Chinese hospitals
All Chinese hospitals have a department of herbal medicine where ancient remedies are used together with medicines from the Western pharmacopoeia. A Nanjing physician told me that the rhizome of the black bamboo, compounded with other plants, treats kidney ailments. “If you heat a freshly cut black bamboo and drink the moisture that runs out of it,” he added, “it acts as a febrifuge to bring your temperature down. The Culm of a bamboo used for bridges, Sinocalainus affine, burned to ashes, will cure prickly heat.” In some tropical bamboos a secretion called tab sheer forms and hardens between the nodes. Chinese, Indians, and other Asian peoples prescribed this for coughs and asthma, as a cooling tonic, and even that Golden Fleece of Eastern medicineas an aphrodisiac. Since tab sheer is nearly 97 percent pure silica, which is chemically inert, it probably requires an additional large dose of faith. But, as often happens in folk medicine, there is something there, and researchers have recently found that tab sheer acts as a catalyst in some chemical reactions. As bamboo finds its place in medicine, so does it too in engineering. Chinese bridges, hanging from cables of twisted bamboo, are ancestors of all the world’s suspension spans. The use of bamboo cables for towing ships in China was first described by Marco Polo for the 13th-century Western world: “The cables … are made of… . The long stout canes of which I have spoken before, fully fifteen paces in length. They split them and bind them together into lengths of fully 300 paces, and they are stronger than if they were made of hemp.” Indeed, stronger. The great bridge over the Min River in Sichuan hangs from bamboo cables nearly seven inches in diameter, wound round capstans so that they can be tightened like tuning a guitar. The Min Bridge, still in use after more than 1,000 years, is justly renowned as one of the engineering marvels of the world. CHINA, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, sent much of its culture to Japan more than a thousand years ago. Most of Japan’s 662 kinds of bamboo, of 13 genera, flourish in the mild climate of Kyushu, the southernmost island, but the bamboo capital is Kyoto. Here I met Dr. Kocher Ueda, Japan’s premier bamboo scientist, known throughout the island-nation as “Dr. Bamboo”. On Kyoto’s outskirts Dr. Ueda led me into a dense thicket of the most curious bamboo I have ever seen. From the ground to a height of four or five feet the nodes seemed to go mad; they zigzagged diagonally up the Culm, leaving triangular internodes that swelled in convex blisters. “Kikko-chikutortoiseshell bamboo,” said Dr. Bamboo, “a variety, heterocyclic, of the hairy bamboo. We are not sure what causes it, but sometimes the trait is recessive and the culms revert to standard shape. Groves that persistently produce the tortoiseshell form are very valuable; it is much in demand for ornament.”
