Ye Ming Sha
StarVespertilio superans Thomas
Traditionally used for
- Eye health
- Digestion
☯ TCM Properties
Clears Liver Heat and Brightens the Eyes; Invigorates Blood and Dispels Stasis; Resolves Accumulation; Reduces Childhood Nutritional Impairment
Traditional Chinese Uses
Ye Ming Sha (bat droppings) is a cool substance with a strong affinity for the Liver and eyes. In Chinese medicine, it clears Liver Heat and disperses Blood stasis to treat visual disorders — particularly night blindness, blurred vision, and corneal opacity from Liver-Heat-Blood patterns. It also has applications in pediatric digestive complaints. Despite its unusual source, it has been documented in the Chinese materia medica since the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing.
Relationships
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Botanical Description
Ye Ming Sha is the dried faeces of insectivorous bats, traditionally collected from species such as Vespertilio superans, Pipistrellus and Murina found in caves across northern and central China. The material consists of small, oblong, dark brown to blackish granules of irregular shape, typically 5-10 mm long, friable when crushed and composed largely of undigested insect chitin (wings, legs and elytra). The granules have a slightly rank, musky odour and a faintly salty, gritty taste. Because the bats feed almost exclusively on night-flying insects, the faeces are rich in fragments of moth and beetle exoskeletons, and Chinese pharmacopoeial standards require that material be free of soil, sand and rodent droppings before processing for medicinal use.
Active Constituents
Uric acid
PurineUric acid is the principal nitrogenous waste in bat faeces and is the compound most consistently reported from this drug. No therapeutic activity has ever been attributed to it in this context; it is a marker of what the material is rather than an active principle.
Urea
Carbamide (organic nitrogen compound)Reported alongside uric acid as an excretory nitrogen compound of the faeces. It carries no established pharmacological role at the doses used.
Cholesterol
SterolListed in the older Chinese analytical literature as a constituent of the faeces. The reports are secondary and no quantitative modern analysis of the drug has been published.
Insect cuticle debris (chitin and associated arthropod protein)
Aminopolysaccharide and structural proteinThe bulk of the drug is undigested arthropod fragments; DNA metabarcoding of commercial Faeces Vespertilionis recovers mainly Diptera and Lepidoptera, plus Cicadidae, together with Arachnida and Malacostraca reads. This is why the material is a gritty dark powder rather than a homogeneous substance, and it means the drug's composition follows the bats' local diet and cannot be standardised.
⚠ Drug Interactions
Corticosteroids, TNF-alpha inhibitors, calcineurin inhibitors and other immunosuppressants
Bat guano is a recognised environmental substrate for Histoplasma capsulatum: the mycelial phase grows in nitrogen-rich, humid, dark guano-enriched material, and infection occurs when microconidia are aerosolised by disturbing it and then inhaled. Once inhaled, body temperature drives the mycelial-to-yeast conversion. Outcome depends on host immunity and inoculum, ranging from a self-limiting febrile illness to disseminated multi-system disease; patients on immunosuppressive drugs sit at the severe end of that range. Documented human exposures come from caves, guano mining, tunnels and guano-fertilised indoor cannabis growing, all of which are the same handling-and-inhalation route a dispensary or patient would face. There is no published study of Histoplasma in commercial Ye Ming Sha specifically, so the evidence is inferential from the substrate, not from the drug.
Clinical note: Do not dispense the raw drug to immunosuppressed patients, and do not let them or anyone else grind, sieve or sweep it. Anyone handling it should do so wetted down, in a mask, with ventilation. Refer any febrile respiratory illness after exposure for histoplasmosis workup and say that guano was handled.
Faeces of Hipposideros armiger, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum and other bat species sold as Ye Ming Sha
DNA metabarcoding of commercial Faeces Vespertilionis samples collected across China identified five bat species, dominated by Hipposideros armiger (mean relative abundance 59.3 percent) and Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (24.1 percent). Vespertilio superans, the species the pharmacopoeial name specifies, was not among the dominant sources. The drug is therefore a mixed-origin animal product whose actual species composition is set by whichever colony the guano was swept from. This matters beyond taxonomy: the genus Rhinolophus is the recognised natural reservoir of sarbecoviruses, and a comparative genomic analysis of betacoronaviruses explicitly identified the commercial trade in bat species used in Chinese medicine as a zoonotic-spillover risk and recommended changing the practice. The same metabarcoding study also flagged houseflies and carpet beetles in the samples as hygiene-related contaminants.
Clinical note: Treat any Ye Ming Sha on the market as unidentified bat guano of mixed species, not as Vespertilio superans. There is no way to verify species by eye. This is a strong reason to substitute a plant drug for the same indication rather than source it.
Historical Texts
Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing
Han dynastyRi Hua Zi Ben Cao
Song dynastyReferences
- Xiaoying Zhang, Wenxiu Wang, Xiaolei Yu, Yuxia Liu, Wenhui Li, Hongxia Yang, Ying Cui, Xiaoxuan Tian. Biological composition analysis of a natural medicine, Faeces Vespertilionis, with complex sources using DNA metabarcoding . Scientific Reports (2022) [DOI]
- T.M. Wassenaar, Y. Zou. 2019_nCoV/SARS-CoV-2: rapid classification of betacoronaviruses and identification of Traditional Chinese Medicine as potential origin of zoonotic coronaviruses . Letters in Applied Microbiology (2020) [DOI]
- Huan Du, Ting-ting Kuang, Shuang Qiu, Tong Xu, Chen-Lei Gang Huan, Gang Fan, Yi Zhang. Fecal medicines used in traditional medical system of China: a systematic review of their names, original species, traditional uses, and modern investigations . Chinese Medicine (2019) [DOI]
This information is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before using any herbal remedy, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, or taking medications.
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