Across cultures, food and medicine have long overlapped, particularly in traditions shaped by pre-modern understandings of the body. In parts of China and Korea, two especially confronting examples –virgin boy eggs and ttongsul – sit at the far edge of that overlap. What links them is not just their perceived medicinal value, but the role of children as symbolic sources of purity, vitality, and restorative power.
Virgin Boy Eggs (China)
In eastern China, particularly in Zhejiang province, virgin boy eggs (童子蛋) are a seasonal delicacy associated with spring. Eggs are soaked and boiled in the collected urine of prepubescent boys, typically sourced from local schools. The practice is centuries old, rooted in traditional Chinese medical beliefs that emphasise balance within the body, especially the regulation of “heat” and “cold.” The urine of young boys, considered “pure” and yang in nature, is thought to carry cooling properties that can reduce excess internal heat.
Locals claim the eggs can improve circulation, prevent heatstroke, and even invigorate the body after winter. Despite growing scrutiny and discomfort from outsiders – and scepticism from modern medicine – the dish still appears in some areas as a nostalgic or cultural artefact, though its consumption is far from widespread.
Poo Wine (Korea)
In Korea, ttongsul (똥술) represents another, even rarer, example of bodily substances used therapeutically. This traditional rice wine, historically infused with small amounts of fermented faecal matter – often from children – was once believed to have medicinal applications.
Records suggest it was used in folk medicine to treat ailments such as bone fractures, bruising, and internal pain. The logic, again, draws from older frameworks of healing: the idea that the body itself contains curative properties, and that youth in particular embodies a kind of untainted vitality.
Unlike virgin boy eggs, however, ttongsul has largely disappeared from contemporary Korean life, surviving more as a curiosity occasionally referenced in media than as a living tradition.
Bodily waste as tonics
Both practices are difficult to separate from the historical contexts that produced them. Before the rise of modern biomedicine, many societies relied on empirical observation, symbolic reasoning, and inherited knowledge systems to make sense of illness and recovery.
This logic is not unique to China or Korea. Across the world, there are echoes of similar beliefs. In early modern Europe, for instance, so-called “urine therapy” involved the consumption or topical use of urine to treat a range of conditions, from wounds to digestive issues. In parts of India, cow urine – considered sacred within Hindu traditions – has been used in Ayurvedic practices for its purported detoxifying properties.
Meanwhile, historical texts from various cultures document the use of animal dung, blood, or other bodily substances in medicinal preparations, often tied to ideas about vitality, transference, and renewal. Some are even used as perfumes.
The bizarre Asian logic of harnessing youth power
Within these frameworks, substances associated with youth – whether bodily fluids or otherwise – were often imbued with restorative potential. Children, not yet marked by age, labour, or vice, were seen as closer to an ideal state of balance. Their bodies, therefore, became unlikely sources of healing.
What distinguishes virgin boy eggs and ttongsul is the specificity of their source: children. This detail sharpens both the symbolic meaning and the modern discomfort surrounding them. Today, with advances in medical science and shifting cultural sensibilities, such practices are largely viewed through a lens of curiosity, scepticism, or even revulsion. Yet they also offer insight into how deeply food, belief, and the body have been intertwined across time.
Rather than dismissing these traditions outright, it is perhaps more useful to understand them as artefacts of a different way of seeing the world; one in which healing was as much about meaning and metaphor as it was about measurable efficacy.
In that sense, they remind us that what we consume has never been just about sustenance, but also about the stories we tell ourselves about health, purity, and the human body itself.
