China’s Latest Health Trend? TCM Cocktails.
Several years on, China’s traditional health craze is showing no sign of slowing down. While jujube ice cream and herbal bubble teas have each had their 15 minutes of fame, now a bar in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu thinks it’s found the next viral fad: traditional Chinese medicine cocktails.
Priced around 100 yuan ($13.80) per glass, the drinks on offer at the newly opened Soul Asylum claim a wide range of effects, from weight loss to enhancing male vitality and nourishing a person’s blood.
Soul Asylum’s owner, identified in domestic media reports only by his surname, Liu, says he consulted a local TCM doctor for the recipes and sourced the required materials from a TCM specialty medicine store, soaking them in grain alcohol for over three months.
“I talked to TCM doctors, and they said mixing medicinal wine with other alcohol is not a problem,” Liu told the Chengdu-based news outlet Cover News.
Among the bar’s most popular cocktails is a drink promising to “boost energy and improve blood health,” featuring ingredients like ginseng, Sichuan lovage root, rum, red dates, and egg yolk. Another top seller aims to “enhance male vitality” through deer antler and whiskey.
Reviews for the bar, which opened late last year, have been mostly positive, with users on the Yelp-like platform Dazhong Dianping giving Soul Asylum an average score of 4.4 out of 5.
According to Liu, the bar’s clientele tends to be young and prefers lower-alcohol options.
Liu isn’t the first bar owner to capitalize on a growing interest in healthy lifestyles, or yangsheng, among young Chinese. TCM-themed establishments have popped up nationwide in recent years. Some, like Liu’s, offer TCM cocktails like “Boss’ Chicken Soup” — featuring angelica root, ginseng, Aperol, and gin. Others, like a bar in the eastern city of Jinan, nod to TCM with herbal ingredients and traditionally inspired names, but don’t claim any medicinal properties.
Other sectors have also tried to profit off the trend, including a TCM tea shop in Shanghai that made headlines for its “night-owl beverages” featuring a mix of ginseng, wolfberry, and chrysanthemum.
Many sellers draw an explicit link between China’s hard-driving white-collar work culture and the need for healthier dining and beverage options. In 2021, Zhima Health, a subsidiary of TCM giant Tong Ren Tang, launched a line of herbal coffees marketed to help young Chinese “eat bitterness,” a euphemism for enduring hardship, whether at work or in their personal lives.
A 2022 report on Gen Z consumption trends found that young people aged 18 to 35 account for 83.7% of China’s health and wellness consumers.
But TCM experts caution some yangsheng offerings may overpromise and underdeliver. They can also land their creators in legal trouble: China’s Food Safety Law also stipulates that only medicinal substances that are traditionally both eaten and used in Chinese medicines can be added to food. Deer antler, for example, is not on the approved list.
Wu Meiling, a lawyer with the Jiangsu Suxing Law Firm, told Sixth Tone that bars that use unapproved ingredients can face fines, the revocation of their licenses, or even criminal liability.
Liu, who declined Sixth Tone’s interview request Thursday, told Cover News that the drinks are meant to promote health rather than treat diseases. While he acknowledged that the TCM drinks were partly a gimmick, he said he hoped the media attention would raise awareness that a night out doesn’t have to be unhealthy.
“When you go out at night, it doesn’t have to hurt,” he said. “It can be yangsheng.”
Additional reporting: Zhou Hanchi.
(Header image: Cocktails at TCM bars in Chengdu (left) and Nanjing (right). From Xiaohongshu)
