelled harbour.
Anyways, back to the museum.
The next section of the museum reconstructed the early development of the city, with some rooms in the style of government or official buildings and a replica street including a photographer, tailor, and traditional Chinese medicine shop. While this area had some of the most interesting information, it was also a little lacking in presentation in the street area. Ironically for Hong Kong, the shop interiors felt artificial and empty, looking more like a single use set in a TV show rather than a place actually inhabited by people. Several areas in the museum had similar problems, lacking those little details that go so far in making a model feel real, as well as having open areas in the exhibit space that were awkwardly large and empty. While the open spaces might help handle large weekend crowds, if an area you could fit a basketball court in is needed to accommodate visitors, the majority of them wouldnʼt actually see anything.
Or perhaps the curators have basketball hoops hidden away and play after hours.
After passing though the street you enter a better done area modeled after an air raid shelter about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in World War II, with flickering lights and old newsreel films. The final section of the museum talked about Hong Kongʼs more recent history, ending with the 1997 handover from the United Kingdom to the Peopleʼs Republic of China.
I was also able to visit the special exhibition “Gilded Glory: Chaozhou Woodcarving,” a fantastic exhibit featuring the traditional woodcarvings from Chaoshan, which are covered in red lacquer and in many cases gold foil. Theyʼre incredibly intricate and beautiful to look at, with a mix of recent and Qing dynasty (1644-1912) pieces. The exhibit is now over, but I will be here long enough to see the next special exhibition, “The Road to Modernisation: 70 Years of the Peopleʼs Republic of China.”
Adam: The opium traders in the carving above are identified through their style of hat - and their noses. In the West, stereotypes of East Asian appearance focus on the eyes, but in the East, stereotypes of Caucasian appearance focus on the nose. In that respect, my strong nose (and my beard) makes me somewhat stereotypically Western looking.
I never ended up visiting the special exhibition on modernization in mainland China, but I did visit mainland China, so I can’t complain too much.
Alex: It’s always fascinating to think why the British government chose Hong Kong and what if it had never happened. Hong Kongers are very “pro-colonialism.” We have English names from birth. We like to use English words in our Cantonese conversations. This is easily understandable. Only around 10% of people in Hong Kong are indigenous. Most people escaped from mainland China to British Hong Kong in the last century. There were no memories of being colonised among these people. They chose to live under British Colonialism. Instead of pro-colonialism, I prefer to say most Hong Kongers identify their cultural identities based on British Hong Kong. In other words, if I ask anyone what’s your impressions of Hong Kong, how many of you would answer the fishing village before British colonialism rather than the city and culture built under it? I think the answer is obvious.
P.S. March Mammal Madness is back, and I’m taking another go at a silly sports analysis style podcast about it, this time with my friend and podcaster David Glogovsky. Make your bracket (the Wild Card match is on March 11, and the first round starts on March 13) and follow along!