On our recent China adventure, we took a group behind the scenes in a real traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy in China. They got to see exactly how the herbal prescriptions were filled and were introduced to a bewildering array of traditional Chinese medicine herbs.
This short video gives you an idea of what it is like inside a busy TCM pharmacy.



[...] This was not like any pharmacy we had ever been in before (video)! There were at least four rows of back to back cases. Some of them were really wide with 12 drawers, and the others had 8 drawers with a workspace in the middle that extended out a bit so that the pharmacists had a place to mix the prescriptions. They had to use stools to reach the top drawers. Each drawer contained a different kind of dried bark, root, snake, insect, moss, herb, and who knows what else that looked as strange as they smelled. The resulting, sometimes conflicting, cacophony of aromas was almost overpowering; however the profusion of smells was not altogether unpleasant. A pharmacists fills presciptions at a TCM hosital in Kunming [...]