Chinese Medicine: Starting with Daily Intelligence

Chapter 546: Chapter 546: Floating Gold on the Sea

Li Xu took the juice and had a sip. "I’m not tired of the view yet. This ocean is like a giant treasure chest; you never know when it might have a surprise for you."

In truth, the real reason was the intelligence that had refreshed this morning.

[Today’s Intelligence: On the shipping route back to China (specific coordinates: N 18°XX′, E 110°XX′), a piece of natural Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance will be floating by. The piece weighs approximately 22 pounds, is grayish-white in color, and is of the highest possible quality...]

Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance.

This was true "floating gold."

Since ancient times, Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance has been the "exclusive fragrance" of emperors.

As early as the Tang Dynasty, Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance was recorded in the annals of history under a different name, one that was a transliteration of an Arab term.

The contemporary miscellany *Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang* recorded:

"The country of Bobali is in the southwestern sea... Its lands produce only ivory and the fragrant substance."

This passage clearly indicates that during the Tang Dynasty, Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance primarily came from the country of Bobali (in the area of modern-day Somalia) in the southwestern seas. Its value was comparable to ivory, making them both rare and exotic treasures from overseas at the time.

By the Song Dynasty, Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance remained a rare luxury item exclusive to the imperial family and the nobility.

Due to its high price and immense profits, some greedy merchants would stop at nothing, creating counterfeit Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance to make a fortune.

This is evidenced by a record in a Song Dynasty text, *The Record of the Listener*, which describes the counterfeiting of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance in Guangzhou.

Its price was recorded in detail during the Ming Dynasty, in the era of Zheng He’s voyages to the Western Seas.

According to *The Marvelous Visions of the Star Raft*, when sold in the markets of Sumatra, its price was far from cheap. One ounce by official measure cost twelve local gold coins. One pound was equivalent to 192 gold coins, which translated to over 40,000 of China’s copper coins—an exceptionally high price.

Converted to the monetary system after the Song Dynasty, the price of one ounce of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance was equivalent to several years of living expenses for an ordinary family, which gives a sense of how precious it was.

Even in modern times, the price of natural Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance remains high. Many people have become rich overnight by accidentally finding it, and there’s a popular saying: "Finding Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance is like winning the lottery."

In 2012, an eight-year-old British boy named Charlie became a lucky winner of this "deep-sea lottery."

While playing on the beach with his parents, he discovered an inconspicuous yellow "rock."

Because the "rock" had an unusual texture, his family took it to a professional institution for testing. The results were shocking—it was a rare piece of natural Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance, valued at approximately 400,000 yuan.

In March 2024, a Thai woman strolling on the beach found a piece of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance weighing 30 pounds, with a conservative valuation of 1.7 million RMB.

In June of the same year, 35 Yemeni fishermen in the Gulf of Aden discovered a colossal 280-pound piece of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance inside the carcass of a beached sperm whale. It was ultimately sold for a sky-high price of 33 million yuan to an Emirati merchant, with each fisherman receiving an average of about 940,000 yuan, changing their lives instantly.

...

The reason Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance has been so sought-after for millennia, with its price remaining persistently high, stems first from its profound cultural significance and its scarcity.

In ancient times, Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance was an imperial fragrance reserved for the exclusive use of emperors and high officials.

In certain historical periods, it was also used in important events like religious sacrifices, blessing ceremonies, and celebrations, imbuing it with sacred symbolic meaning.

As time went on, the use cases for Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance gradually expanded, but its scarcity never changed, which kept it in a state of being "hard to come by."

Second, Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance has an extremely wide range of uses, possessing value as a fragrance, a skincare product, and a medicinal ingredient.

Besides its use as a high-end fragrance by the ancient Chinese, ancient Hebrew women would grind Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance into a powder, mix it with oil to create a balm, and apply it to their skin for both moisturizing and aromatic effects.

Furthermore, the Ming Dynasty physician Li Shizhen detailed its medicinal value in the *Compendium of Materia Medica*. He believed that Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance had a sweet taste, a fishy aroma, and a "warm" nature. According to him, it could invigorate blood circulation, disperse blood stasis, and relieve pain, as well as treat conditions like coughing, asthma, chest tightness, and shortness of breath, making it a rare and precious medicinal ingredient.

However, the core reason why Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance is "worth its weight in gold" ultimately comes down to the principle that "rarity creates value."

The formation and acquisition of natural Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance are both fraught with uncertainty. It originates in the deep sea, a place humans can hardly reach, and the amount that washes ashore or is caught by fishermen is extremely small.

Furthermore, the formation cycle of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance can take hundreds of years. The sperm whale, its only "producer," once suffered a sharp decline in population due to rampant whaling by humans, which further exacerbated the scarcity of the substance.

For a thousand years, people had no idea where this mysterious fragrance came from.

During the Han Dynasty, fishermen who accidentally dredged up Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance while fishing initially thought it was useless "floating pumice." That was until someone discovered by chance that when dried and burned, it released a rich, long-lasting aroma that could linger for days.

This discovery made Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance famous, and it was presented to the emperor as tribute, becoming an imperial fragrance.

Because its true origin was unknown, the ancients used their imagination. Combining this with the fact that it came from the sea, they invented the legend that it was formed from the solidified saliva of dragons. This is how the name "Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance" came to be.

This legend persisted for hundreds of years,

until modern times, when fishermen from the Saudi Arabian island of Socotra unintentionally unveiled the true nature of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance.

The inhabitants of Socotra Island made their living by fishing. One elderly fisherman, after catching a sperm whale, discovered a lump inside its intestines that he suspected was Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance.

At the time, the common belief was that the sperm whale had mistakenly ingested a piece of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance floating on the sea. However, when marine biologists heard the news, they keenly suspected it might hold the secret to its formation and immediately launched an in-depth investigation.

The results of the research were astonishing:

Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance, revered by humans as the "pinnacle of all fragrances," was actually a "fecal stone" formed in the intestines of a sperm whale.

As apex predators in the marine food chain, sperm whales mainly feed on soft-bodied animals like squid and octopus. Although their bodies are soft, these prey have hard, beak-like chitinous jaws and radulae in their mouths that cannot be digested by the whale’s stomach.

To prevent these hard substances from scratching its intestinal tract, the sperm whale’s intestines secrete a waxy substance that envelops these indigestible jaws and radulae. Through long-term accumulation and compression, this gradually forms a lump—the "prototype" of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance.

These lumps leave the sperm whale’s body in one of two ways: either they are expelled through the anus along with the whale’s feces, or they are vomited out when the whale experiences gastrointestinal discomfort.

Because the density of Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance is less than that of seawater, it floats on the surface after being expelled from the body. It then drifts with the ocean currents, undergoing a long process of being soaked in seawater, baked by the sun, and eroded by the wind.

Eventually, it transforms into the natural Dragon’s Saliva Fragrance that people find, either washed up on shore or discovered by fishermen.

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