27.10.2025

Lecture: CHIANG Chu-shan, "Natural History, Borderland Turn, and Global Perspectives: New Approaches to the Study of Ginseng History in Early Modern East Asia"

On Tue, Oct 28, 2025, Prof. CHIANG Chu-shan will talk (online, in Chinese) on "Natural History, Borderland Turn, and Global Perspectives: New Approaches to the Study of Ginseng History in Early Modern East Asia"

Prof. CHIANG Chu-Shan (National Central University)
[presented at China Center Tübingen]
Natural History, Borderland Turn, and Global Perspectives: New Approaches to the Study of Ginseng History in Early Modern East Asia 博物學、邊境轉向與 全球視角：近世以來東亞人參史研究的 幾種新視角 (in Chinese)

Tue, Oct 28, 4 PM in a hybrid format, Hintere Grabenstr. 26
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/93600564476?pwd=WSn7FnZrqiJa5CtgcEEDzNIaurn6kk.1 
Meeting-ID: 936 0056 4476
Passcode: 928919

Abstract Over the past decade, ginseng scholarship has widened across disciplines and languages, opening new directions in East Asian and global history. This lecture traces the field’s shift from institutional analyses to cultural, borderland, and global frames. Since Imamura Tomo’s History of Ginseng (1935), research has moved through three phases: Qing political-fiscal management of the monopoly; the social and medical cultures of consumption; and the global circulation of knowledge, trade, and identity. Early work—exemplified by Van Jay Symons—privileged bureaucracy. In contrast, my Empire of Ginseng (2015) places the plant at the nexus of politics, medicine, and daily life, as both a symbolic commodity in Qing governance and a node in China–Korea–Japan knowledge networks. Drawing on Manchu memorials, palace records, and medical treatises, and engaging Harold Cook and Londa Schiebinger, I show how ginseng linked imperial and bodily politics in the early modern world. A “borderland turn” (New Qing History) further reframed space: Seonmin Kim’s Ginseng and Borderland (2017) demonstrates how the Qing–Chosŏn Changbai frontier became a regulated borderland through mapping, tribute, and surveillance, with trade and smuggling redefining sovereignty. A global turn—Heasim Sul’s A Global History of Ginseng (2022)—situates the plant within imperialism, modernity, and Orientalism, explaining its absence from Western narratives even as Jesuits, the East India Company, and U.S. merchants globalized it and Eurocentric pharmacology dismissed it as “Oriental superstition. ” Together these approaches shift the historiography from national institutions to connected microhistories of material culture and medicine, casting ginseng as a lens on power, knowledge, and belief across empires and highlighting East Asia’s active role in shaping modernity. 
Bio Prof. Chiang Chu-Shan 蔣竹山 is a Professor at the Graduate Institute of History at National Central University, Taiwan. His research focuses on Ming-Qing medical history, new cultural history, global history, and popular historiography. He holds a PhD from National Tsing Hua University and is the author of Empire of Ginseng: Production, Consumption, and Medicine in Qing China (2015).