Scorpions soaked in alcohol await customers on the road to Bago. Pic: Minh Zaw

ABOUT 65 kilometres (40 miles) north of Yangon, along the highway to Bago, is a small village named Banda with a line of stalls selling products sure to send a chill down the spines of most passers by.

Lining the shelves of about 10 shops in the village are bottles of various shapes and sizes in which lemon rinds, black scorpions and huge centipedes are soaking in home-brewed rice wine.

The shops sometimes attract tourists who are enticed by the sheer grotesquerie of the wares, but more often draw locals and visitors alike who are interested in the perceived medicinal effects of rice wine that is permeated by the essence of creepy critters straight out of your worst nightmare.

“This medicine is good for treating swelling, paralytic stroke and tympanitis,” said Daw Myint Myint Khin, the keeper of one of the shops, as she pointed to a bottle of wine-soaked lemons. “You have to apply it to the part of the body where the problem is occurring,” she said.

She said she does good business making the medicine and selling it to both Myanmar and visitors.

“I sell about 10 bottles a day to locals who want to cure paralytic diseases at prices ranging from K1500 to K8000,” she said.

Daw Myint Myint Khin said that while locals are mostly interested in using the lemon-based medicine to apply to ailing body parts, many tourists from China buy bottles of scorpion and centipede wine to drink.

“Some Chinese visitors will buy a bottle and drink it on the spot,” she said. She explained that live scorpions and centipedes are first placed in distilled alcohol to remove the poison before they are put in the bottles with rice wine.

Chinese men especially like the medicine because it stimulates their hormones, Daw Myint Myint Khin said.

She said the medicine she sells was formulated by a traditional practitioner named U Ba Tun, who specialises in curing paralytic diseases.

Daw Myint Myint Khin’s husband, Ko Zaw Oo, said they were considering expanding their line of products at the shop.

“We’re trying to collect live snakes to soak in alcohol because Chinese tourists like that as well,” he said.