Page 22 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

8.

vessel to Canton.

Financed by a group of New York and Philadelphia

merchants, the "Empress of China" departed from New York in

February 1784. Capt. John Green and Supercargo Samuel Shaw

carried a cargo of ginseng (jen-shen), a root highly valued

by the Chinese as "a sovereign remedy for almost every malady

that human flesh is heir to, from indigestion to consumption,

and. .believed to insure irrununity from all kinds of disease. 11

Actually the ginseng aboard the "Empress of China" was not

genuine, but the root of a plant in the same family as Chinese
ginseng. The Chinese had been using ginseng for centuries be­

fore Western traders arrived. Westerners, seeing how much

ginseng brought in the market at Canton, sought to find the

root elsewhere.

In 1716 a French missionary, intrigued by an article on

the root written by a missionary to China, discovered the plant

growing in eastern Canada. This American ginseng, although

inferior in quality to Chinese ginseng, proved very profitable

in the Canton market, where it sold at a lower price. New

Englanders also found the root and exported it through the

English. By the 1750's !\ffierican colonists outdistanced the

Canadians in the export of ginseng. The root, therefore, was
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a natural cargo to carry to Canton in the first American venture.

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The name ginseng came from the shape of the root, which
often had a human form. For that reason the Chinese believed that
the drug prolonged life besides curing various afflictions. Act­
ually ginseng did possess medicinal value, although not as the
panacea the Chinese believed. Maurice G. Kains, Ginseng: Its
Cultivation, Harvesting, Marketing and Market Value; with a Short
Account of Its History and Botany (New York, 1901), pp. 1-5.