Abstract
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ginseng emerged as a highly sought-after tonic in East Asian medical practices and a significant commodity in global trade. Physicians, herbalists, and naturalists from China, Japan, and Europe explored ginseng from various perspectives, with images playing a crucial role in the production and circulation of knowledge. By focusing on these images, the present article explores the historical processes through which knowledge of ginseng was represented, modified, and codified during its global circulation. In China, two distinct iconographic conventions developed from four herbal illustrations originating in the official pharmacopeia of the Song dynasty: one referenced the illustration of Luzhou 潞州 ginseng, complemented by detailed revisions; the other focused on the depiction of ginseng as a commodity, reflecting knowledge in the marketplace. In early Edo Japan, scholars primarily learned about the plant morphology of ginseng through Chinese works of materia medica. However, after the Kyōhō reforms, the demand for ginseng domestication led scholars to begin depicting ginseng through firsthand observations. Nevertheless, the textual descriptions of “three branches and five leaves” 三椏五葉 from Chinese materia medica continued to influence both the identification of ginseng varieties and the ways in which they were illustrated. European naturalists obtained various ginseng images through both Chinese materia medica and field investigations in Japan, seeking to uncover the typical forms of ginseng amidst an overwhelming array of conflicting information. Within this complex historical process, images served not only as vehicles for knowledge transmission but also as agents for knowledge production. While images in European natural history developed a realistic style that represented the typical form of plants by detailing all necessary traits, ginseng images in East Asia tended to foreground several representative characteristics, such as branch-leaf arrangement, root shape, and the rhizome head. This difference in pictorial strategies reveals an epistemic divergence in the natural history between East and West. As knowledge and images spread globally, significant changes occurred in the identification and understanding of ginseng. Various plant species originally classified under the names “renshen” 人參, “ginseng,” or “ninzin” were gradually excluded from these designations, with Panax ginseng C.A.Mey. of the Araliaceae family eventually being established as the sole, true ginseng in East Asia.
Keywords
ginseng; image; three branches and five leaves; knowledge production; global history
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