The lkl korea Trip 2010

26. Lunch with the mayor

We drive to a quiet restaurant – though in Hadong County that describes most of them. In the shaded car park we are greeted by a large reception committee. The mayor and his wife, all dressed in habok, are waiting, and many of the county officials. I think my friend Kyung-sook has rather over-egged the pre-visit sketch of the visiting journalist, and the local hierarchy are keen to make an impression. More than anything, though, they are keen to make sure the good news of Sancheong's many attractions get to an outside audience.
Inside the restaurant, the lunch is splendid. There's a local variation on samgyetang: O-ri-baek-suk is a rich chicken casserole in a thick black sauce of mushrooms and nuts, to be attached with both chopsticks and spoon. I was seated opposite the mayor, and was grateful that he set the example with what to do with the discarded bones – simply place them on the table cloth.
The local alcohol is a soju stored in bamboo vats, giving it a golden colour. Being used to casual soju-drinking with friends in London I am concerned that I have just received or poured the precious liquid in a disrespectful manner, so I try to make amends by deferentially turning my face away when having a drink. But maybe the mayor is just having an off day.
I take the opportunity of getting some of the background on the Sancheong Herb Festival, and the plans of the organisation committee for the future.
The Sancheong Medical Herb Festival has been going for 10 years now, and seems to get bigger every year. The festival is only a week long, but the organisers claim that they have had 1 million visitors (maybe that's a mistranslation, but the festival area is huge, and seemed respectably busy when I visited.)
They plan to go international in 2013. In that year, the Ministry of Culture have decided that there will be an International Medicinal Herb Festival in Korea, and Sancheong is a prime contender, having the biggest and longest-standing festival, and the only one listed by the Ministry of Culture, though there is competition from four other cities in Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces. The international festival will also showcase Korea's latest UNESCO “Memory of the World” listing, the herbal medicine text book from the early 17^th Century, the Donguibogam. Here again Sancheong has the advantage, being the home town of the text book's author, Heo Jun. Sancheong also claims to be the origin of Korean herbal medicine, and the location where the best quality, most potent, medicinal herbs are grown, thanks to the unique circumstances of Earth Sky and People being in perfect harmony, the pure waters in the area, and the strong Ki energy in the region.
Reflecting this perceived advantage, Sancheong County is investing heavily in the infrastructure for 2013 in a multi-year project with a huge budget of 90 billion won. The complex of traditional buildings near the turtle are due to be completed in time and will form part of the festival's attractions.
I'm convinced, and I look forward to returning to Sancheong in three years' time to see the completed International Festival preparations.

27. The expo incl Heo Jun play and herb museum (40%)

The mayor hurries off for an appointment, leaving the rest of us to finish the soju and then make our way to the festival. It's a huge site, with a big stage, exhibition marquees and seemingly hundreds of smaller tents in which local farmers and herbalists display their wares. We pass a test where monks from Daewonsa are encouraging people to come for a temple-stay. My place is already booked for the evening.
Our first destination is the display tent of my friend Kim Jin-gu: ceramic artist, healer and herbalist. Bringing together all his skills, his stall sells ceramic pots designed for burning medicinal herbs. And, seeing that this is a Korean festival, we have to have the full Experience. Morgan is first, and Jin-gu massages her, feeling the energy flows in her body and reading her personal history: he divines that in a previous life she was a monk. Next, the herbal treatment. The pot of smouldering herbs is placed on her bare stomach, and before long Yoseph and I join her on adjacent bunks. We lie, in the warmth of the spring afternoon, digesting our lunch, drifting in and out of sleep, as the gentle weight of the ceramic containers press down on our bellies and the smell of singed herbs drifts towards the sky. We could have stayed there all afternoon.
After a refreshing cup of tea, it's time to visit some of the other stalls, while our guide tries to give some local history.
Each stall seems to be handing out free samples, usually dark green or brown decoctions which promise to raise my body temperature, reduce my body temperature, heighten the balance in my body. But most of all, they promise stamina. Virtually all the herbs seem to be good for a man's stamina, which, from the hand gestures a gather is a euphemism for sexual performance. I am concerned that when I am at the temple that night I am going to be suffering from acute priapism, hardly a condition conducive to focusing on one's inner self.
We see giant mushrooms and fungi, the inevitable ginseng and herb reductions of all kinds. Most of the produce seems to be geared towards men, but when pressed I find a herbalist who will show me a bag of dried fungus which is good for women.
I pass stalls of herbal soaps, stalls selling Sancheong's famous dried persimmons, and my favourite, after all the not terribly pleasant-tasting samples I had tried: freshly-squeezed Sancheong strawberry juice. We move on to a stall where students from Jinju university are experimenting with cocktail recipes: very colourful, and fortunately not too alcoholic. Another opportunity to experience herbal medicine visitors are invited to try their hand at chopping various herbs using vicious-looking guillotines. I remember the opening scene of Bong Joon-ho's Mother, where the central figure is filmed using exactly this implement to chop her herbs. The finger gets closer and closer to the blade, and her attention is distracted. The camera cuts away from the herbs as the viewer waits for the inevitable scream...
I am told that there's a herbal medicine for any disease you care to mention: you do not need Western medicine. And despite Korea's impressive health system, traditional herbal medicine is growing in popularity. In the last 15 to 20 years, the number of Korean doctors specialising in herbal medicine has grown threefold – from 5,792 in 1990 to 16,732 in 2007. And the medicine on display at Sancheong is definitely herbal. When one thinks of oriental medicine one often thinks of trade in unspeakable body parts of endangered species. There were no bears' gall bladders, powdered rhino horns or tigers' penises at Sancheong. This festival is purely vegetarian.
There's other things to see: a nice little exhibition of bonzai trees, informations boards, and many different shapes and sizes of ginseng roots in coloured oils: some of them look almost human.
From the main stage the PA system is blasting out the latest single by Girls' Generation. Meanwhile, on a smaller stage at a corner of the campus, the story of Heo Jun is played out in a mini-musical.
Little information is available on Heo Jun in English. Indeed, more information is available on the Korean TV drama which is based on his life. Heo was born in Sancheong, and was a famous court physician during the reign of King Seonjo (r 1567–1608). But, so the story goes, his vision was to make medical care available to all, not just the court, and returned to Sancheong.
Heo Jun is best known for compiling the Bonguibogam, the comprehensive herbal medicine text book. The work was completed “with the collective support of medical experts and literati according to royal instruction. The work informs the evolution of medicine in East Asia and beyond. In terms of health care system, it developed the ideals of preventive medicine and public health care by the state, which was virtually an unprecedented idea up to the19th century.”


http://english.triptokorea.com/english/viewtopic.php?t=11386&view=previous&sid=91ba03c6b97a999ae3a36ed2ff5bd5c0
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=27073&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html