A traditional Chinese herbal product has now sat on the shelves of a single German pharmacy chain for six years. The Bahnhof-Apotheke chain in Germany has sold nearly 200,000 bottles of Shufeng Jiedu granules, the respiratory-relief formula made by Anhui Jiren Pharmaceutical in eastern China, at €39.90 (about RM186, US$43) per bottle. That number, disclosed by the company's deputy general manager Zhu Qiang to China Daily in a piece syndicated to The Star and the Asia News Network on 28 July 2026, is the most concrete piece of evidence yet that Chinese patent medicine has moved from "exotic alternative" to recurring European stock.
The shift is broader than one product. According to China's National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, TCM is now practised in 196 countries and regions. China has signed TCM cooperation agreements with more than 40 foreign governments and international organisations. Tianjin Da Ren Tang Group's emergency heart-attack pill Suxiao Jiuxin Wan has been a registered prescription drug in Russia since 1997 — almost thirty years of continuous pharmacy presence. And in the same Tianjin industrial corridor, a 300-million-yuan (about US$42 million) intelligent workshop is being built to make the next generation of these products traceable to the herb field.
Russian prescriptions: Suxiao Jiuxin Pills since 1997, registered as a prescription cardiovascular drug.
EU quality pass: 193 granule varieties from Anhui Jiren cleared German quality inspections.
Hainan TCM hospital: Sanya TCM Hospital now runs customised plans for foreign clients (acupuncture, tuina, herbal baths, medicinal cuisine, weight management).
Standards infrastructure: 100+ ISO standards for TCM published through a committee China helped establish.
From "exotic alternative" to pharmacy stock
Anhui Jiren entered the European market in 2018 and now has 193 of its granule varieties available in the EU market through licensed pharmacies. The product range is the company's response to a longstanding regulator complaint about TCM: the empirical nature of herbal formulas, where the same herb can promote or stanch blood flow depending on its combination with other ingredients. Standardisation is the answer Europe has demanded, and the company has spent the years since 2018 building it into its QC stack.
"From treatment to wellness, we seek to integrate TCM's health-preserving culture into the daily lives of Europeans," Zhu Qiang said. The corporate strategy is visible in the second product line: a "Four Seasons Tea" based on TCM principles, which has appeared in a Hamburg tea house since last year. Each product in the series adapts its herbal composition to a specific season, marketed as a food supplement rather than a medicine — which sidesteps the harder regulatory path for TCM as a pharmaceutical in Europe.
Russia was first, in 1997
Tianjin Pharmaceutical Da Ren Tang Group has obtained quality certifications recognised in Australia and Japan. But its longest international run is in Russia, where Suxiao Jiuxin Pills — a compound emergency medicine for acute angina — became a registered prescription drug in 1997. Twenty-nine years of continuous pharmacy availability in Russia is the kind of regulatory foothold that no other Chinese TCM manufacturer has matched, and it is the reason Da Ren Tang is the most-cited Chinese TCM name in Central Asian and CIS clinical literature.
The company has also tackled the variation problem head-on. Its current Suxiao Jiuxin production line is fully digitised. Each bottle carries a QR code that lets the consumer trace the medicine's journey from the specific herb plantation through every step of processing, storage and quality control. "We use digital control to tackle the pain point of batch-to-batch variation in herbal products, ensuring both efficacy and stability," said Li Hongjiang, the plant's production deputy general manager. The next-generation intelligent workshop will use near-infrared spectroscopy and visual inspection systems to push that consistency higher — at a 300-million-yuan capital cost that signals Da Ren Tang is treating the international market as permanent infrastructure, not a one-off export.
AI as the new quality control layer
The most surprising part of the 2026 TCM story is how rapidly AI has been absorbed into the production and research workflow. In 2024, Tianjin-headquartered Tasly Pharma, in collaboration with Huawei Cloud, launched a TCM large language model. Trained on a massive corpus of classical texts and clinical data, the model assists in formula optimisation, mechanism explanation, and the discovery of new clinical applications — i.e., it is the layer that connects 2,000-year-old empirical knowledge to modern regulator questions about reproducibility.
A separate large model was developed jointly last year by the National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin plus Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, covering knowledge from over 20 clinical disciplines. "AI can synthesise the vast empirical knowledge recorded in ancient TCM texts, thereby supporting the standardisation of TCM practice," said Guo Yi, vice-president of Tianjin University of TCM.
Standards: the unglamorous infrastructure
Long before AI and digital QR codes, China spent two decades building the standards base that foreign regulators now recognise. China facilitated the establishment of a technical committee under the International Organization for Standardization, which has issued over 100 international standards for TCM to date. On the academic side, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine led the creation of the world's first international educational standard for TCM undergraduate programmes. Those two pieces — standards for the products, and standards for the people who prescribe them — are the boring load-bearing layer that makes the pharmacy sales numbers possible.
Hainan as the human face of TCM access
The most accessible entry point for a foreign patient who wants the in-person TCM experience is now the southern island of Hainan. The Sanya Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine has designed customised treatment plans for foreign clients — acupuncture, massage, herbal baths, medicinal cuisine and weight management services all sit on the menu. The warm climate is not a marketing flourish: it is a clinical fact that affects how a patient's circulation responds to moxibustion and tuina. Konstantin, a Russian engineer quoted by Xinhua, brought his parents to the hospital for acupuncture therapy. "The techniques combined with Sanya's warm climate greatly alleviate neck and lumbar pain," he said.
Some community-based institutions in Hainan have built one-stop "wellness communities" for international tourists by integrating residential environments, health services and healing therapies. This is the closest the Chinese TCM sector has come to a Thai-style spa + clinical hybrid, and Hainan's visa-free access for many Asian, Middle Eastern and Commonwealth passports makes it the easiest mainland entry point for a TCM-only medical tourism trip.
What international patients should do in 2026
Three practical shifts are visible to a foreign patient right now. First, the over-the-counter Western access is real but narrow: Shufeng Jiedu granules in selected German pharmacies, Suxiao Jiuxin Pills as a Russian prescription for acute angina, and a growing list of Anhui Jiren granules in the EU. Patients travelling between those markets can pack a small TCM kit for self-limiting conditions — common cold relief, post-operative recovery, jet lag — but should bring the Chinese product name plus a TCM-aware clinician's note to clear customs.
Second, the in-person TCM clinical experience is no longer concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai. Hainan's Sanya TCM Hospital has built a foreign-patient pathway. Hong Kong's new government flagship Chinese Medicine Hospital — covered in this column on 23 July — runs 23 multidisciplinary programmes. For patients who want TCM integrated with Western diagnostics, these two sites are now the most accessible entry points.
Third, the AI and standards layer is moving faster than the consumer-facing marketing. A patient asking a Chinese TCM hospital today what makes a particular formula reproducible will hear about near-infrared spectroscopy, QR-code traceability, and large-language-model-assisted formula review. The 2026 TCM experience is not the same as the 2016 TCM experience, and the difference is engineering as much as it is herbs.
What to watch in the next 12-18 months
Three signals will tell you whether the 2026 wave is structural or a peak. First, the launch of Da Ren Tang's 300-million-yuan intelligent workshop in Tianjin — when it goes live, near-infrared spectroscopy and visual inspection will become the new baseline for Chinese TCM exports. Second, the next ISO TCM standard, which is expected to focus on the data format for traceability QR codes — a boring but necessary step for cross-border pharmacy recognition. Third, the second wave of programmes at the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital, expected to include fertility and developmental-delay indications by end-2026.
For international patients, the realistic near-term access path is to plan a two-week Hainan TCM programme, bring a Russian- or German-market TCM product list for return travel, and use the new hospital-based international patient services in Hong Kong or Sanya rather than the old "tourist TCM clinic" model. The infrastructure for that path exists today — it is no longer a 2027 forecast.
Bottom line
TCM in 2026 is not "going global" in the marketing sense. It is going global in the engineering sense: ISO standards, near-infrared spectroscopy, AI-assisted formula review, QR-code herb traceability, and 29-year prescription presence in Russia. The clinics in Sanya and Hong Kong are the visible front door. The Tianjin intelligent workshops are the load-bearing floor underneath.