The nutrition of Colla Corii Asini is no better than ordinary food, and even contains harmful substances, the price is so high, thanks to the false touting of Chinese medicine. In today’s “health fever” is getting stronger and stronger, among all kinds of tonic health products, Colla Corii Asini is undoubtedly one of the best, loved by the majority of female consumers. However, it is far from being a magical product that claims to be able to beautify and slow down the aging process, but it is just a very common Chinese medicine with many names but little use. So, how did Colla Corii Asini become a sought-after item? This has to be said from the ancestral old Chinese medicine. The earliest Colla Corii Asini is made of cowhide, nothing to do with donkeys Chinese medicine claims that Colla Corii Asini nourishes blood and nourishes Yin, moistens dryness and stops bleeding; it is used for blood deficiency and yellowing, dizziness and palpitations, sleeplessness, dry lung and cough. According to the Eastern Han Dynasty’s Shennong Ben Cao Jing, Colla Corii Asini “is used for internal collapse of the heart and abdomen, labor pains like malaria, pain in the waist and abdomen, and soreness in the extremities. It is also used for women who suffer from blood loss and fetal disturbances. It is used for a long time to lighten the body and benefit the qi. In Zhang Zhongjing’s “Treatise on Miscellaneous Diseases of Typhoid Fever”, he used “Gum and Ai Siwu Tang” and “Chuanxiong Danggui Gum and Ai Tang” to treat a variety of internal and gynecological diseases. According to Ming Li Shizhen’s “Compendium of Materia Medica”, Colla Corii Asini is “sweet, flat, non-toxic ……, light and beneficial to the body”. The Chinese tradition of nourishment has its origins in the early days, and Colla Corii Asini has been used as a panacea for nourishing Yin and health. The origin of the gum is probably not related to medicine, but to the carpenters and other industries that need to glue objects, that is, the gum of gum and the glue of glue is a meaning. Tao Hongjing of the Northern and Southern Dynasties said in the “Collection of Notes on the Materia Medica” that “the clear and thin one is used for painter; the clear and thick one is called raspberry gum, which is used in medicine; the cloudy and black one is not used in medicine, but can be gummed”. Written at the end of the Han Dynasty, “the famous doctor’s record” recorded that the gum is “cooked cowhide made of”, at this time, the medicinal gum from the miscellaneous skin gum evolved into the gum cooked exclusively with cowhide. Now the donkey skin as raw material of gum, why the earliest was made of cowhide? Some people believe that the donkey originated in Africa and West Asia, initially only sporadically seen in Xinjiang, Tibet and other places, the Central Plains donkey has been very few, probably until after the opening of the Silk Road, donkeys as a means of transport large-scale introduction to China. This is one of the reasons why donkey skin was not used in the manufacture of early Agaricus. Donkey skin really replaced cowhide as the raw material of Colla Corii Asini, from the Five Dynasties to the Song Dynasty when the “cowhide ban”. Cowhide in ancient times have great military use (manufacture of armor, boiling bow and arrow with glue), the frequent wars of the Tang and Song dynasties is far more demand than supply. In order to protect the cowhide as much as possible for the military, the official ordered strict control of cowhide private trading, unified by the government to buy out. At the end of the Qing Dynasty Li Jiannong “Song Yuan Ming economic history manuscript” records, “Five Dynasties to cow leather tendons and horns for the manufacture of clothing and armor needed, are strictly prohibited from leaving the country. Peasant cattle died, not by the official inspection, shall not be stripped, its leather tendons and horns are lost to the official.” At a later stage, the people can even cowhide as a tax payment. Thus, cowhide became a scarce raw material, people will gradually to donkey skin instead of cowhide, as the raw material for the manufacture of Agaricus. Later on, the gum made from cowhide was called “yellow gelatin”, while Agaricus was used to refer exclusively to donkey skin gum. About the name of Colla Corii Asini, most of the opinions nowadays believe that it was named because it was produced in Dong’a, Shandong Province. Tao Hongjing said, “Out of Dong’a, so the name of Colla Corii Asini.” Dong’a was called “A” or “Ayi” during the Warring States period, and was renamed Dong’a during the Qin Dynasty, when Dong’a County was established and was part of Dong County. The first one was moved from Acheng Town (ancient Dong’a City) in Yanggu to Dong’a Town (Dong’a Ancient City) in Pingyin during the Northern Wei Dynasty, the second one was moved from Dong’a Town (Dong’a Ancient City) to Jinan during the Hongwu Period of the Ming Dynasty, and the third one was moved from Jinan to Dong’a County after the founding of the People’s Republic. These three places were the central production areas of Colla Corii Asini, so the production of Colla Corii Asini was not limited by special geographical conditions and raw materials (such as the magical well water), and the name “Colla Corii Asini” has been kept with the change of county rule. With the backing of old Chinese doctors, Colla Corii Asini has become the newest addition to the health care industry. Data shows that in 2015, Colla Corii Asini retail pharmacy sales alone amounted to 6.582 billion yuan, an increase of 32.8% over the previous year, and has occupied the top spot in retail pharmacy sales for many years. Most of these supplies are produced by more than two hundred local Agaricus manufacturers in Shandong, and the number of Agaricus practitioners has exceeded 100,000. The largest Agaricus factory in Shandong, Dong Ah Giao, has built a breeding plant to accommodate 10,000 donkeys and has orders for more than one million donkey skins each year. The scale of production and sales of Colla Corii Asini is enormous. In addition to the largest Dong Ah Giao and Fu Giao factories, other small factories of Colla Corii Asini generally produce between 100-200 tons, with a national sales volume of 6,000-7,000 tons or less, and a market size of 23.6 billion RMB. According to estimates, by 2020, the size of the gum industry will double to 52.4 billion yuan in output value. The Ministry of Agriculture issued this year the “National Grass-fed Animal Husbandry Development Plan (2016-2020)”, the first time the donkey included in the special industry, industry insiders interpreted that China’s donkey industry may therefore usher in development. 2015-2020, the gum industry will likely maintain an annual growth rate of about 15 percent. Behind the huge market scale, it is implied that the prices of raw materials and final products are rising wildly. The worldwide scarcity of live donkey resources has led to the rising price of donkey skin and Colla Corii Asini. According to the Shandong Colla Corii Asini Association, the price per donkey skin in the Chinese market was only more than 20 yuan in 2000, and less than 500 yuan per donkey skin around 2010; while in 2014 it soared to 1500 yuan, and the average purchase price was more than 2600 yuan in 2015. In 2002-2006, there was a short period of low prices in the Agar market, mainly due to the intense competition among enterprises to fight price wars. At that time, some large Agaricus enterprises had joined hands to keep the price of Agaricus low, forcing some small enterprises out of the market. During the same period, with the continuous development of agricultural modernization and mechanization, there were fewer and fewer people breeding donkeys, and the stock of donkeys fell quickly, thus increasing the cost of purchasing donkey skins. At this time, in order to adapt to the low-price strategy, some manufacturers made the collared donkeys, taking horse skins, mixed skins and even industrial leathers to make collared donkeys, which still has a negative impact on the industry. In 2010, the price bureau of Shandong Province no longer applied government pricing to donkey skins, and the price increase of Colla Corii Asini in 2011 reached 60% at once, which was the most aggressive price increase in the past years. Specifically, the price of Dong Ah Gum in 2016 was 2,365 yuan/catty, while in 2015 it was 1,989 yuan/catty; the price of Fu brand gum was 1,980 yuan/catty in 2016 and 1,380 yuan/catty in 2015 – a rise of nearly 400 yuan and a rise of 600 yuan. Other brands of Agaricus are also increasing in price, with an average increase of about 30 percent. Not only are domestic donkeys in a bad situation, but even African donkeys are hard to escape In order to make Agaricus, 4 million donkeys are slaughtered in China every year, with an average of thousands of donkeys to be slaughtered every week. These donkeys usually do not live to be three years old before they become the target of skin stripping. The massive slaughter resulting from the massive demand is also threatening the number of donkeys in the country. According to statistics, the total stock of donkeys in China has fallen from 12.7 million in 1954 to 6.03 million in 2013, a decrease of about 110.6 percent, and is still declining at a rate of 3-5 percent per year. According to the BBC, Burkina Faso has banned the export of live donkeys and donkey skins to China and regulated the domestic slaughter of donkeys for the purpose of protecting the sustainability of the population. 1,000 donkey skins were exported in the first quarter of 2015, while 18,000 were exported in the fourth quarter; in the first half of 2016 alone, 65,000 skins were exported. As a poor country in western Africa, Burkina Faso has a total of 1.4 million donkeys, and exports have accounted for a significant proportion of the local donkey population. Since then, Niger has also announced a ban on continued donkey exports to China. Last year Niger already exported 27,000 donkeys to China, and that number reached 80,000 this year. Due to the strong demand, the price of a donkey skin has risen from US$4 a few years ago to US$50, and the price of a donkey has gone from US$34 in the past to US$100 to US$145 today. Locally, donkeys are used as transportation and occasionally as a source of meat. Excessive exports and slaughter have put the local donkey herd at risk of extinction. Chinese doctors tout the value of Agaricus as basically non-existent, and there is a proliferation of counterfeit products. With such expensive Agaricus, it must be very useful. The truth will make people who bought Colla Corii Asini heartbroken: after spending money on white powder, the Colla Corii Asini you buy may not have the nutritional value of cabbage. The main component of Colla Corii Asini, like many other foods, is protein, with crude protein and collagen accounting for 75.1% and 48.21% of Colla Corii Asini respectively. Although Colla Corii Asini is also rich in many amino acids, the proportion of essential amino acids is very small, only 15.98%-20.22%. As animal skin products, collagen similar to that in gum can be obtained by treating pig skin, sheep skin or cow skin with the same method of boiling gum. Collagen, like other proteins, must be transformed through the digestive tract to be absorbed by the body and is not too special. Nutritionally, it does not meet the body’s need for amino acids and is an inferior protein, used only as an additive in the food industry in most countries. The “magical” Colla Corii Asini is actually not much more noble than ordinary food. The claim that Colla Corii Asini contains special “mysterious ingredients” does not hold water from a scientific point of view. The process of making Colla Corii Asini is to repeatedly boil the treated donkey skin with water and concentrate the paste. Under the simple heating conditions of firewood boiling, the food components can only undergo general reactions such as cross-linking or hydrolysis, and no new medicinal elements can be produced. Therefore, gum, which lacks medicinal ingredients, has little effect in raising human white blood cells and platelets, and is not very effective in improving the quality of life and physical condition of anemic patients. In addition, a large portion of the gum currently in circulation is of questionable quality. The donkey skin should be used to boil the gum, many manufacturers in order to save costs, but the production of leather offcuts, horse skin, cowhide, etc., and heavy metal substances contained in industrial products, is very likely to cause damage to the human body. A sampling inspection by Shandong Food and Drug Administration in 2015 detected a total of 2 batches of unqualified products with a high content of inorganic impurities, which indicates that manufacturers have added non-biological additives in the production process. Macau Daily reported this year a market sampling results of Colla Corii Asini products, found that four batches of Chinese herbal medicine “Colla Corii Asini” does not meet industry standards, and adulterated with kraft source ingredients, showing that manufacturers suspected of adulteration. Previously, there are also scholars have done a special analysis of the raw material composition of Colla Corii Asini. In the 31 samples of Colla Corii Asini, Colla Corii Asini, granules and oral liquid tested, six batches of samples did not all detect the four characteristic amino acids of Colla Corii Asini, which means they actually do not contain any donkey skin ingredients. The only one that met the amino acid content requirements of the 2010 version of the National Pharmacopoeia was one case of Agaricus blazei. However, even if the content requirement of the National Pharmacopoeia was reduced to the limit of 1%, only 13 samples met the standard, with a passing rate of 41.9%. In addition to the few active ingredients, poor quality gum is more likely to contain chromium, lead, mercury, arsenic and other harmful substances. Chromium mainly comes from the production process to reduce costs and the use of leather shoes, belts, leather bags and other trimmings, lead, mercury, arsenic is mainly from illegal additives. Long-term excessive intake of lead, mercury, arsenic and other harmful elements will lead to immune system disorders, and cause neurological, endocrine, liver, kidney system damage, and even cause tumors. And although chromium is an essential trace element, but chromium intake once over the limit, will cause dermatitis, hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, acute kidney failure, lung cancer and other diseases. Spend a high price, but not receive the miraculous effect, but also may cause harm to the body. It is time for people to wake up to the mania of gum.