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  • Ginseng and Borderland: Territorial Boundaries and Political Relations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea, 1636–1912 by Seonmin Kim
  • Tommy Tran
Seonmin Kim, Ginseng and Borderland: Territorial Boundaries and Political Relations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea, 1636–1912. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 242 pp. $34.95 US (paper) and Luminos (open access).

East Asian Studies scholarship has been moving away from nation-centered perspectives toward more interregional assessments. Seonmin Kim's Ginseng and Borderland adds to this ongoing conversation a refreshing contribution that not only discusses Chosŏn-Qing relations beyond a Korea-China binary but also the factors of economic and territorial issues. Central to Kim's argument are the twin components of the Manchu Qing self-perception and tensions over the Manchurian ginseng trade. Kim demonstrates that the Manchurian frontier, Manchu-ness, and ginseng play essential roles in the triangular configuration of "Korea," "China," and "Manchuria" as practical and conceptual geographies.

The premise of Kim's work is that ginseng "shaped, more than any other product, Qing-Chosŏn relations as well as Qing policy for the northeastern region" (7). Because Manchurian wild ginseng was as important as a sacred object of Manchu identity as it was a strategic good, Manchu rulers' attempts to jealously guard their precious commodity are inseparable from their perceptions of territory. Kim indicates that conflict that occurred within the ambiguous frontier space between Chosŏn, Manchuria, and China proper contributed to contentious redefinitions of boundaries. Kim does not depart from the common interpretation that Chosŏn's long survival is due to skillful diplomacy, but also considers equally important the Manchus' own internal challenges and needs to reconcile contradictory policies. A productive irony is that whereas the Manchu emperors oscillated between assertiveness to benign neglect, the Chosŏn court's anxieties over potential confrontations mixed with a distrust of Qing intentions gradually led Koreans to more strongly identify a zone of demarcation. Kim presents a troubled romance in which Chosŏn leaders cautiously worked with Manchu emperors' egos and Beijing-based Manchu elites' impossible ideals of maintaining the sanctity of a Manchu way tied to Manchuria and ginseng. Kim decenters both "China" and "Korea."

The book presents a compelling narrative in which the border regions between Korea and China gradually took shape through multiple contingencies. Kim starts with the triangular relationship between the declining [End Page 381] Ming Dynasty, the pre-Qing Later Jin Dynasty, and Chosŏn in relation to Manchuria. An illustration of the ambiguity over the region was the contrasting ways that each of the three polities conceived of the territory. Here Kim suggests that whereas the Ming only grudgingly recognized that they shared the Liaodong region with the Jurchen state, "for the khan of the Aisin Gurun, territory and sovereignty were inseparable" (39) and this disconnect along with claimed ownership over wild ginseng reserves were a persistent source of conflict.

Chapter one is an account of the Jurchen consolidation in the early seventeenth century in relation to Ming China and Chosŏn Korea. This chapter explores histories of the Manchurian region as a frontier through scuffles over access to wild ginseng, the Jurchens' dual relationship with the Ming and Chosŏn, the Aisin Gurun interests in controlling the ginseng trade, and the implications that came with the establishment of the Manchu Qing empire. Here Kim argues that "ginseng gradually came to be used for the purpose of indicating territorial boundaries" to the extent that it "came to bear a more political significance in foreign relations" by the time Hong Taiji consolidated power (45–46). An interesting detail, which continues to be the case well into the nineteenth century, was that ginseng poaching and trespassing from both sides also served as an impetus for respective regimes to further control the movement, a factor in a more concretized border.

Chapter two discusses how Korean ginseng poaching troubled Qing-Chosŏn relations and prompted the establishment of a borderland buffer zone. The chapter opens with an incident in 1685 in which a ginseng poaching expedition organized by a local Chosŏn official engaged in a panicked skirmish with Qing authorities. The issue would eventually lead...

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