The Thousand-Year Camphor Gang

The Thousand-Year Zhang Gang

Zhangshu, Jiangxi, has been the capital of medicinal herbs for a thousand years.

Since ancient times, it has enjoyed the reputation that "medicinal herbs are incomplete until they reach Zhangshu, and ineffective if they pass through without it."

The Gan River flows on, and Mount Gezao rises green. Ever since Ge Xuan gathered herbs and refined elixirs on Mount Gezao, the Zhang Gang's medicinal legacy, rooted in Zhangshu's herb market, has taken hold in central Jiangxi.

Set against the long sweep of history from the late Tang dynasty to the late Qing, this novel follows the rise and fall of the Jishi Hall and recounts the turbulent lives of generations of herbalists: Chen Qinghe, Gui Wa, Lu Chengan, Shen Huaijin, and Lin Songnian. Through repeated wars and endless military calamities, they safeguard thousands of medical texts in the Golden Cabinet and Stone Chamber, uphold the hall's strict rules for identifying and processing herbs, and carry both the medicine gourd and the prohibitions blade, remaining true to their principles of integrity and healing the world.

From choosing the Keeper of the Seal through five grand contests, establishing a double-person, double-lock system for highly toxic medicines, and strictly forbidding the use of sulfur to fumigate medicinal materials, to hiding books and protecting medicines amid the chaos of the Song and Yuan dynasties, and spreading their medicinal knowledge far and wide by sea during the Ming; from the three halls' alliance during the prosperous reigns of Kangxi and Qianlong, which brought the world's greatest herb market to its height, to the late Qing, when China's gates were flung open and foreign medicines and the flames of war dealt their blows, the flame of their legacy still burned amid the ruins.

Prosperity fades, and objects can be destroyed, but the resolve to seek truth in herbal medicine and the healer's commitment to kindness endure through a thousand years of wind and rain, passed down from generation to generation. The history of the Zhang Gang is also an epic song of Chinese medicine's trials and triumphs.