Interesting article about the ginseng harvest in South Korea, and single plants worth $65,000!
“The restaurant’s only customers, a small group of ginseng seekers, had assembled for a breakfast of tofu soup before driving off to a nearby mountain that they planned to scour for the sought-after plant.
Despite the early hour and the rain, their conversation grew increasingly animated with each retelling of the news from the night before: someone had just found an 8.3-ounce, 30-year-old ginseng plant, valued at $65,000!
“Just because the ginseng plant weighs more, it doesn’t necessarily mean that its quality is superior, as the television report was implying,” said the group’s leader, Pae Young-gun, seeking to puncture the expanding balloon of unrealistic expectations pre-emptively.
South Korea’s news media periodically report on the discovery of extremely rare wild ginseng plants that command tens of thousands of dollars and fuel the dreams of ginseng seekers across the country. In South Korea and elsewhere in Asia, wild ginseng’s roots have traditionally been prized for their supposed preternatural healing powers, properties believed to be missing in the farmed variety.
So armies of ginseng seekers forage in the country’s thickly forested mountains where wild ginseng can be found — if it can be found at all — in nooks with the right mix of air, sunlight and humidity.
As mountains are regarded as holy places, the searches tend to take on a spiritual, or at least superstitious, dimension. The finder of the $65,000 ginseng was reported to have seen three pillars of fire in a dream just before stumbling on the plant on Sobaek Mountain, in the middle of South Korea.”
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