Almost three years after opening his Market Street store, Ning's acupuncture, massage, and herbal remedies have been catching on among Borderers. Some still view Chinese medicine with scepticism, but with acupuncture now often available on the NHS, aspects of it have clearly become more widely accepted.

Ning says: "Pain problems are the most common, like shoulder pain and back pain. Also depression, stress, this kind of problem. Most of them are going to conventional doctors and some of them think I'm the last try for them. For example, the pain problem, the GP gives them just a pain killer, some of them take these for several months and then people come here to try acupuncture – it is quite good for relieving this.

"A lot of stress and depression patients come for acupuncture because in Western medicine you get antidepressant drugs and years and years of taking these pills – it's not good for the stomach, and you get lots of side effects. Acupuncture is a nice treatment for those, it's much more natural."

Chinese medicine is based on the concept of qi (pronounced 'chee'), or life-force, and the idea that the five elements of fire, water, metal, earth and wood must be balanced within the body.

Chinese doctors believe that energy lines, or meridians, run through the body, and can become blocked, causing ill health. Acupuncture needles help to unblock these meridians, allowing the qi to flow freely and restore health.

"From this point of view," Ning says, "acupuncture is just to regulate this balance, so that the human body is in a harmonious state."

He first became interested in Chinese medicine at the age of five, when he would watch his uncle creating herbal preparations in his home town of Lanzhou in north-west China. He went on to college to study traditional herbal medicine for five years, and acupuncture for three.

Interestingly, he decided to work in the UK because it would enable him to practice a more 'pure' form of traditional medicine than in his home country, where practitioners now combine traditional medicine with modern, Western treatments – a development which some see as diluting the craft.

Ning comments: "Before I came to the UK, I was invited to go overseas to many places like the United States, Australia, and European countries to visit Chinese clinics and I think it's quite different because in China the policy has changed quite a lot.

"Many Chinese doctors use Chinese medicine as well as Western medicine to treat people, but overseas they regard Chinese medicine as purely traditional, so it's quite separate. It's more pure here.