#import from china

[junotter]

Part 2 of my modern avatar au, The Gaang (part 1)

[troythecatfish]

[trans-leek-cookie]

i feel like we are conflating "not realizing you were being lied to" and "accepting/ignoring obvious gross behavior" in the same realm of being Not At Fault. Yeah this is abt James Somerton cause like. Yeah you're not going to notice plagiarism unless youre familiar with the plagiarized work (or someone calls out said plagiarism) that's fine. But like? You aren't irredeemable or anything, but maybe in the future be more critical when someone you respect or like says stuff that's misogynistic or lesbophobic or biphobic or transphobic? Like you don't have to instantly persecute them, but please let that inform how you see them? Don't just write them off as having good intentions or important things to say (even if they do), you can acknowledge those intentions while also acknowledging their faults. Again: it's not an unforgivable sin, but there's a difference in being lied to and listening to someone Say Misogynistic and Bi/Trans/Lesbophobic Shit openly

[fatehbaz]

Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

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Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

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China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. 

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

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By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

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Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

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Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

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Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[tonya-the-chicken]

Every time I read a review of "Global South" country politics it's always "We are defying the US by doing this and this. And "This and this" is being friends with authoritarian regimes and not giving a fuck about victims of genocide. But hey! International leftist solidarity against the victims of American imperialism :) If you're a victim of any other imperialism then fuck you. We are building stronger relationships with "Usa's rivals" (regimes that are the reason you are suffering rn)

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

xiao yuliang 肖宇梁  

[aeolianblues]

I'm trying not to block people. But there's only so many times I can go 'give people the benefit of the doubt' and then click their blog and what's literally the third or fourth post on their blogs? They talk about middle eastern people like savages who can't control their violent urges. And of course, more than half of them are Americans. After posing for 20 years, the masks that temporarily went up when anti-war activists criticised the American war in the Middle East are slipping, some of you never really believed brown people to be your equals did you? Get the fuck off my blog.

[flintandpyrite]

I spent a lot of time at lake Michigan last week and now I am at lake Champlain and like I know they are geologically young lakes unlike Baikal so we haven't had the time to develop them but it really just seems terribly unfair that our large lakes have no aquatic mammals in them. I kept looking at Michigan going "FREE REAL ESTATE" and today I kept imagining that logs in the water on Champlain are seals. Anyway, we need mad scientists to be developing small lake whales. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[junotter]

sometimes researching for avatar redesigns has you 6 layers deep into the Japan's Meiji era allies wiki

[troythecatfish]

[rubberbandballqueen]

when at the library today i picked up a book abt typography to pick up some more theoretical skills there and to no one's surprise it pretended that european languages were the only languages in the world which like whatever i'll still learn what principles it has to teach and then try to reverse-engineer applications to cn font design based on what i know.

despite not trusting the english-language resources available online to be as in-depth or technical as i desire, i got curious and googled "chinese typographic design" anyway n scrolling through the introduction to the first result, you can kind of tell it's not written with a chinese-speaking audience in mind, or at the very least an audience with some semblance of chinese cultural sensitivities bc its section headed by the words "navigating the simplified and traditional divide" goes on to basically say it's an Aesthetic Decision which. well. is certainly a way to pretend you're avoiding politics.

[jayswing101]

Hello hi may i interest you in a baby goat? Meet Mocha and her little baby Kinder!! Kinder was born April 13th, 2023 and everyone loves her so much

[aloeverawrites]

Guys this is your chance to block the tankies, clear out your leftist spaces. If someone's supporting a country or organisation that's committing war crimes or genocide, or supports bigotries like antisemitism, just block them.

[bookwyrminspiration]

I saw the posts you reblogged about the Velocipastor and I think I need to watch it now

oh ABSOLUTELY you must. that was the best worst 72 minutes of my life ever and I WILL be rewatching it many times, please please watch it I'm begging on my KNEES

I didn't watch it on youtube myself so I can't exactly verify this link (I skimmed through it and it looks right), but here's the full movie on YouTube for anyone who wants to experience the epic highs and lows of a grieving priest who turns into a dinosaur and fights ninjas on a 35K budget

there's just. there's so much going on and it's so so clearly low budget but embraces that and it's genuinely one of my favorite movies now. please please watch it everyone

[wetslug]

paid 8$ for some lychee but i think it was worth it