Korea (30 page)

It was tricky getting into the ginseng factory. Mr Sung knew the manager and telephoned him to ask for access, but he had been told the processes were confidential, and visitors were not too welcome. I made some telephone calls to Seoul, however, to the institution known as Office of Monopoly (no definite article is ever used in its title) that regulates all matters relating to red ginseng. An official said they would retire to consider the matter, then telephoned the Youth Hostel: a Mr Ha—‘Ah! my friend!’ cried Mr Sung—would receive me at four. No cameras, please.

Although I have half-facetiously suggested that the most apt symbol for modern Korea would be the tiger-striped security barrier—you see them everywhere, potent reminders of the heavy hand of state—there can be no argument about the most readily recognizable icon on the peninsula. You see it under bell jars in ancient pharmacies. You see it on the labels of sweets and cigarettes, on hair restorers and after-shaves, on chewing gums and face creams. Huge posters carry its image. If Korea were run by Californians I daresay somewhere there would be a statue. The ginseng root is a curiously anthropomorphic thing, anyway—a thick, pinkish root with a fat body, two elephantine ‘legs’, a couple of thinner ‘arms’ and an assortment of lesser limbs—a ‘head’ with hairs and on some specimens a navel, a penis and knees. Sometimes it stands erect; other specimens are bent at the midriff and seem to sit back, contentedly dispensing their magicks. The Chinese character for ‘gin’ is ‘man’, though to confuse matters the word
ginseng
is not actually used in Korea: the Korean word for what the Chinese call
jensheng
and for what the English-speaking world calls ‘ginseng’ is actually
insam
—hence if you ask for a cup of ginseng tea in Korea the phrase is
insam-cha chuseyo, putokkhamnida
, and if you asked for ginseng tea you would get very blank looks indeed.

Semantics aside, ginseng
is
Korea: thanks to the efforts of the monopoly that musters and markets it, the world now firmly
associates Korea with ginseng and ginseng with Korea. Not many people beyond the Orient know exactly what it is; there is the vaguely terrifying (but not wholly wrong) assumption that it has something to do with the curious activities of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (a figure of quasi-religious bizarrerie, well known in the West, who is either despised or unknown in Korea). Few people can be precisely certain if ginseng will do them good or harm, if it is an aphrodisiac, a life-extension drug, a sleeping draught, a Menace to Society, or some cunning fungus through whose use the sinister East will subtly extend its dominance over a bewildered and drug-fuddled West. But whatever, it
is
the symbol of Korea, without a doubt, and it is all made, processed and packed in Puyo, behind the high white walls and guard towers of Number 200, Naeri Street.

It was once all made in Kaesong and exported in huge quantities to a China that had been fascinated with
yin-yang
restoratives (in which field ginseng claims pre-eminence) since the third millennium
BC
The Koryo kings were forced to pay levies to the Yuan Dynasty’s Mongol emperors: gold and silver; cloth and grain; falcons, eunuchs, young women—and ginseng, always ginseng. Ginseng was stiff with
yang
energy: no Chinese, no Mongol, could possibly function well without it. The principal factory for its mass production was established in Kaesong in 1908, a branch office of the Ginseng Division of the Royal Ministry of Finance.

But Kaesong was swallowed up by North Korea in 1953, and the factory was moved south to Puyo. Kaesong still makes some ginseng and exports it under the historically accurate name of
Koryo
ginseng (since Kaesong was the Koryo capital). A little is made in China, and both the Russians and the Americans grow the plant and toy with processing it. The biggest exporter in the world, by far, is Korea, and all the export quality red ginseng comes from the factory at Puyo.

There are two kinds of Korean ginseng. There is
paeksam
, or white ginseng, which is grown for four years, then washed, sorted, graded and sold. This type of ginseng is regarded as
inferior enough for private enterprises to make and market, and such magisterial characters as Puyo’s Mr Ha have no interest in it at all. Red ginseng, or
hongsam
, on the other hand, is the real McCoy of the
insam
world. It is exactly the same ginseng, except it has been matured in the earth for two years longer than that selected as white ginseng, and it has been steamed and dried. This curing process, then, and the two years’ maturation in the field, is all that separates two ginsengs that are treated as differently as gold from pyrite. Red ginseng—stronger, more concentratedly beneficial—is the subject of the hugely powerful Office of Monopoly, and on that subject Mr Ha waxed lyrical indeed.

He was a fat man with bulging black circles under his eyes—not the best advertisement, perhaps, for so efficacious an elixir. He sat in his office with four colleagues, and they nodded and smiled broadly as servants trooped in with a steaming silver pot. ‘You are very welcome,’ said Mr Ha. ‘You will take some red ginseng extract, please?’ And a servant poured a deep red liquid into an egg-shaped china cup that had handpainted flowers on its side. Mr Ha stood and made a short and rather formal speech: ‘Red ginseng is good for your life, Mister Simon. It will purify you. It will help your body to make more blood. It will clean your liver. It will cleanse your hangover. It will make you live much longer. Gentlemen, drink!’

And we all stood and sipped the scalding liquid. It is not easy to describe the taste. Sweetish rubber, perhaps. Glue? The faintest hint of drying paint. A freshly baked Victoria sponge cake, cooked in a pine wood on a warm spring afternoon. Ginger and balsam dipped in molasses. All these tastes and smells came to mind as I drank the vaguely medicinal liquid. Not at all unpleasant but rather odd, as though someone had slipped a mickey into a glass of decent claret, and I suspected it but drank it all the same.

‘You will feel its effects very soon,’ said Mr Ha and then showed me his motto. It was arranged under the glass of his tabletop: ‘I believe that the able industrial leader who creates wealth and employment is more worthy of historical notice than any politician or soldier…’ ‘So you see, we create wealth and
employment, and by making something useful that is beneficial to everyone. Can we do any better than that?’ He beamed. The other men at the table beamed and bowed. One of them released a most enormous belch, and Mr Ha beamed even more. And then an escort arrived to take me around the factory.

It turned out that the Korean War had left a problematic legacy for the ginseng makers. The original Korean factory had been at Kaesong, as I have explained. It was strategically placed inside a fifty-mile-wide circle where the better six-year ginseng was traditionally cultivated. Then came the war, and Kaesong fell into Communist hands. Most of the fifty-mile circle, however, remained in the South—mercifully, for the Korean export trade. The new factory that the Southern authorities then built in Puyo was right in the middle of a fifty-mile-wide circle where four-year ginseng was grown. The inconvenience was considerable: everything grown around Puyo was destined to become white ginseng and was sent up to Seoul to be processed by private enterprise factories; everything grown around Seoul (and particularly on a beautiful island called Kanghwa-do, an hour west of the capital) had to be trundled south to Puyo to be made into red ginseng. The mistake appears to have been to plant the red ginseng plants in the middle of a white-ginseng-growing area; when I asked my guide why this had been done he looked at his feet and shuffled them uncomfortably. I think someone had made an almighty mistake.

Trucks bring boxes of the precious anthropomorphic roots of
Panax ginseng
down to Puyo every day. For the six years before this transport the roots had matured in their shaded mulches of chestnut leaves. The red raspberry-like fruits, which had appeared every summer after the plant was three years old, had grown and withered, grown and withered. The leaves, protected from the damaging sun, had sprung up and then had faded and died six times, each time leaving another callus that, welded together in the crucial six-year maturation, became the head that is so important to the root’s status in ginseng society. No head, no deal, basically; a hydra-headed beast, or one that looks like a cross
between E.T. and the Mekon, is much favoured and pried from the ground with reverential care, packed all about with straw, and dispatched to Puyo for the attention of Mr Ha and his hundred pretty Puyo girls.

The girls wash every root as though it were a child, lovingly towelling between its little legs and under its wizened arms and patting its head dry and smooth. Then baskets carry the creamy roots into the steamers, where the cream becomes a deep and angry red, the smooth roots craze and buckle like frying bacon, and the whole factory fills with the aroma of rubber and ginger, molasses and sponge cake. And from this moment onward the roots, ugly in their dismemberment, are weighed, sorted, graded and dealt with according to the commercial pressures of the moment.

The grades are given names that are appropriate to the standing of the root in botanical society. The least good (although all are superior to the various grades of white ginseng) is known as Tail ginseng, the next is Cut ginseng. Then there is Good Grade, then Earth Grade. And finally, in red-and-gold packets that will cost its devotees small fortunes in folding money, Heaven Grade. The girls—who, when I was there, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting playfully with each other—fed the sorted roots into the maws of silvery machines, and from the various orifices of these engines came the substances that Korea then exports to the waiting non-Communist world—9,200 metric tons of the stuff each year—to be sent off to Hong Kong, Singapore, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Athens, Santiago and Mexico City (the places where Korea has set up Ginseng Centres), and to the sixty countries where the root is eaten, drunk or otherwise ingested.

Puyo’s managers offer it as unadorned root, sold in flat tins decorated with paintings of pretty girls in
hangbok
. They sell it as extract (which is what Mr Ha gave me); there is powdered ginseng tea; there is spray-dried powder, and there is ordinary powder; there are tablets, capsules and pills; there are fine-cut pieces and there are polygonal slices—all to be taken with honey
if needed, or with pieces of the dried
Zizyphus
fruit we know as a jujube, and all guaranteed to make the taker feel a great deal better. The trucks that bring the earth-covered roots down in the morning leave in the afternoon with the red-and-gold packets of polygons and slices and pills and capsules. The great ships that leave Pusan and Inchon each day, filled with Hyundai cars and Samsung televisions and Daewoo refrigerators, also hold, in every available corner, small and very valuable boxes from the factory over in Puyo town.

The chemistry of ginseng is bewildering, and books on the topic (which Mr Ha pressed into my hands at every available moment) combine folksiness with utter incomprehensibility. I nearly gave up at the paragraph that started, ‘Therefore, let us turn our attention to terpenoid,’ and then did abandon the struggle at another that started with the declaration that ‘ginseng saponin is a glycoside structured with dammarene from triter-penoid’. The words that made greater sense were those that claimed ginseng had an ‘anti-cancer effect’, was ‘anti-aging’, was analgesic, antibiotic, inhibited overfermentation in the gut, was anti-diabetic, and had been declared by chemists at a doubtless grand institution called Kinki University to be full of magnesium and therefore very good for one’s general health.

Professor Oura of Toyoma University in Japan cut out the livers of rats and fed them ginseng, whereupon good-sized parts of their livers grew back. A Dr Lee of the Ginseng and Tobacco Research Institute found that tar left in smokers’ livers was cleansed away by ginseng. Dr Kim of Wonkwang University injected lead into mice, gave them ginseng, and most of the lead vanished. Professor Huh of Youngnam University made his rats into chronic alcoholics, gave them ginseng, and they corporately went on the wagon. Professor Joo of Yonsei University fed rabbits with a forage that contained lots of cholesterol, gave them ginseng, and the cholesterol levels in their blood dropped away to nothing. A Bulgarian doctor found that ginseng lowered stress. A Professor Hong found it made hens lay more eggs. An English researcher named Fulder gave ginseng to nurses on night shift
and found that they perked up—the list goes on and on, credible or not I cannot tell. The claims made for the improving qualities of ginseng are perhaps more catholic and numerous than for any other substance known.

My own impression is that ginseng
does
do good. Mr Ha had told me that the effects of his infusion would be noticeable within minutes—and noticeable they most certainly were. I became unaccountably full of energy. I had all the cheerful enthusiasm of an early drunk, and yet all my faculties were quite normal and I was in full control. I have in consequence taken ginseng pretty regularly ever since. I will not know for many years if it prolongs my life; I have few enough serious ailments to know whether it is chipping away at their effects; I cannot look at my arteries to see if the cholesterol is being corroded nor into my liver to see if dying cells are being regenerated. If it is, as claimed, an elixir that promotes spermatogenesis, then I am happy to know but have no access to proof. All I do know is this: when I take ginseng, I end up feeling pretty good. (Not that I feel bad if I don’t take it—there is no suggestion that ginseng is in any way addictive.) People tell me I look fitter than for some time. And I like the taste. Maybe it
is
all some mighty Korean confidence trick; maybe ginseng extracts have no more than a placebo effect, and one that works wonders on the suggestible psyches of people like me. I am well aware that I might be being taken for an almighty ride and that Mr Ha and his brother tricksters at Korea’s Office of Monopoly may well be laughing behind their hands at how all the
yangnom
fall for all this guff about saponins and terpenoids and help jolly along Korea’s millions of dollars in profits each year. Maybe, but somehow, knowing full well for how long the Chinese have accepted the medicinal value of the root, I doubt it. Puyo town provided a revelation for me, and one that will take me some long while to forget.