Changbai Mountain Ginseng Diggers: Before Entering the Mountain, One Must First Worship the Old Chief

In Changbai Mountain, there used to be a group of people who made a living by digging ginseng, called ginseng diggers. Before entering the mountain, they had to worship a person first: the Old Chief.

Legend says the Old Chief was named Sun Liang, a man from Shandong who went to Manchuria during the Qing Dynasty to enter the mountains and dig ginseng. He encountered disaster in the mountains and died in the woods. Later, ginseng diggers felt that he had always been secretly watching over them, pointing the way when they were lost, and letting them find a shack when they were hungry, so they regarded him as their patriarch. The first thing upon entering the mountain was to burn incense and kowtow at the Old Chief's temple at the mountain entrance, asking him to bless them with a safe journey and also to bless them with finding ginseng. The temple wasn't necessarily a real temple; some were just a rock, with a few wooden boards set up as a small shrine.

Once inside the mountain, there were even more rules. The ginseng diggers went in teams, and the leader was called the Chief. Everyone lined up in a row, holding a stick to brush aside grass, walking while looking. The first rule was not to talk randomly, and absolutely not to say the two words "ginseng"; they had to call it "pestle"; when discovered, they had to shout "Pestle!" loudly, and others had to respond, then ask how many leaves it had, whether it was "four-leaf" or "five-leaf"; the more leaves, the older the age. Once found, they couldn't just pull it out; they had to first tie the ginseng stem with a red string, then dig a little bit at a time, and when digging, they had to use small bone picks, not iron tools, saying they were afraid of hurting the rootlets.

There were also some taboos, such as not turning around casually, not saying unlucky words, and not scolding people in the mountain. The reason was that ginseng has a spirit and would "run away"; if you shout "ginseng", it would grow legs and run away, so before digging it up, everything had to be done carefully.

These rules are still followed by some old ginseng diggers in Northeast China to this day, but now wild ginseng is extremely rare, most of what is sold in the market is artificially cultivated, and fewer and fewer people enter the mountains. In some places, the Old Chief's temple still exists; during holidays and festivals, some people go specially to burn a stick of incense.

#Folklore #网络转载 #东北民俗