Therapeutic Massage

Therapeutic massage in China has a very long history, and was described in huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Manual o fInternal Medicine), the ouldest extant medical treatise. There is passage in the Manual which states that " if the body is benumbed was a result of the blocking of the jingluo, it may be cured by massage". The mames of ten volumes of The Yellow Emperor and Qi Bo's Treaties on Massage were listed in The History of the Han Dynasty written by Ban Gu (32-92 A.D) of the Eastern Han dynasty, by the time of the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907), special massage departments were established in the imperial court and the subject was included in the medical curriculum.

Further development took place in subsequent dynasties. The influx of Western medicine after the Opium War (1840-1842) enriched Chinese medical science, but for a variety of reasons, traditional Chinese medicine, including massage, became the object of prejudice and misunderstanding.

With the founding of the People's republic in 1949 , traditional Chinese medicine gained a new lease on life and developed under the policy of combining Chinese and Western medicine. Massage therapy has also gained wide acceptance in clinical practice.