A Letter from the Studio · Yang Wang

What an Albanian Grandmother Taught Me About Cupping

A personal reflection on tradition, memory, and what has always been home.

By Yang Wang · Chinese Massage – Tai Chi Tirana

It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon at the studio when I first noticed.

A client — a teacher from Tirana, in her fifties — was lying on the table after her cupping session. The marks were that deep purple kind, the ones that show up on a body that has been carrying tension for too long. She looked at them in the mirror and laughed.

Then she said something that stopped me.

"My grandmother used to do this for us. With glass cups. In the village."

In China, where I am from, this would not have surprised anyone. Every Chinese grandmother knows about 拔罐 — ba guan, "pulling cups". But when I came to Albania in 2020, I had assumed I was bringing something new. Something foreign. A Chinese gift to a curious country.

That afternoon, I started asking questions.

I Started Asking Everyone

In the weeks that followed, I asked everyone. My clients. My neighbors on Rruga Astrit Sulejman Balluku. The man at the fruit stand. The woman who runs the qebaptore around the corner.

The answer was almost always the same. "Ah yes — kupa. Or ventuza. My grandmother. My aunt. In the village."

In nearly every Albanian family, somewhere, there was a memory. Someone's nënë who would warm a glass cup over a candle and place it on a sore back. Always glass cups. Always at home. Always with the same purpose: to pull the badness out of the body.

But here was the thing that puzzled me.

In the villages, the practice was alive — quietly, in kitchens, by grandmothers. In Tirana, in Durrës, in Shkodër, almost no one was doing it anymore. People spoke about it the way you might speak about an old recipe — with affection, but with a small distance.

In China, cupping has never gone away. Every neighborhood has someone who does it. So why, in Albania, had it become a "grandmother's thing"? Why had the cities let go of something the villages had so carefully kept?

What I Found That Night

I am not a historian. I am a practitioner. But that question stayed with me, and one Tuesday night I sat down with my computer, made a cup of tea, and started reading.

What I found surprised me more than anything any client had ever told me.

Hippocrates

The first surprise was Hippocrates of Kos — born around 460 BC, the "father of medicine". He practiced cupping. Not as a curiosity. Not as folk medicine. As one of his main tools. He used it for back pain, neck pain, lung problems, period pain — the same things I treat in sessions today.

I sat there with my tea, thinking: Hippocrates? The Greek? Greece is not far from Tirana. You can drive there in a few hours.

Galen, and a Roman Road Through Illyricum

Galen of Pergamon (129–200 AD) was the most influential doctor in European history before the Renaissance. He treated Roman emperors. He was a passionate practitioner of cupping and bloodletting. He even publicly criticized other doctors who did not practice cupping enough.

And here is what I had not understood: the Roman Empire reached Albania. The province was called Illyricum. Roman doctors trained in Galen's methods walked the same roads I walk now. They cupped patients in the same towns where my clients' grandmothers — centuries later — would cup their grandchildren.

The tradition had not come from somewhere else. It had been here.

The Barbershop Revelation

The third surprise is the one I keep telling everyone about.

In medieval Europe, cupping and bloodletting moved into the monasteries. Monks performed them for centuries — until 1163, when a Church council decided priests should not be drawing blood. So the practice moved to the barbers.

For the next six hundred years, barbers across Europe did not just cut hair. They pulled teeth. They cupped patients. They drew blood. They were known as barber-surgeons.

I want every Albanian reading this to do something for me.

The next time you walk through Tirana — or Durrës, or Shkodër, or Korçë — count the barbershops. Look at the spinning red-and-white poles outside them. Every single one is a 900-year-old advertisement for cupping and bloodletting. We just stopped seeing it.

Five Hundred Years of Hijama

For five and a half centuries — from 1385 to 1912 — Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman medicine had a deep tradition of cupping, called hijama. The Turkish surgeon Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu wrote in detail about it in the fifteenth century. His techniques were practiced in every major Ottoman city. Tirana. Shkodër. Berat. Gjirokastër.

So when an Albanian grandmother heated a glass cup and placed it on her grandchild's back in 1962, she was doing something her own grandmother had learned from her own grandmother, in an unbroken line going back through Ottoman hijama, Byzantine medicine, Roman doctors, Galen, and Hippocrates.

Two and a half thousand years of practice. On this soil.

I came here in 2020 thinking I was bringing a Chinese gift. I was wrong. I was returning something that had been home all along.

What I Want You to Know

This is what I love most about Albania, and one of the reasons I have stayed.

The country is generous in a way that surprised me when I first arrived. Mikpritja — the welcome you give a guest — is real here. People offered me food before they knew my name. Friendship before I had earned it. They taught me Albanian by repeating words patiently, the way my own grandmother in Liaoning would have taught a child.

But what I did not expect was that Albania would also welcome my work this way — as something familiar. Not strange. Not foreign. As something that fit.

When I sit with a client at the studio and place the cups, I am not introducing anything new. I am continuing a conversation between Albanian bodies and these techniques that started when the Romans built their road through Illyricum. The grandmothers were not wrong to do it. The cities are not wrong to come back to it.

And I am not the one who brought it. I am the one who happens to know its modern Chinese form — the meridian theory, the diagnostic precision, the clean equipment — and I am grateful, every day, that Albania has welcomed me to bring that form back home.

If your grandmother used to do kupa in the village — yes, this is the same thing.

If you have always thought of cupping as something exotic from China — yes, it is also Greek, and Roman, and Ottoman, and Albanian.

If you have a tight neck after too many hours at a screen — well, Hippocrates would have known what to do. So would your grandmother. So do I.

Come and see us, on Rruga Astrit Sulejman Balluku. The tradition is older than the building. And it is yours.