lemon lover is right about the 100 mg vitamin C tablets. I bought those once but never found them again in Beijing.

Vitamin C is water soluble so your excess intake is pissed away.

I take 1000 mg Vitamin C as suggested by my cardiologist in 1996 after a series of ischemic heart attacks, one a month, where no cause was evident. In 2014, The VA determined Agent Orange caused my heart attacks.

From wikipedia:

"A meta-analysis of 44 clinical trials (2014) has shown a significant positive effect of vitamin C on endothelial function when taken at doses greater than 500 mg per day. The researchers noted that the effect of vitamin C supplementation appeared to be dependent on health status, with stronger effects in those at higher cardiovascular disease risk."

So, lemon lover 大夫, I will continue to consume unnecessary vitamin C at 7 cents a day because I haven't another heart attack since I started doing so in 1996.

BTW pharmacy prices in Kunming seem to be fixed as I found no difference from one pharmacy to the next.

@Geezer

I wrote:
"unless on medical indication".

The problem is they hide them because there is more money to be made on the fancy ones.

Vitamins, and other minerals that our home markets might categorize as food supplements, are classified as pharmaceutical in China.
This explains the prices being fixed,as pharmacy prices are fixed in China. One reason why there seems to be more pharmacies than convenience stores. There is no real competition.
The downside is that the barriers to entry to the China market are very high. One reasons why imported supplements are so expensive. Basically, every product you wish to import must go through the Chinese equivalent of FDA approval. Import agents cannot afford this, and once the big companies have done this, there is little competition in the imported product market segment. Chinese FDA approval was about USD 6000 per product when we looked at doing this 10 years ago. If you consider that even a basic range of supplements is 20 products, you can see why agents avoid this sector.

tiger: That sounds about right. My involvement, other than get a small percentage on shipments for eight years ended, ended when they formed their venture. The pharma guy reported and paid me quarterly but it was slow at the beginning.

As a rule, I avoided food and medical stuff due to high regulation risk. I had a SOE company in Zhuhai that develop a product that contained aloe, 100% duty on content, and alcohol, both a hazard material (fire) and with FDA medical exposure. US customs required a detailed chemical analysis as formality. The Chinese side felt the product formulation was secret and refused. Nearly a year, four trips to China, packaging design, landing a USD 600K first order with about USD $25K out of my pocket, I gave up. Lesson learned: Stick to being an agent no matter how good the margins looked.

Also Walmart sells vitamins and fish oil. Possibly someone has mentioned this already but just in case not.

@shara: So does the pharmacy down the block from me.