Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  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 work
s 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.

  Mae-young, my friend who had climbed with me on Halla-san, had telephoned while I was away. She had been in Vancouver and had planned to come back to Korea for a few days. If I promised not to walk so fast as I apparently had on Cheju-do, could she come on down? Two days later she was in Puyo, eager to hear of my various adventures. It was good to see her again—her good cheer of our days on Cheju was still in full spate, and she made good friends with the artist Miss Ko and came with me up to Chonggak-sa to see the mountain nuns and to learn a little of how her own Buddhism had gone awry during her years of work and Westernization. ‘Very stimulating,’ she said, as we climbed down the hillside after listening to the young abbess for more than an hour. ‘I envy them their life.’ Did the nun, I wondered, not in fact envy her? Did she not wish that she could travel away from a remote mountain, albeit a very beautiful one, to places like Vancouver and Hong Kong? ‘No, she has no desire. She knows about the world. She thinks her duty is to make her own small part of it as good as possible and not concern herself with visiting the rest. There is too little time to be wasted travelling far from home.’ I felt that both of us had been taken down a peg or two.

  Once Mae-young had gone again, I walked northeast for thirty miles and eventually came to the Kum River again where the Dutch had crossed it, at the other old Paekche capital of Kongju. This was a livelier town than Puyo, a bustling little place, with an assortment of fine Victorian churches and colleges, an excellent yogwan where I stayed for two contented nights, and any number of little cafés and bars. I went to see the remarkable tomb of the twenty-fifth Paekche king Muryong—a tomb that was only discovered in 1971 and that had been quite undisturbed since the monarch was buried and his tomb sealed in AD 523. Thousands of pieces of jewellery and pottery brought from the tomb were said to be displayed at the Kongju museum, but I felt suddenly and unaccountably weary of all this history and embarked for the countryside again. I was going through a period of feeling happier walking than stopping, and as I set out and clanged my way across the great iron bridge that spans the Kum-gang, I confess I felt more in my element again.

  The countryside ahead was rich and prosperous and hilly, and the village houses were coloured gaily in chartreuse and violet, tangerine and royal blue. From the tops of the schools and barns flew the three-leaved green-and-white flag. This was a part of Korea where the nationwide self-help movement known as Saemaul Undong was particularly strong.

  Saemaul Undong, or the New Community Movement, is the reason there are so few thatched roofs in Korea and why so few old men wear horsehair hats and why one sees so few young girls playing on the traditional swings and seesaws that all villages sported only a decade or so ago. Saemaul Undong is the reason why Korean villages are, by and large, clean and well-furnished places with electricity supplies and big schools and warehouses and grain elevators and clean wells and perhaps piped water and sanitation and multi-coloured tiles on the roofs of the houses, new and old. Saemaul Undong is the driving force behind all those cement trucks rushing along the country lanes, behind the telephone linesmen who are installing new lines on Sunday afternoons, behind the endless rows of polythene-covered greenhouses that are built each season to warm the strawberries or the asparagus or the okra and other city food from which the farmers now make so much of their money. Saemaul Undong is the line of modern tractors, the chugging ‘rice rockets’, the new bridges and spillways and culverts and irrigation channels. Saemaul Undong is run from a massive office you see on the road to Seoul Airport and, with its flags and songs and legions of eager acolytes, is at once a mightily efficient grass-roots political organization and a self-perpetuating memorial to its creator, President Park Chung-hee.

  It was begun in 1971 after President Park and his colleagues realized, as the government now says, that the gap between the circumstances of Korea’s farmers and its urban citizenry had become unacceptably wide. The movement, based heavily on propaganda, was launched ‘to cultivate positive attitudes in the rural masses, to assist them in gaining confidence in their future, and to train them for more active self-reliance and co-operation’. It began modestly enough—the government provided the material for village houses to be repaired, experts provided advice, and the farmers did the work themselves. It was extended into co-operative efforts on a larger scale—irrigation channels and roads and bridges were built by entire villages, and everyone began to learn about organization and co-operation. And then group farming projects started—collectively owned factories and marketing facilities—the principles of the kibbutz had spread to Korea.

  On one level it appears to have worked magnificently: rural life in Korea seems to have improved beyond all imagination, and the gap between the urban and rural masses has narrowed (although that between urban rich and rural poor has widened hugely). Romantics can argue that some of the essence of Korea has been lost in the process of its modernization; and I—having seen the relict beauty of those few villages in remote corners of the country where permission has been granted to keep out the Saemaul Undong organizers—count myself among the romantics. Something very tangible has been gained, no doubt; something evanescent, something mysterious and spiritual has been lost. But most important of all, the Saemaul Undong has enabled a strong and powerful central government to extend its tentacles deep into the fabric of the country’s rural society, and when, one afternoon on my way north from Kongju, I saw a group of policemen with guns moving out along the levees towards a remote hamlet on the distant skyline, I wondered if the Saemaul movement was all that much of a benefit.

  There were ten men, all of them heavily armed with rifles and submachine guns; they had parked their police cruisers on the roadway and were moving out on foot. The flags of the New Community Movement fluttered from the houses through which they passed. What were they looking for? Whom did they seek? What wayward foe of the government would find himself in custody tonight? When would his family learn of his fate? With what specific crime would he be charged?

  Of course it was entirely possible that the man they wanted was a heavily armed bank robber, a dangerously criminal clone of Bonnie or Clyde. But I doubted it. Bank robbers, armed criminals, drug smugglers, syndicate bosses—these were not the stuff of Korean criminality. Far more likely that the state was moving against one who had once moved against the state, and likely, too, that the green-and-white flags that more usually marked economic good fortune and self-reliant triumphs were this time indicating the presence of a telltale, of a village spy, of a neighbourhood watch gone bad, and that a movement perhaps conceived with good intent had ended up as part of the apparatus of a state that is all-powerful, all-suspicious, and not at all benign.

  I shuddered as I watched the men fan out and walked on northward. I walked on towards the city and away from the flags and the uniquely Korean social experiment they were said to represent.

  8. Seoul City—Soul City

  The Nobility, and all Free-men in general, take great care of the Education of their Children, and put them very young to learn to read and write, to which that Nation is much addicted. They use no manner of rigour on their method of teaching, but manage by all fair means, giving their Scholar an Idea of Learning, and of the Worth of their Ancestors, and telling them how honourable those are who by this means have rais’d themselves to great Fortunes, which breeds Emulation, and makes them students. It is wonderful to see how they improve by these means, and how they expound their Writings they give them to r
ead, wherein all their Learning consists. Besides this private Study, there is in every Town a House where the Nobility, according to antient Custom of which they are very tenacious, take care to assemble the Youth, to make them read the History of the Country…

  Hendrick Hamel, 1668

  There can be few Americans who would voluntarily give up their citizenship and exchange it instead for citizenship of the Republic of Korea. Few enough people anywhere, indeed, would wish to renounce the national allegiance of their birth and assume the nationality of another place—save, of course, those who wish to become citizens of the new nations that, like the United States or Canada or Australia, have been built almost entirely from immigrants, and save those who have chosen to flee from repressive societies and regimes to enjoy a life of liberty in some more progressive nation far from home.

  But to go from the free, wealthy and developed West to the less free, less wealthy and less developed East, and to go for ever, with all the old rights renounced and with all the new customs adopted—this kind of move is an eccentric and unusual one, undertaken only after great thought and often by unusual and fascinating people. I have a dear friend, an Englishman who chose twenty years ago to become a citizen of India and endure poverty and discrimination and restriction: he now lives contentedly in Bombay, never regretting his decision, refusing to show any envy or sadness when, on arriving for a holiday in London, he is made to stand in the aliens’ line at the airport and is asked brusquely how long he plans to stay in the land of his birth and whether he has enough money to support himself. I have met a handful of Britons and Canadians and Americans who have been officially assimilated into China for many years and have endured revolutions and turbulences they can never have foreseen. There are runaway spies who now live in strange luxury in Moscow and East Berlin. A few romantics still follow Gauguin’s path into the blue Pacific, and go as seriously ‘troppo’ as to acquire a new passport along with the ‘sleeping dictionary’ with which they provided themselves on arrival. And there are, of course, many millions of long-term rootless residents dotted around the globe—the great cheerless crowd of ‘expats’—who exercise their fading memories on frozen and time-warped images of home and order their amahs and bearers about with age-induced ferocity and incivility. All these we know.