Centipedes and Seahorses and Chinese Medicine

Four-inch-long poisonous black centipedes with yellow legs are prized ingredients in some oriental medicine concoctions in Korea and some places in China. These disgusting creatures can be quite aggressive. When attacked they rear up and strike like snakes and can run amazingly fast. My wife was bitten on the foot by one that crawled into her bed. Her foot was swollen for about a week.

 Describing a man who sold centipede juice on the streets of Seoul, one American wrote in the Korean Times, the man "displays a whole towel that is positively crawling with centipedes the size of tongue depressors. With an enormous pair of tweezers, he picks off the centipedes and drops them in a boiling vat. From a tap at the bottom of the vat, a thick red liquid oozes into glass vials.”

 A sign in front of herb shop in Kyongdong market in Seoul read: "Centipedes: we will roast and grind them for you." A centipede tonic in the shop was prepared according recipe described by Huh Joon, a Chosun dynasty physician who lived from 1546 to 1615.

 In China, seahorses are prescribed from ailments such as asthma, arteosclerosis, dizziness, joint pain, impotence and incontinence. The fact that dried sea horses are consumed for virility is ironic because sea horse are a species in which the males get pregnant.

Seahorse soup  "North is ginseng and south is seahorse" is a Chinese adage from the Divine Peasant’s Herbal Compendium. But Chinese have not been the only ones who consumed seahorses as a medicine. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder reported that "ashes of seahorse...mixed with soda and pig's large" cured baldness.

 In Hong Kong, "inferior" seahorses sell for about $100 a pound, Higher quality ones go for around $400 a pound. The seahorses are usually ground and mixed with herbs and other ingredients a made into a tea. An estimated 2 million seahorse were consumed n China in 1992, a tenfold increase from the previous year. Three million wee consumed in Taiwan the same year.