The Letter That Crossed an Ocean

In 1711, a missionary in China mailed a letter about a strange root. It would cross an ocean and start a global trade.

It's one of the most improbable chapters in ginseng's long story: how a single piece of correspondence, written by a French priest in Beijing, traveled across continents and set off a frenzy of digging and shipping on the other side of the world. A reminder of just how badly people wanted this root.

A priest, a root, and a letter

Pierre Jartoux was a French Jesuit who spent nearly two decades in China as a mathematician, cartographer, and engineer. While mapping the empire's far northeast, he encountered ginseng firsthand and saw how extraordinarily prized it was. The Chinese, he noted, couldn't simply grow it; they gathered it from the wild, with the emperor reportedly dispatching huge teams to collect all they could.

Struck by the plant's value, Jartoux wrote a detailed letter in 1711, describing the root, its appearance, and the mountainous terrain where it grew. That letter circulated through the Jesuit network and was published in the journal of the Royal Society in London. Across Europe, botanists took notice. A new, valuable plant had a precise description and, crucially, a profile of exactly the kind of habitat it needed.

The reader half a world away

Here's where it turns remarkable. That published letter reached Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary living among the Iroquois in what is now southeastern Canada. Reading Jartoux's description of the terrain, Lafitau had a hunch: the rolling, forested hills around him looked a lot like the habitat described half a world away.

He began searching. With the help of a Mohawk woman who knew the local plants, he found a specimen near the mission that matched Jartoux's account almost exactly. It's worth being honest about what that "discovery" really was: the Indigenous peoples of North America had known and used this plant for generations. What Lafitau added was the connection, recognizing that the American root was a close cousin of the famous Asian one.

One letter, a transcontinental trade

That recognition lit a fuse. If the wider world prized Asian ginseng and a near-identical root grew wild in North America, then North American forests held something the global market wanted. Within a few short years, ginseng was being dug and shipped from the New World toward Asia, and a transcontinental trade was born from what began as a single piece of mail.

• 1711
  Jartoux observes ginseng in China and writes his letter describing the root and its habitat.
• 1713
  The letter is published in the Royal Society's journal in London; European botanists take note.
• 1715–16
  Lafitau reads it in North America, and with Mohawk help, identifies the same root growing locally.
• Soon after
  A New World to Asia ginseng trade ignites, carried along existing trade routes.

What the whole episode reveals

Step back and the meaning is clear. People did not chase this root across oceans, decode foreign letters, and comb distant forests for a plant the world felt lukewarm about. The sheer effort, the international correspondence, the trade routes redrawn, all of it circles back to a single fact: ginseng was wanted, intensely and across cultures, in a way few things ever have been.

And through all of it, one origin remained the benchmark. Asian ginseng, and Korean ginseng above all, was the standard the new sources were measured against. The American rush was, in the end, the world chasing a value Korea had been cultivating for centuries.

Dr. Choi's roots come from Geumsan, one of the historic heartlands of that tradition. The letters and trade routes are history. The root they were all chasing is what we make today.

This article is a historical and cultural overview drawn from published histories and is for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and makes no health claims. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.