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In 2015, the company shifted production to a new factory in Tai Po. Most of its 70 workers live near the old factory in North Point, so a shuttle service runs between the two neighbourhoods. “Every single box of Po Chai Pills all over the world comes from this factory,” says Kevin Chu, the general manager of Li Chung Shing Tong. The production line operates eight hours a day, five days a week, producing 10 million boxes of pills a year.
Like Sum, Chu is a pharmacist, and his family usually had a box of Po Chai Pills on hand for stomach troubles. After graduating from the Chinese University of Hong Kong pharmacy programme in the 1990s, he began working in local hospitals, but became unsatisfied with the approach to health issues. “I knew how Western medicine works and I knew its limitations,” he says. “It doesn’t offer a cure for diseases, it offers alleviation. I thought, ‘What should medicine do?’”
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A worker sifts through chopped up Chinese herbs on the production line at Po Chai Pills old factory in North Point. Photo: Po Chai Pills
Chu decided to return to school, this time to study traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which is known for a more holistic approach to health problems. “It was a strange move at the time,” he says. Though it has been practised for thousands of years, TCM has only recently received interest from the global scientific community. “One of my aspirations was to modernise it,” Chu says. “Western medicine has to go through rigorous research and control measures, and that was lacking in Chinese medicine at the time.”
After years of research, Chu developed a drug, Oncozac, from Chinese medicinal mushrooms that strengthens the immune system and can relieve side effects caused by cancer treatment. That caught the attention of Sum, who hired Chu to revamp Po Chai Pills’ manufacturing process.
It was not easy at first. “The production staff here are so proud of what they are doing,” Chu says. “But they were so proud they didn’t want to change.”
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An old advertising van featuring Po Chai Pills in Singapore.
The sleek new factory helped convince them. It includes a laboratory where each of the pills’ 14 herbal ingredients are tested to quantify their active ingredients. It is a lot to squeeze into the pills’ small size, each measuring just four millimetres in diameter. “They dissolve in your stomach in less than 15 minutes,” Chu says. “Chinese medicine normally works slowly, but Po Chai Pills work very quickly.”
The manufacturing area looks as clean as you would expect from any pharmaceutical company. In a changing room, Chu covers his shoes in sterile bootees, dons a hairnet and fits a surgical mask around his face. He then walks into a room where a stainless steel machine is grinding herbs into a fine powder.
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Workers sort and pack Po Chai Pills at the company’s old factory in North Point. Photo: Po Chai Pills
Chu cannot reveal exactly which herbs make their way into Po Chai Pills. He does say, though, that the company has been working with the same farmers on the mainland for 20 years, and none of the ingredients are particularly rare, which makes the pills affordable. Old packages of Po Chai Pills from the 1970s list a variety of ingredients common in Chinese medicine, including angelica, chrysanthemum and rose.
After the herbs are ground together, the mixture is soaked with water, which acts as a binding agent, and passed through a machine that looks like a meat grinder. Then it is extruded into long thin strands. “It’s just like making spaghetti,” Chu jokes. The strands are chopped into pills, put into a tumbler to round off rough edges, and then dried in ovens that are hot enough to kill bacteria but not so hot that it affects the active ingredients.
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Tools used to make the pills. Photo: Po Chai Pills
Next, the pills are coated in red food colouring to give them their distinctive ruddy sheen. This is one of the few ingredients that have been altered over the years, because the pills were previously coloured with cinnabar, which contains mercury. Today, each batch of Po Chai Pills is tested for microbial contamination, heavy metals and plasticised residue. “We test everything and we test all the time,” Chu says.
Traditional ingredients, modern process – that sums up how Po Chai Pills are now made. It also reflects the way they are marketed. Though they are packaged with custom-made machines from Germany and Italy, each box of pills looks the same as it has for decades, with an intricate crest bearing the portrait of Li Shiu-kei and a 1960s-era photo of Hong Kong. “The heritage and credibility are so important,” Chu says. “What changes is how we interact with the public.”
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A worker pours out a tray of pills. Photo: Po Chai Pills
In recent years, the company has worked with pop starlet Angela Yuen Lai-lam – whose surname is a ****nym for “pill” – to produce a series of Facebook ads targeting consumers in their 20s. In one video, Yuen spends the night singing karaoke before stumbling into bed drunk, at which point she is offered a glass of water and a bottle of Po Chai Pills, which are reputed to ease the pain of the morning after.
