Farmers beam, picking ginseng flowers in a breeding field, published in The Korea Times Sept. 11, 1994. Korea Times Archive

In the early 1900s, Charles M. Root, an aptly named American, wrote, “When China thinks about [Korea] it is not about its political status, its queer customs or its [strategic] importance to China, but the ginseng that comes from [Korean] mountains.” He added, “This root is the foundation of all the commercial dealings between China and ‘The Land of the Morning [Calm].’”

Harvesting wild ginseng was a task filled with danger. The mountainous regions of Korea were teeming with wolves, wild boars, leopards and tigers. According to Seonmin Kim (author of “Ginseng and Borderland”), wild ginseng was not supposed to be seen by humans and was guarded by tigers — according to some folktales, the root could even transform itself into a tiger.

The stages of ginseng from a catalog published in 1905 / Charles Marvin Root, “What is Ginseng?” 1905

Ginseng was surrounded by the supernatural and was often a popular subject of ridicule and derision. Root wrote:

“The [Koreans] say, that only persons of blameless life and purity of heart can so much as see where the ginseng shoots upward its few stalks covered with pale leaves. There is a common tradition that when it is taken from the earth it utters a low musical cry like the wail of a lost spirit, and it must be quickly wrapped up or its virtue and strength will depart to return no more.”

In the 1890s, a journal published in England claimed: “The virtue of the plant does not lie in its material composition, but in a mysterious power appertaining to it through being produced........

© The Korea Times