Dr. Ho, International Man of Mystery

20 September 2005


Dr. Ho during our visit to his home in Baisha.

Reluctantly I concede that no visit to Baisha, the small Naxi town about 10 km north of Lijiang, is complete without meeting the famous (infamous?) Dr. Ho, denizen of main street. This is born out in countless travel pieces on the web, in magazines, newspapers and books (e.g., The Lonely Planet China guide), on television and in film, all describing meetings, planned and otherwise, of travelers with the aging doctor.

You’ll recall (see earlier post) that several weeks ago Tony and I tested our then new bicycles with an afternoon ride to Baisha and a brief tour of the town and it’s environs. Because our tender butts were feeling the pain of bumping down the traditional stone main street, we dismounted and paused to have a look around with an eye towards cold beers and soft chairs at the Buena Vista Café—a well advertised restaurant catering to tourists in “midtown”.

As we stood gathering our wits about us and flexing our aching butts (to the extent that old butts flex), we were hailed by a funny aged man in a white lab coat gesticulating and chattering as he emerged from a shady enclave beside us, much as an ant lion would emerge from its sandy pit to collect unwitting ants that had slid into its trap. By the time we realized what was happening, our fates were sealed.

Dr. Ho is an eccentric and frantic man, with a manic son of boundless energy and a self-perpetuated reputation as the herbal medicine expert of Yunnan (and perhaps the world). Words like famous, distinguished, remarkable, and miraculous comprise much of his self-taught English vocabulary and are repeated rapidly as the Doctor leads you first across his patio and then into his house, both of which are wallpapered with newspaper clippings, testimonials, letters and business cards providing detailed proof of his importance in the world beyond Baisha.

Bruce Chatwin, the well-known British travel writer (In Patagonia; The Songlines), owns responsibility for the elevation of Dr. Ho from small town herbalist to international man of mystery. Chatwin described the doctor in a 1986 article in The New York Times as “the legendary Taoist Doctor of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain”, to the consternation of Tan Wee Cheng who wrote in a November 2002 travelogue that Ho is “a medical doctor [period] and there isn’t anything Taoist about him” perhaps alluding to his less than humble demeanor .

Once in Ho’s sitting room we are offered his traditional cup of tea (John Cleese, the Monty Python actor, reportedly commented after a visit, “Interesting bloke, crap tea.”) which we sipped quietly as Dr. Ho presented us with more testimonials describing the gratitude and curiosity of western medical doctors examining patients previously suffering from serious maladies, including cancer, who were cured as a result of the doctor’s herbs.

Although Dr. Ho’s English is functional, he soon runs low on vocabulary and passes us to his son, who springs into action like the animated Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons of my youth. Tony and I sip our tea and steal concerned glances at each other as the son presents further evidence of his father’s fame and prowess and dives headlong into a description of a visit from Michael Palin, the well known British humorist and travel documentarian (Palin has a television series that follows his global adventures). This includes repeated acting out of Palin appearing at their door, knocking politely and asking if he could come in. How (for God’s sake!!) could a person as famous (!!) as Palin be so low key (??!!), the son clearly wonders as he does push-ups and jumping jacks on the floor in front of us (I’m not exaggerating). He dashes behind a glass display case and mimics Palin on a toilet—apparently one with an excellent view—by crouching so that only his perky head appears above the glass, chin up, looking smartly from one side to another, to see the imaginary sights visible from the “number one toilet.” Much laughter all around as Tony and I take advantage of the noise and confusion to nervously forge an escape plan (can’t be late for dinner, family at home, looks like rain, etc., etc.) and eye the door, entertained but fearful of the open-ended nature of the monologue.

Ego pathology aside, Dr. Ho has had an interesting life. Jade Dragon (Yulong) Snow Mountain, according to Michael Palin’s travelogue, supports over 600 species of medicinal plants on its slopes and in the surrounding hills, and Dr. Ho has made a career of collecting and applying them first to local cases and then, as his fame spread, to visitors from all over the world. He or his family do all of the collecting, and the plants are processed in a courtyard behind his sitting room and stored in and adjacent room. I’d love to know more about them but the language barrier and our urge to flee stifled further questioning. Ho practiced in the area until the Red Guards smashed his practice and his home during the Cultural Revolution. He resumed working in 1985 and continues to work to this day, though it was unclear to us what proportion of his time is spent on medicine versus tourist entertainment. In either case, he has become a fixture in Baisha and a person that people come to see from all over the world.

One has to wonder though, what the typically self-effacing Chinese think of his frantic self-promotion, and whether he is lonely as a result. In the end, he and his son seemed like good-hearted people driven mad by fame (are you listening Tom Cruise?), and like other visitors before us, as we said our gracious goodbyes we marked the experience as positive. These ants though, blessed with partially developed reasoning brains, will be careful not to slip into the doctor's pit a second time.

Dr. Ho "working" while his son gyrated in front of us -- though he looked deep in thought, careful examination reveals that his brush is poised above a laminated news article about himself and any perceived intention to produce Chinese characters is purely theatrical.