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GINSENG, AMERICAN

GINSENG, AMERICAN, Panax quinquefolium, which grew in the Hudson Valley and elsewhere, was at first regarded as a weed. It resembled a root native to Korea and northern China, to which the Chinese imputed extraordinary but wholly imaginary therapeutic and pharmacological properties. On 22 February 1784, Robert Morris dispatched to China the Empress of China from New York with American ginseng. The voyage netted $30,000. The owners, as Morris wrote to John Jay, hoped "to encourage others in the adventurous pursuit of commerce." Subsequent trade with China in ginseng boomed, and was restricted only by the limited quantities of American ginseng available. About 1790, the fur trade of the Pacific coast largely displaced the ginseng trade as the principal trade good that Americans used to obtain silks and teas from China, although the ginseng trade continued into the twentieth century. In the early 2000s, Wisconsin was the principal producer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christman, Margaret. Adventurous Pursuits: Americans and the China Trade, 1784–1844. Washington, D. C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984.

Dulles, Foster R. The Old China Trade. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930; New York: AMS, 1970.

Frank Edward Ross/C. W.

See also Agriculture; China Trade; Medicine, Alternative.