Zhou Yanqiu

An introduction

She refills the hundred drawers and knows, by weight in the hand, when a supplier has changed. She built the tongue reference the rest of us use: eleven years of photographs, filed by season, so that a coating in March is compared against other Marches and not against July.

A tongue photographed at seven in the morning, before you have eaten or brushed, tells me more than an hour of questions.

Areas of focus

• Tongue photographs — she looks at every one before it is written about
• Heaviness: after meals, in the head, in the limbs, in wet weather
• Skin that flares in summer and settles in autumn
• Appetite that has changed without anything else changing

Background & training

24 years · since 2002

• Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine — five years, graduated 2001
• Two further years in herbal identification and quality, Nanjing

Qualifications

Licensed to practise Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China.