He Shou Wu (Fo-Ti): History and Traditional Use

He Shou Wu is one of the most storied roots in Chinese herbal medicine, and almost everything memorable about it — even its name — comes from a folk legend about an old man whose white hair turned black again. This page separates what can actually be documented from what is tradition and folklore: where the plant's older names came from, the texts that first recorded it, the legend that gave it its name, how the labor-intensive black-bean processing tradition arose, how it reached the West as "Fo-Ti," and how modern chemistry and a sobering safety record finally caught up with a thousand-year-old reputation.

Table of Contents

  1. Names: From "Intertwining Vine" to "Mr. He's Black Hair"
  2. The Legend of Mr. He
  3. The Earliest Written Records
  4. A Tonic in the Chinese Materia Medica
  5. The Black-Bean Processing Tradition
  6. Arrival in the West as "Fo-Ti"
  7. The Modern Safety Reckoning
  8. From Tradition to Modern Research
  9. Research Papers and References
  10. Connections
  11. Featured Videos

Names: From "Intertwining Vine" to "Mr. He's Black Hair"

The herb sold today as He Shou Wu is the tuberous root of a climbing vine in the buckwheat family (Polygonaceae), known to science as Polygonum multiflorum Thunb. and, after later taxonomic revision, also as Reynoutria multiflora and Fallopia multiflora. The Latin epithet multiflorum — "many-flowered" — simply describes the plant's abundant sprays of tiny white flowers. The names that carry real history, though, are the Chinese ones, and they tell two different stories about the same plant.

Before it was ever called He Shou Wu, the vine was commonly known as jiaoteng — literally "intertwining vine" or "crossing creeper" — a plain, descriptive name for a plant whose stems twine and cross over one another as they climb. That older name never fully disappeared: in the Chinese pharmacy the dried stem of the plant is still sold under the name ye jiao teng ("night-crossing vine") and is used as a separate, calming remedy in its own right, distinct from the root. The survival of jiaoteng inside the stem-name ye jiao teng is a small but genuine fossil of the plant's pre-legend identity.

The famous name, He Shou Wu, came later and is usually translated as "Mr. He's Black Hair" or "Black-Haired Mr. He." The components are commonly read as He (a Chinese family surname), shou (head), and wu (black — the same character used for a crow). That translation, and the legend behind it, are repeated almost universally in the herbal literature; they should be understood as the traditional account of how the plant got its name rather than as an independently verifiable historical fact. What is not in doubt is that the name itself, once attached, fixed the herb's reputation for the next thousand years: a root that turns gray hair black again.

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The Legend of Mr. He

The origin story of He Shou Wu is one of the best-known legends in all of Chinese herbal medicine, and like most founding legends it survives in several versions that disagree on the details. The traditional core of the tale is this: a frail, sickly man surnamed He, who had been unable to father children and whose hair had turned white early, discovered a strange vine whose roots, taken regularly, restored his vitality, darkened his hair, and let him father children and live to a great old age. The plant was then named in his honor. Folklore holds that he had noticed the vine's stems twining together as if embracing — sometimes told as the male and female vines uniting at night — and that this is what prompted him to dig and try the root.

Beyond that shared core, the specifics drift from one telling to another, which is exactly what one expects of an oral legend later written down. In some accounts the man is called He Tianer or simply Tian Er; he is variously placed in Hebei province, said to be in his late fifties when he found the plant, and reported in some versions to have renamed himself "Neng Si" afterward. The age he supposedly reached ranges from about 130 to 160 years depending on the source, and several versions extend the story to his son and grandson, who took the same root and reportedly also lived long lives with full heads of black hair — one common version has a grandson named Shou Wu living to 130. Because these numbers and names cannot be confirmed and contradict one another, they are best read as the flourishes of a traditional tale, not as biography. There is, importantly, no historical "inventor" or single founder of the herb: like most traditional medicines, it emerged from accumulated folk use, and "Mr. He" is the legend's personification of that use, not a documented discoverer.

What the legend genuinely tells us is what early users valued the root for: dark hair, restored sexual and reproductive vitality, and long life. Those three claims — not the impossible ages — are the real historical signal, and they are precisely the uses that the later written materia medica went on to record in sober clinical language.

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The Earliest Written Records

The legend was committed to writing surprisingly early. It is traditionally attributed to a short account by the Tang-dynasty scholar Li Ao, usually titled something like He Shou Wu Lun ("An Account of He Shou Wu") and conventionally dated to roughly 813 CE. Li Ao's text is repeatedly cited as the source of the Mr. He story; the exact date and wording are reported with some variation across sources, so the date is best given as approximate. This account is named here as a historical source rather than as a modern citation.

The plant also entered the formal pharmacological literature in the Tang period. He Shou Wu is generally said to have been first recorded in the materia medica Ri Huazi Bencao, a Tang-dynasty herbal conventionally dated to around 713 CE, and it was then carried into the government-commissioned Kaibao Bencao (the "Materia Medica of the Kaibao Era"), compiled in 973 CE. A point of accuracy worth flagging: the Kaibao era and its Bencao belong to the early Song dynasty, not the Tang — the Song government commissioned the Kaibao compilation in 973 — even though He Shou Wu's first documented mention is the older, Tang-era Ri Huazi Bencao. The plant was later given a full treatment in the most influential Chinese pharmacopoeia of all, Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu ("Compendium of Materia Medica"), compiled in the late sixteenth century during the Ming dynasty. Modern review articles summarize this lineage by noting that He Shou Wu has been an entry in the Chinese materia medica "since the Tang dynasty, over 1,200 years ago."

Taken together, the documentary record is unusually good for a folk remedy: a named legend in writing by the early ninth century, a place in the official herbals of the tenth, and a detailed monograph in the sixteenth. The herb did not simply circulate in oral tradition — it was catalogued, classified, and prescribed by the leading medical authorities of successive Chinese dynasties.

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A Tonic in the Chinese Materia Medica

Once it entered the written tradition, He Shou Wu was classified within the framework of Chinese medicine as a tonic — specifically as a root that nourishes the Blood and supplements what that system calls the Liver and Kidney. In traditional theory the health and color of the hair were read as a direct reflection of the Blood and of the Kidney "essence" (Jing) that governs growth, reproduction, and aging; a root reputed to darken hair therefore made perfect sense, within that worldview, as a remedy that replenished essence. This is the traditional rationale, recorded here as tradition.

The recorded traditional uses map closely onto the values embedded in the legend. The prepared root was prescribed for premature graying and hair loss, for low-back and knee weakness, for dizziness with ringing in the ears, for declining reproductive and sexual function, and for the general decline of old age, while the raw root was used quite differently — chiefly as a remedy to moisten the intestines and relieve constipation, and as a topical treatment for sores, abscesses, and swollen lymph nodes (the condition old texts called scrofula). The modern LiverTox reference summarizes the inherited reputation plainly, listing He Shou Wu's historical uses as backache, dizziness, graying of the hair, constipation, and various liver and kidney complaints.

He Shou Wu is widely described in popular and commercial herbal writing as one of the great longevity tonics, and as a favorite of Daoist practitioners seeking to cultivate vitality. Those characterizations are commonly repeated and capture the herb's standing in the tradition, but they come largely from secondary herbal sources rather than from primary historical scholarship, so they are best treated as the received view of the herb's reputation rather than as precisely documented fact.

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The Black-Bean Processing Tradition

One feature of He Shou Wu's history is genuinely distinctive and is far more than folklore: the elaborate way the root is traditionally processed before it is used as a tonic. Chinese pharmacy draws a sharp line between the raw root (sheng He Shou Wu) and the prepared root (zhi He Shou Wu, also written Zhi He Shou Wu), and treats them almost as two different medicines. The transformation is achieved by a traditional processing method in which the sliced root is repeatedly stewed and steamed with the liquid of black soybeans until it is fully absorbed, then dried — a cycle that the classical instructions say should ideally be repeated up to nine times, turning the pale, starchy raw root dark reddish-brown to nearly black throughout.

What makes this old technique remarkable is that modern chemistry has confirmed it does something real. Analytical studies show that black-bean processing measurably changes the root's composition: the principal stilbene compound (the one abbreviated TSG, discussed below) decreases, while the root's polysaccharide content rises sharply — reported as roughly seven-fold higher in the processed root than in the raw, and the profile of the anthraquinone compounds shifts as well. Traditional practice held that processing made the root suitable for long-term tonic use and tempered its harsher, more purgative raw character; the chemistry broadly supports the idea that raw and prepared He Shou Wu are not interchangeable. This distinction is not a historical curiosity — as the safety section explains, it matters for liver safety, and it is frequently lost in the Western supplement market, where labels often do not say which form a product contains.

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Arrival in the West as "Fo-Ti"

For most of its history He Shou Wu was an East Asian medicine. It reached the Western herbal market comparatively recently and arrived wearing an unfamiliar name. In North America the herb is very widely sold as "Fo-Ti," a trade name that has no basis in traditional Chinese herbal nomenclature — it is not a translation or transliteration of any classical Chinese name for the plant, and it appears to have been coined in the Western supplement trade in the twentieth century. The result is a genuine point of confusion: the same root is sold as "He Shou Wu" in some shops and "Fo-Ti" in others, and a buyer may not realize they are the same plant.

The Western names also blur the all-important raw-versus-prepared distinction. A product labeled simply "Fo-Ti" may contain the raw root, the black-bean-prepared root, or an extract of uncertain processing, and the label frequently does not specify. The cluster of English and trade names the herb now travels under — Fo-Ti, Chinese knotweed, climbing knotweed, fleeceflower root, Ho Shou Wu, and various branded forms — reflects this somewhat haphazard introduction to the West and is one reason the herb deserves careful sourcing rather than casual purchase.

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The Modern Safety Reckoning

The most important recent chapter in He Shou Wu's history is not a story of rediscovery but of caution. Over the past two decades, as the herb spread worldwide as a supplement, a growing medical literature has linked it to drug-induced liver injury (DILI). This is a real and documented turn in the herb's long history, and an honest account of its past has to include it.

A systematic review of published case reports and case series, by Lei and colleagues in 2015, gathered the global record of liver damage associated with Polygonum multiflorum and found a clear "dose–time–toxicity" pattern: injury was strongly associated with long-term use and with excessive doses. Most patients in the reviewed cases recovered once they stopped taking the herb, but the review documented serious outcomes — including cases requiring liver transplantation and a number of deaths — underscoring that this is not a trivial risk. The U.S. National Institutes of Health's LiverTox database carries its own monograph on the herb, attributing the injury chiefly to its anthraquinone constituents (such as emodin, rhein, and chrysophanol) and noting that a specific genetic marker, the HLA-B*35:01 allele, has emerged as a major susceptibility factor — evidence that for many people the reaction is an idiosyncratic, immune-related response rather than a simple dose poisoning.

This safety history loops back to the processing tradition. The raw root carries the higher load of the compounds implicated in toxicity, and the traditional black-bean preparation that reduces them is exactly the step most likely to be skipped or unverifiable in a modern supplement. The practical, honest lesson from the herb's recent history is therefore straightforward: He Shou Wu is a powerful traditional medicine with a genuine liver-injury signal, the raw and prepared forms are not the same, and anyone considering it should treat sourcing, form, dose, and duration as serious questions and seek qualified medical guidance — a fuller, practical treatment of these risks is given in the dedicated Liver Health and Hepatotoxicity Warning article.

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From Tradition to Modern Research

The thread that runs from the legend of Mr. He to the modern laboratory is, in one sense, unbroken: the traditional claims about hair, vitality, and aging are exactly the questions modern researchers have gone looking for. The bridge between the two is a single compound. The root's most studied constituent is a water-soluble stilbene with the unwieldy name 2,3,5,4'-tetrahydroxystilbene-2-O-β-D-glucoside, mercifully abbreviated TSG. It is generally described as the principal and most distinctive active ingredient of He Shou Wu, and it is structurally a close cousin of resveratrol, the much-publicized antioxidant of red grapes — a useful clue that this old anti-aging herb and the modern resveratrol story belong to the same chemical family. TSG is now important enough that it serves as a quality-control marker for He Shou Wu in the official Chinese Pharmacopoeia.

Contemporary review articles survey a large body of laboratory and animal work on TSG and on the whole root — spanning antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, cardiovascular, bone, and hair-related effects — that offers plausible mechanisms for the traditional reputation. It is essential to be honest about the limits of this evidence: much of it is preclinical (cell and animal studies), rigorous human clinical trials remain limited, and the same chemistry that interests researchers also includes the compounds tied to liver injury. Tradition raised the questions; research is still working through the answers. The detailed compounds, mechanisms, and the practical benefits and cautions are taken up in the companion Benefits articles and on the main He Shou Wu (Fo-Ti) page; this article's purpose is the history — how a legend about an old man's black hair became one of the most studied, and most cautioned-about, roots in the Chinese pharmacopoeia.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines key peer-reviewed reviews of Polygonum multiflorum (He Shou Wu) and its principal compound TSG with curated PubMed topic-search links into the historical, ethnobotanical, and safety literature. Historical primary texts (Li Ao's He Shou Wu Lun, the Ri Huazi Bencao, the Kaibao Bencao, and Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu) are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only stable links (DOI, PMID, NCBI, and PubMed searches) are hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

  1. Qian J, Feng C, Wu Z, Yang Y, Gao X, Zhu L, Liu Y, Gao Y. Phytochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology and detoxification of Polygonum multiflorum Thunb.: a comprehensive review. Frontiers in Pharmacology. 2024;15:1427019. — doi:10.3389/fphar.2024.1427019
  2. Zhu C, Li J, Tang W, Li Y, Lin C, Peng D, Yang C. 2,3,5,4'-Tetrahydroxystilbene-2-O-β-D-glucoside (TSG) from Polygonum multiflorum Thunb.: A Systematic Review on Anti-Aging. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2025;26(7):3381. — doi:10.3390/ijms26073381
  3. Wang C, Dai S, Gong L, Fu K, Ma C, Liu Y, Zhou H, Li Y. A Review of Pharmacology, Toxicity and Pharmacokinetics of 2,3,5,4'-Tetrahydroxystilbene-2-O-β-D-Glucoside. Frontiers in Pharmacology. 2022;12:791214. — doi:10.3389/fphar.2021.791214
  4. Lei X, Chen J, Ren J, Li Y, Zhai J, Mu W, Zhang L, Zheng W, Tian G, Shang H. Liver Damage Associated with Polygonum multiflorum Thunb.: A Systematic Review of Case Reports and Case Series. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2015;2015:459749. — doi:10.1155/2015/459749 (PMID 25648693)
  5. Polygonum multiflorum — LiverTox: Clinical and Research Information on Drug-Induced Liver Injury. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Last updated 2020. — NCBI Bookshelf: LiverTox — Polygonum multiflorum
  6. He Shou Wu / Polygonum multiflorum — history and traditional use — PubMed: Polygonum multiflorum traditional use and history
  7. Polygonum multiflorum in historical Bencao (materia medica) literature — PubMed: Heshouwu in historical Bencao literature
  8. Polygonum multiflorum processing (black soybean / pao zhi) and chemical change — PubMed: Polygonum multiflorum processing and chemistry
  9. Polygonum multiflorum hepatotoxicity and HLA-B*35:01 susceptibility — PubMed: Polygonum multiflorum liver injury and susceptibility
  10. Tetrahydroxystilbene glucoside (TSG) — antioxidant and anti-aging activity — PubMed: TSG antioxidant and anti-aging activity

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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