Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001—2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China—Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why —  apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin —  locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post—colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.