A Century and a Decade: Two Very Different Paths Chinese Medicine Brands Took Abroad

Disclaimer: This page is for informational and historical purposes only and is not medical advice. It describes where and when products were registered or marketed, according to the sources cited — it does not evaluate, confirm, or deny the effectiveness of any product for any condition, including COVID-19. These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or any other regulator. Consult a qualified physician with any health questions.

Two products show up again and again in any scan of Chinese-heritage medicine brands with a real overseas footprint — and they got there by almost opposite routes. One took roughly a century and a half, spreading through migration, family enterprise, and organic retail expansion. The other reached a comparable spread of countries in roughly a decade, through systematic pharmaceutical regulatory filings, mostly triggered by a single global event. Neither is one of the old-brand houses this site otherwise covers — Tiger Balm is a Singapore corporation with roots in a Yangon Chinese pharmacist family, and Lianhua Qingwen is a modern pharmaceutical product, not a centuries-old house. Read together, their public records make an unusually clean before/after case study in how "overseas presence" can be built two different ways.

The century path: Tiger Balm

Tiger Balm's own account traces the product to a Yangon (Rangoon) pharmacist family of Chinese descent, more than 150 years ago, with the business later restructured and globalized under Haw Par Corporation, headquartered in Singapore. By the company's own disclosure, Tiger Balm products now reach more than 100 countries — a figure that comes from Haw Par itself, not an independent audit. The company's disclosed approach to entering a new market is incremental: register and establish one or two specific products first, then expand the range once that foothold is working, rather than launching a full catalog at once.

That slow-build pattern shows up in local retail records across this site's other research. In Bangkok, a Thai FDA registration record lists a licensed entity for Tiger Balm products. In Manila, the brand runs an independent Philippine Facebook page as its local retail-facing channel — see this site's piece on the three Southeast Asian Chinatown pharmacy quarters for how that fits alongside Binondo's older apothecary shops. None of this is a claim about current sales volume or market share — it is a description of a company that, over a very long timeline, built a real multi-country retail and regulatory footprint one market at a time.

One identity note worth stating plainly: because Tiger Balm's origin story runs through Yangon before Singapore, it is sometimes lumped together with other "medicated balm" brands that are genuinely Burmese-rooted, or mistaken for a mainland Chinese brand. Neither reading is accurate. Tiger Balm is best described as a Chinese-diaspora enterprise, founded outside mainland China and globalized from Singapore — not a mainland Chinese old-brand house, and not a Myanmar-national brand either.

The decade path: Lianhua Qingwen

Lianhua Qingwen (连花清瘟), made by Shijiazhuang-based Yiling Pharmaceutical (以岭药业), took a different route entirely. Company statements and press materials describe registrations or approvals in close to 30 countries and territories within about a decade, concentrated heavily in the period around the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries named across company and regulatory-adjacent sources include Canada, Russia, Singapore, Kuwait, Brazil, Indonesia, Mozambique, Romania, Thailand, Ecuador, Laos, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Mauritius — a spread across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia that is unusually wide for a single product launched this recently. Separately, Yiling also signed an agreement covering four different patented traditional-medicine products (not Lianhua Qingwen itself) for registration in Nigeria under a "herbal and natural medicine" category, according to the company's own announcement and industry-media coverage — Nigeria's national drug regulator's original registration record for this was not independently located in this research, so that specific approval is recorded here as a company-and-trade-press claim, not a confirmed regulatory filing.

This is where the "systematic filings" story gets more complicated once you look at individual countries' own records rather than the company's summary count.

What Kuwait and Thailand each say, in their own words. Company and press materials describe a 2020 Kuwaiti approval framed as the first instance of a Chinese patent medicine gaining international approval related to COVID-19. Thailand's own drug regulator tells a narrower story about the same product: a 2020 Thai FDA notice confirms Lianhua Qingwen's registration as an herbal product for a cold/flu-related indication, and explicitly states that the product was not approved to treat COVID-19 in Thailand. This page does not attempt to reconcile those two framings into a single verdict on efficacy — that is outside its scope, and outside what a museum-style showcase site should adjudicate. What the two records together show is that "internationally approved" can mean different things in different jurisdictions, and a company's global summary count can flatten those differences.

What "registered" doesn't guarantee: the Philippines case. The Philippine FDA's public verification portal shows the clearest single example of registration not equaling a stable, ongoing channel. Lianhua Qingwen's Philippine registration, number THPR-50, lists Phil. Archipelago International Trading Corp. as both importer and distributor of record, was issued 2021-04-20, and carries a publicly recorded expiry date of 2025-08-07 — a date this research did not find superseded by a later renewal record. The product also contains Ephedra, a controlled substance category in the Philippines: a 2024 Dangerous Drugs Board regulation extended, by one more year, a temporary removal of this specific product from the Philippines' dangerous-drugs list, and separately restated the THPR-50 expiry date in the same document. Smaller Philippine retailers still carried product listings into 2026, with at least one requiring a prescription upload before purchase — which shows continued small-scale retail visibility, but says nothing about whether that stock corresponds to a currently valid registration. The Philippines' own 2020–2021 approval generated real visibility at the time — including a public note from China's embassy in Manila — but the public record does not show that initial approval automatically translating into an uninterrupted channel five years later.

Two paths, read side by side

	Tiger Balm	Lianhua Qingwen
Time to reach broad international presence	~150 years	~1 decade
Mechanism	Migration, family enterprise, organic multi-market retail expansion, incremental per-market registration	Systematic pharmaceutical regulatory filings, concentrated around a single global health event
Company's own claimed reach	100+ countries (company disclosure)	Close to 30 countries/territories (company and press materials)
What public records complicate	Little in this research — the slow-build pattern is well corroborated locally	Country-by-country approval scope varies (Kuwait vs. Thailand framings differ); at least one registration (Philippines) shows a public expiry date without a located renewal
Corporate/brand identity	Singapore corporation, Yangon-Chinese origin — not a mainland China old-brand house	Modern pharmaceutical product from a mainland China company — not a centuries-old house

Put side by side, these aren't two examples of the same phenomenon at different speeds. One is a genuinely old, slow, market-by-market retail story; the other is a genuinely fast, regulatory-filing-driven story shaped heavily by one global event — and its country-level record shows both real reach and real gaps between "approved" and "currently, stably available." Both are real "overseas success" stories by different definitions of success, and neither definition should be assumed to apply to the other.