Bozhou
World's largest TCM herb market handles ¥185 billion annually from a city that has traded medicinal plants for 1,800 years — living fossil economics.
The price of coltsfoot quadrupled in two years in Bozhou, and nobody was surprised — this is a city where herb prices move like tech stocks. Bozhou, a prefecture in northwestern Anhui, is the largest traditional Chinese medicine trading hub on Earth. Its market covers 1.2 million square metres across three floors, houses 20,000 merchants and 3,000 stalls, and handles a flow of botanical, mineral, and animal-derived materials that reached ¥185.25 billion ($25.7 billion) in total business value in 2023 — an 11.3% increase over the prior year.
The city claims legitimacy from Hua Tuo, China's most famous ancient physician, who practiced here during the Eastern Han Dynasty roughly 1,800 years ago. Wikipedia mentions Hua Tuo and notes Bozhou's herbal trade. What it undersells is the industrial scale: 73 of China's nationally ranked top-100 pharmaceutical companies have established operations in Bozhou, 126 local pharmaceutical firms exceed ¥100 million in annual output, and the city produces 90% of all herb tea sold in China. In the first half of 2024 alone, local trade hit ¥86 billion ($12.1 billion). The Kangmei TCM price index — the Bloomberg terminal of medicinal herbs — has climbed 75% since 2020.
Bozhou's reach extends beyond China. Anhui Jiren Pharmaceutical has passed German quality inspections for 193 types of TCM granules now sold in EU pharmacies. The city breeds 6 million medicinal seedlings annually and has introduced 60 high-output herb species. This is not folk medicine surviving in modernity — it is a supply chain that has industrialised a 1,800-year-old knowledge system into a platform handling tens of billions in annual flow.
The biological parallel is the ginkgo tree. Ginkgo biloba is a living fossil — unchanged for 200 million years, the last surviving species of an entire division of plants, now cultivated worldwide for pharmaceutical use. Bozhou occupies the same position in the economic landscape: an ancient knowledge system that should theoretically have been displaced by modern pharmaceutical chemistry, but instead persists, industrialises, and grows. The Kangmei index climbing 75% in four years is the economic equivalent of a Mesozoic survivor outperforming its successors.