Seonmin Kim's fascinating new book documents the discourses, practices, and messy lived experiences of frontier relations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea through a focus on Northeast Asia's most famous medicinal herb—ginseng. By tracing the geopolitical implications of ginseng harvesting and trade, Kim ably demonstrates how the Qing-Chosŏn borderland evolved from a purposefully ambiguous buffer zone with “features of both a vague zone and a distinct line” (p. 14) to a well-defined border by the end of the two dynasties’ history.
Drawing on sources in Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, Ginseng and Borderland joins a growing corpus of “New Qing History” scholarship that looks to the Qing's frontiers to reconstruct the dynasty's “Manchu” ethnic identity and pluralistic foreign relations. Kim's book also seeks to dismantle an older model of premodern Sino-Korean “tributary relations” that portrays Chosŏn Korea as the example par excellence of a deferent Chinese tributary state. As Kim's narrative...
