柴胡加龍骨牡蠣湯

Or, if you prefer, chai hu jia long gu mu li tang. Three words in Chinese I can figure out, but eight sends me reeling.

The best I can translate it -- not the google way, but the "have three dictionaries open at once to five places in each" way -- is "Bupleurum plus dragon bone male viscera pestilence decoction".

Joe Hing Kwok Chu gives what has to be the most useful information I have found on it online without wanting to spend more than another hour on it. He saved me a lot of trouble by having it written out in Chinese so I could look up the individual ideographs and the Chinese in *this* post comes to you courtesy him, Unicode, and apple-c/apple-v. Yes, I have checked each word. The only one that doesn't seem to match quite right is "pestilence" (li), which seems to have another radical on its left in the name of the drink. No such ideograph in my dictionaries beyond what I take to be the radical on the right, which matches exactly the one that turns up as "pestilence". Maybe it's the same thing, maybe it's not, who knows, I'm not a doctor. Clearly whatever word appears has something to do with pestilence. Unless, of course, it's only there for pronunciation, which is I think just a little unlikely. "Bone" (gu) is also very slightly different, apparently depending on the font. The little box in the lower right hand corner of the little box on top is on the bottom left in my printed literature, but otherwise identical.

Doing it the google way, "Bupleurum D" or "Calm Dragon Formula" appears to be roughly the same thing -- maybe a patent medicine version of the loose herbs I've got here. I think Bupleurum is magnolia. I have no idea what constitutes a dragon bone, but yes, there is some sort of bone in what I'm decocting on the stove right now. It's lovely. Smells delicious. Some sort of fruit in it. Smells like cinammon. Going to dry out the boiled stuff on the counter tomorrow and go through it all.

I've gone from boiling rocks and seashells to simmering seashells, flowers, and dragon bones. Clearly I am losing my mind. I am, in the end, doing nothing more than taking medicine, yet when I do the most basic research on what I'm taking I can't help but grin from ear to ear. I love the discovery that goes with it. Not that other people haven't already translated things way better but it literally opens my mind.

I'm drinking it now. It tastes good. Smells fantastic.

For fun:

Search for 柴胡加龍骨牡蠣湯 in google. If anything turns up with "translate this page" listed as an option, click it. It's somewhere between helpful and hilarious, and just when you think it's too hilarious to be helpful it turns too helpful to be hilarious, and then flips back again. Translating into and out of French and Italian using google's for wussies. The poetic "calm dragon formula" name, or the relatively sober "bupleurum plus dragon bone and oyster shell" name comes out, oddly enough, as "English plus keel oyster soup". Well, they definitely got the "plus" right. I don't know whether I'm tasting the (fossilized?) dragon, the keel oysters (barnacles, perhaps?), or the Englishmen (possibly Barnacle Bill?), but I do rather like it.

I could go on wondering all night and follow all the leads for hours on end and never figure it all out. So I'll sign off now. The dragon's calm and I'm ready to sleep.