Imagethief has been out in the Chinese provinces a few times. After every such trip, I'm always left with the vague and unsettling feeling that I have somehow managed to visit an entirely different planet. I then chide myself. This is your repressed sense of cultural imperialism talking, I tell myself. How dare you make any sweeping judgments of weirdness against an entire people?

And then I read something like this:

Villagers tout urine drinking's health benefit
Updated: 2006-11-21 11:41

Du Ximin, 50, was one of the five people who formed a healthcare research center promoting drinking urine to stay healthy in his village in 1993.

Now about 400 of the village of 1,600 are in the habit of drinking their own urine, and two-thirds of them are senior people, reported state television.

Du, formerly head of the Wuzhuang Village in Baqiao District of Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, has been drinking his urine on a daily basis since 1990.

He has been very healthy over the years, China Central Television reported.

Du said his mother fed him his urine when he was about three years old. His mother was one of the disciples of a local Taoist group that promoted drinking urine to stay healthy in the 1930s. The group had about 800 members.

Du has also converted his wife and two sons - one a college student and the other a migrant worker - into a urine-method believer and practitioner.

I am familiar with the Chinese tendency to have theme villages and cities. Here is the jar-manufacturing village. There is the city that makes all the world's cigarette lighters. Over the hill is the PLA ammunition manufacturing town. However I offer that when your village hook becomes "urine drinking" that you've hit bottom and it's time to consider rebranding, perhas as the donkey-flogging village, the not-wearing-any-pants village, or anything a little less, um, nasty.

Some readers may be inclined to see this as a Westerner thoughtlessly disparaging Chinese traditional medicine. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, I am not aware of any well-established tradition of urine drinking in by-the-book traditional Chinese medicine. Of course, I also don't a thing about traditional Chinese medicine, so filter accordingly. I am, however, most definitely thoughtlessly disparaging an entire branch of alternative medicine that seems well entrenched around the world. How else to intepret the abundance of websites devoted to the wonders of "urine therapy"? So it seems this bunch of Shaanxi peasants are treading over snows well yellowed by those who have come before. I have no doubt, however, that some nationalist wag will now leap forward to assert China's claim to being the first nation to discover the health benefits of urine. If you say so.

If you want to find out about similar but even worse therapies involving human waste, you can read this.


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