Panax ginseng

The chief who boiled his roots

Hetu Ala, spring 1605. In his walled town, Nurhaci has a plan for his ginseng, and his ministers are against it.¹

Nurhaci is a Jurchen chief in the forests north-east of Ming China, and his country is full of things the Chinese will pay for. Pearls, sable, the pelts of black, silver and red fox. And ginseng, which his people sell at four markets on the Ming frontier.^{1, 2}

The ginseng has a problem. His people keep the roots soaked in water to make them heavier. The Chinese buyers dislike them wet and drag their feet, and the Jurchens sell in a hurry for very little because they fear the wet roots won't keep.^{1, 2}

Nurhaci wants to boil the roots and dry them in the sun. He does it over his ministers' heads, sells slowly, a little at a time, and gets double the usual price.¹

He guarded that trade fiercely. Any chief caught selling even a scrap of ginseng, pearl or sable without his approval was put to death.² In 1607 he brought tens of thousands of ounces of ginseng to the border passes. The Ming, afraid of what the Jurchens would do if nobody bought it, pushed Chinese soldiers and merchants to pay for it out of their wages, even their property.² One historian puts his sales at up to sixty tonnes of the root in two years, worth about a quarter of all the foreign silver China took in a year.²

Ginseng money helped build a kingdom. Under his son the Jurchens became the Manchus and their kingdom the Qing, and in 1644 Nurhaci's grandson entered Beijing to rule China.²

By then the Chinese had been praising, taxing and faking this forked root for well over a thousand years.^{3, 8, 9}

A root that cried like a child

Its Chinese name, renshen, means man root, and the best roots looked the part. An early herbal gives them a head, hands, feet and a face.³

A fifth-century book of marvels says they could cry like a child. A man digging for one heard groaning in the earth after his first few strokes of the spade. He followed the sound and pulled up a root half a metre long, with all four limbs, its hair torn where the spade had caught it. That was why it groaned.⁴

The finest roots grew at Shangdang, in Shanxi.^{6, 12} In a tale set there around the year 600, a voice called behind a man's house night after night. It stopped only when he dug up a lone ginseng plant nearby and found, five chi down, a root shaped exactly like a human body.⁵

Koreans knew where to look too. Around AD 500 the Daoist scholar Tao Hongjing wrote notes on the oldest Chinese herbal and recorded that people prized the slim, hard white roots of the Korean kingdom of Paekche. Koguryo's came next, though he rated Shangdang's above both. Then he copied down a Koguryo song.⁶

"Three branches and five leaves, back to the sun, facing the shade. If you want to find me, look for the jia tree." Tao added that the jia was a very large tree.⁶

That herbal bore the name of the Divine Farmer Shennong and already ranked ginseng among the top drugs, the ones that could be taken for a long time without harm. The book said it calmed the spirit, stopped fright, brightened the eyes, opened the heart and added to wisdom.⁷

Real ginseng and radishes

Anything that precious was going to be faked. In the second century the essayist Wang Fu used ginseng to scold rulers who hired the wrong men. Governing without true worthies, he wrote, is like needing real ginseng for an illness and being fobbed off with a radish. You take it, grow worse, and never know you were cheated.⁸

It was taxed, too. In the third century the official Fu Xuan complained that the counties of Henei had to send the court ten to fifty jin each of "true Shangdang ginseng", though it grew nowhere near them. The people suffered for it.⁹

By the Song dynasty there was a test for the real thing. Take two men, put a piece of ginseng in one man's mouth and nothing in the other's, and send them off together for a mile or two. The one without will be panting hard. If the other is breathing easily, the ginseng is real. The scholar Su Song wrote the old trick down in his illustrated herbal of 1061.¹⁰

A few decades later a well-travelled tax official, Kou Zongshi, described the Shangdang roots, long and slender and hanging down, some more than a foot long, some forked ten ways. They cost as much as silver and were hard to come by, and when a local found one he laid it on a board and decked it out in new coloured silk.¹¹

Shangdang paid for its fame. By 1578, when Li Shizhen finished his great herbal, the people there saw ginseng as a plague on their district and had stopped digging it, and not even a Shangdang root could be had. All the ginseng in use came from Liaodong, in the north-east.¹²

Li also warned of cheats who soaked their roots, drank the juice themselves, then dried and resold them. People called it soup ginseng.¹²

Ten thousand men in the forest

Late in July 1709 the French Jesuit Pierre Jartoux was mapping the Manchu homeland for the Qing emperor Kangxi when his party reached a village within four leagues of Korea. One of the villagers went up into the mountains and came back with four whole ginseng plants in a basket.¹³

That year, Jartoux learned, the emperor had ordered ten thousand Manchus into the forests to dig it, so that the profit went to them and not to the Chinese. Each man owed the emperor two ounces of the best roots and was paid for the rest by its weight in fine silver. The emperor stood to get about twelve tonnes of the root that year, at a quarter of its value at most.¹³

The diggers worked in companies of a hundred, strung out in a line, combing every tract they were given. For six months they carried no tents, lived on parched millet and slept under the trees. When a man went missing, lost or eaten by wild animals, the others looked for him for a day or two and then went back to work.¹³

A barrier of wooden stakes, patrolled by guards, kept the Chinese out of the ginseng country. Sometimes two or three thousand slipped through anyway, risking their freedom and everything they had dug.¹³

Jartoux drew one of the plants, then tried it on himself. He took his pulse, ate half a root raw, and an hour later found his pulse fuller and quicker, his appetite up and himself far more vigorous. Suspecting the day's rest, he tried again four days later, when he was so tired he could barely sit on his horse. A mandarin gave him a root, he ate half, and an hour later the weariness had gone.¹³ His letter, printed in 1713, gave western Europe its first reliable account of the plant.^{13, 14}

He could not see the man in it, though. To Jartoux, Gin-seng meant the form of a man, yet neither he nor anyone else who looked could find the likeness. The Manchus named it better, he thought. They called it orhota, the chief of plants.¹³

And he made a guess. If the plant grew anywhere else, it might be in Canada, whose forests and mountains sounded much like these.¹³ Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit at the Mohawk mission of Kahnawake, read the guess and went looking. In the summer of 1716, after he had given up, he noticed the plant by its bright vermilion berries. He had found a cousin, the American species.¹⁵

When Carl Linnaeus named the genus Panax in 1753, the ginseng he described grew in Canada, Pennsylvania and Virginia.²⁰ Asian ginseng, the root this story is about, got the name it still carries only in 1842, when the botanist Carl Anton Meyer called it Panax ginseng.²¹

Heads on the Yalu

Jurchen and Korean diggers worked the same mountains, and the line between their countries ran through the ginseng. In 1592 the Koreans caught several Jurchen poachers and killed them in unusually brutal ways, beheading and skinning them. Nurhaci protested to the Korean court and threatened to take it to the Ming.¹⁶

Once Nurhaci's son had invaded Korea in 1627, the punishments ran the other way. In 1631 two Koreans who had gathered ginseng on Jurchen land were executed in Seoul, in front of the khan's envoy. It became the rule that Korean poachers caught on the Qing side were beheaded on the bank of the Yalu, and the officials of their home district sacked or banished.¹⁶

In the autumn of 1685 a Qing party mapping the land by the Yalu met a band of Korean diggers who had crossed the river. A local Korean official had raised them, thirty-one "vagabonds and wanderers". The Qing men shot arrows to drive them off. The Koreans fired back with guns, killing a Qing official and twelve horses, and got away.¹⁷ Kangxi's envoy came to Seoul and made the Korean court execute every one of the offenders and the officials involved. King Sukchong had to write a long apology and pay a fine of twenty thousand ounces of silver.¹⁷

Twenty seeds from Korea

In Japan, ginseng was the dearest and scarcest of all the drugs bought from abroad. So the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune had the lord of Tsushima ask Korea for seed.¹⁸ In 1737 a twenty-year-old named Tamura Ransui was given twenty seeds. Seedlings kept dying. But twenty-six years later Tamura was put in charge of the shogun's new ginseng works in Edo. The ten or so roots of the early years had become, by the officials' count, about a million.¹⁸

Not everyone was pleased. The next year the shogunate complained that some doctors were telling people the home-grown root was weak, and suspected them of being in league with the drug shops.¹⁸

China's emperors would not hear of gardens, and punished ginseng farmers as harshly as poachers. In 1802, when the military governor of Jilin proposed making the farms legal, the Jiaqing emperor shot back that only wild ginseng from the mountains worked. "Taking cultivated ginseng is useless."¹⁹ Eight years later, farmed roots made up sixty per cent of the ginseng the state collected from Shengjing.¹⁹

The five thousand years

Wild or farmed, the root now comes with a pedigree. A Korean ginseng maker's leaflet promises "a history of 5000 years", and research papers repeat the number.²²

The trail to whoever first wrote it goes cold, but the sums lead back to the Divine Farmer. Legend made Shennong a ruler of the remote past who tasted hundreds of plants to learn what they did, and gave him a belly as clear as crystal so he could watch them work.²³ A 2012 paper in a urology journal dated him to between 3500 and 2600 BC, said ginseng was discovered in the mountains of Manchuria over five thousand years ago, and had Shennong chewing the root and feeling "a warm and sexually pleasurable feeling".²³

The same paper says the book bearing his name was compiled about two thousand years ago, at the end of the Western Han.²³ Its ginseng entry talks about the spirit, the eyes and wisdom. Sex never comes up.⁷

The root's written record starts about then too. Wang Fu's radish is from the second century AD, and Korea's own official text on the origin of ginseng puts the oldest written trace in the first century BC.^{8, 24} Manchurian ginseng, the kind supposedly found five thousand years ago, was a latecomer. It only became well known in China about a thousand years ago.²

Two thousand years is a long time to be praised, taxed, fought over and faked. The other three thousand belong to the Divine Farmer.

Still in the shade

A wild root is still worth far more than a farmed one, because it grows so much more slowly.² Red ginseng is the root steamed and then dried, not far from what Nurhaci forced through over his ministers' heads in 1605.^{25, 1} What the modern trials found is in the Research tab.

And the Koguryo song still gives the best directions. If you want to find me, look for the jia tree.⁶