such a thing is to mix it with glue and use it to repair sandals,” he said quietly. “Two things I do know. Anyone who tries to steal a valuable item from the Ancestress is begging for an unpleasant death, and I am now too old to attempt it without having some muscle to back me up. I have accepted your five thousand copper cash, and you are my client, and the decision is yours.”
“Master Li, when do we leave?” I asked eagerly.
I was ready to race out the door, but he looked at me wryly.
“Ox, if the children die suddenly there is nothing that we can do about it, and if the textbook prognosis holds true, they should last for months. The worst thing that we could do would be to arrive at our destination weary and unprepared,” he said patiently. “I'm going to get some rest, and if you can't sleep, perhaps the abbot will be kind enough to expand your education on the subject of the quest. Ginseng is the most interesting as well as the most valuable plant in the whole world.”
He yawned and stretched.
“We'll have to go back through Peking to pick up some money, and we'll leave at the first watch,” he said.
Li Kao lay down in the bonzes’ bedchamber. I had never been so wide awake in my life. The abbot took me into his study for instruction, and what I learned about ginseng was so interesting that I was almost able to forget the children for an hour.
4. Root of Lightning
No medicinal plant is quite so controversial, the abbot explained. There are eminent physicians who swear that it is no more effective than strong tea, and there are those who swear that it is effective in treating anemia, cachexia, scrofula, gastrointestinal catarrh, and malfunctions of the lungs, kidneys, liver, heart, and genital organs. Long ago when the plant was plentiful, peasants would mix the ginseng root with owl brains and turtle fat and smear the mixture over the heads of patients to cure insanity, or blend it with the powdered horns of wapiti deer and sprinkle it over the patients’ chests to cure tuberculosis. Strangest of all is the viewpoint of the professional ginseng hunter, because for him it is not a plant but a religion.
The legends are quite marvelous. Ginseng hunters refer to the plant as chang-diang shen, “the root of lightning,” because it is believed that it appears only on the spot where a small mountain spring has been dried up by a lightning bolt. After a life of three hundred years the green juice turns white and the plant acquires a soul. It is then able to take on human form, but it never becomes truly human because ginseng does not know the meaning of selfishness.
It is totally good, and will happily sacrifice itself to aid the pure in heart. In human form it can appear as a man or as a beautiful woman, but more often it takes the form of a child, plump and brown, with red cheeks and laughing eyes. Long ago, evil men discovered that a ginseng child can be captured by tying it with a red ribbon, and that is why the plant is now so hard to find, the hunters say. It has been forced to run away from evil men, and it is for that reason that ginseng hunting has become one of the most hazardous occupations upon the face of the earth.
The ginseng hunter must display the purity of his intentions right from the start, so he carries no weapons. He wears a conical hat made from birch bark, and shoes of tarred pigskin, and an oiled apron to protect him from dew, and a badger skin attached to his belt, on which he sits when the ground is wet. He carries small spades made from bone and two small pliable knives that are quite useless for defense. Along with a little food and wine, that is all he has, and his quest takes him into the wildest mountains where no men have dared to pass before. Tigers and bears are his companions, and the hunter fears strange creatures that are even more dangerous than tigers—such as the tiny owls that will call him by name and lead him into the Forest of Oblivion from which no man returns, and the bandits that are more brutal than savage bears and who crouch beside the few paths in order to murder an unarmed hunter and steal his roots.
Ginseng hunters, when they have thoroughly searched an area and found nothing, will mark the barks of trees with kao chu kua, which are tiny secret signs that tell other hunters not to waste their time there. Hunters would not dream of deceiving each other, because they are not competitors but fellow worshippers. Where a find has been made a shrine is raised, and other hunters who pass will leave offerings of stones, or scraps of cloth. If a hunter finds a plant that is not mature enough he will put stakes around it with his mark on them. If other hunters find the place they will pray and offer gifts, but they would rather cut their throats than take the plant for themselves. The behavior of a man who makes a find is very strange.
A weatherworn, clawed, half-starved ginseng hunter will occasionally have the good fortune to make his way through dense underbrush and come upon a small plant with four branches that have violet flowers and a fifth branch in the center that rises higher than the others and is crowned with red berries. The stalk is deep red, and the leaves are deep green on the outside and pale green on the inside, He will drop to his knees, his eyes streaming with tears, and spread his arms wide to show that he is unarmed. Then he will kowtow and bang his head three times upon the ground, and he will pray,
“O Great Spirit, do not leave me! I have come with a pure heart and soul, after freeing myself from sins and evil thoughts. Do not leave me.”
Then the hunter covers his eyes and lies still for many minutes. If the ginseng plant does not trust him, and wishes to change into a beautiful woman or a plump brown child and run away, the hunter does not want to see where it has gone. At length he opens his eyes, and if the plant is still there his joy is not so much from the fact that he has found a valuable root as it is from the fact that he has been judged and found to be pure in heart.
He takes the seeds and carefully replants them so that the ginseng can grow again. The leaves and flowers are stripped and ceremoniously burned, with many prayers. The hunter's bone spades are used to dig up the root, which is forked and has something of a human shape—skeptics point to the shape as the basis of an ignorant folk religion—and the small pliable knives are used to clean the tiny tendrils called beards, which are supposed to be crucial to the curative powers. The root is wrapped in birch bark and sprinkled with pepper to keep insects away, and the happy hunter begins the long, dangerous trek back toward the safety of civilization.
“Where his throat will probably be slit by somebody like Ma the Grub,” the abbot said sourly. “Who will be swindled by somebody like Pawnbroker Fang, who will sell the root to somebody like the Ancestress, who will squat like a huge venomous toad upon a folk deity whose sole purpose in life is to aid the pure in heart.”
“Reverend Sir, I have never heard of the Ancestress,” I said shyly.
The abbot leaned back and rubbed his weary eyes.
“What a woman,” he said with grudging admiration. “Ox, she began her career as an eleven-year-old imperial concubine, and by the time she was sixteen she had Emperor Wen wrapped around her fingers to the point where he took her as his number three wife. The Ancestress promptly poisoned the emperor, strangled his other wives, decapitated all but the youngest of his sons, elevated that weakling to the throne—Emperor Yang—and settled down behind the scenes as the real ruler of China.”
“Reverend Sir, I have heard all my life that Emperor Yang was a depraved and vicious ruler who nearly destroyed the empire,” I exclaimed.
“That's the official version, with parricide tossed in,” the abbot said drily. “Actually he was a timid little fellow, and quite likable. The real ruler was the Ancestress, which is a title that she awarded herself and which carries a certain Confucian finality. Her reign was brief, but gorgeous. She set about bankrupting the empire by decreeing that every leaf that fell in her imperial pleasure garden must be replaced by an artificial leaf fashioned from the costliest silk. Her imperial pleasure barge was 270 feet long, four decks high, and boasted a three-story throne room and 120 cabins decorated in gold and jade. The problem was finding a pond big enough for the thing, so she conscripted 3,600,000 peasants and forced them to link the Yellow and Yangtze rivers by digging a ditch 40 feet deep, 50 yards wide, and 1,000 miles long. The Grand Canal has been invaluable for commerce, but the important thing for the Ancestress was that three million men died during the construction, and a figure like that confirmed her godlike grandeur.
“When the canal was finished,” the abbot said, “the Ancestress invited a few friends to accompany her on an important mission of state to Yang-chou. The fleet of pleasure barges stretched sixty miles from stem to stern, was manned by 9,000 boatmen, and was towed by 80,000 peasants, some of whom survived. The important mission of
