Po Chai Pills

Po Chai Pills are tiny round herbal pills, about four millimetres across and a glossy reddish brown, sold in small glass vials, ten to a box. The box is printed in red and pink lattice like a banknote, with a portrait of the founder, Li Shiu-kei, above a view of Hong Kong harbour. The pills are swallowed by the vial for indigestion, vomiting, diarrhoea and the morning after.

Li Shiu-kei developed them in 1896 in Foshan, in Guangdong, where, the company says, he had begun by selling herbal tea from a street stall. His firm, Li Chung Shing Tong, sold them as Po Chai, meaning roughly to protect and relieve. They were made in Foshan until 1949, when the Li family fled to Hong Kong after the communist revolution and opened a new factory in North Point. The Foshan works was nationalised, and its successor still sells the pills in mainland China as Bao Ji Pills; Li Chung Shing Tong keeps the name everywhere else.

In Hong Kong the pills became a fixture of the family medicine cabinet. The South China Morning Post found 97 per cent of Hong Kong consumers knew the brand when Jacobson Pharma bought the company from the Li family in 2010, and a saying quoted by its manager holds that where there are Chinese people there are Po Chai Pills. In 1970 an advertisement covered the side of a Hong Kong building.

The formula is a blend of more than ten herbs, among them patchouli, atractylodes, angelica, chrysanthemum and mint, ground, extruded into strands like spaghetti, cut, rounded and dried. The red coat was once cinnabar and is now food colouring. Production was briefly stopped in 2010, after contaminated capsules led to a recall, and since 2015 every box has come from a factory in Tai Po, still in the same box.