In the ninth year of Guangxu's reign, he traveled to Longyou in western Zhejiang.
Yu Enzhen, a veteran who returned from the officialdom of Guangdong, erected a signboard with gold characters on a black background - "Zi Fu Tang" in the autumn rain. He served in Guangdong for more than 40 years and rose to the rank of chief envoy. He witnessed the suffering of the people in Lingnan due to lack of medical treatment and the rampant use of counterfeit medicines. After resigning and returning home, he took out his life savings and made three oaths: to seek truth in medicinal materials, not to reject the poor, and not to deceive the common people.
Recommended by the Lanxi Zhuge Medicine Gang, the upright old man Zhong Fang Laoli came to Zifu Hall to sit in the hall. He has been practicing medicine for forty years and has never collected any medical fees. He hates quack doctors and profiteers the most. With one diagnosis and one medicine, and one promise and one letter, the two of them started a long road to saving the world and the people in this small pharmacy.
From the first opening of the shop in the ninth year of Guangxu's reign, to the changes in the Republic of China, to the raging war of resistance against Japan, "Zi Fu Tang" uses a century-old medicine shop as a mirror to reflect the suffering and rebirth of a nation. After Yu Enzhen, the eldest son Yu Fupu took over the family business and adhered to the ancestral motto of "I would rather make a penny less profit than lose a penny to save a life" in troubled times; the third generation Yu Youan returned from studying abroad and supplemented traditional Chinese medicine with the advantages of Western medicine. His shortcoming was that he risked his life to deliver medicine to the guerrillas during the Anti-Japanese War; after the founding of New China, the fourth generation Yu Mingcheng dedicated his ancestral business to the country, and Zifu Hall was merged into the state-owned system, but the word "Zifu" still flows like blood.
The novel is based on the real history of the Longyou Merchant Gang, and uses a thick and gentle style of writing to describe the ups and downs of four generations of a family and the spiritual roots of a drug store that has survived for a hundred years. Here we have the benevolence of doctors, the inheritance of medicine, the ups and downs of business, and the feelings of family and country. There are also the fireworks in the streets of small towns in the south of the Yangtze River and the scenery of the four seasons in the mountains and rivers of western Zhejiang.
