The sap drinkers of Hadong

For us nature and culture lovers, reporter Choe Sang-hun of the New York Times has an interesting article on the maple sap collectors of Hadong-gun County (하동군/河東郡) in South Kyŏngsang Province.

Apparently, this is the perfect time of year:

“It’s important to have the right weather,” said Park Jeom-sik, 56, toting plastic tubs up a moss-covered slope. “The temperature should drop below freezing at night and then rise to a warm, bright, windless day. If it’s rainy, windy or cloudy, the trees won’t give.”

For centuries, southern Korean villagers like Mr. Park have been tapping the gorosoe, or “tree good for the bones.”

Unlike North Americans who collect maple sap to boil down into syrup, Korean villagers and their growing number of customers prefer the sap itself, which they credit with a wide range of health benefits.

Choe writes that this practice is also done in Japan and northern China. The tree they are collecting it from is the korosoé namu (고로쇠 나무; gorosoe namu in that icky Revised Romanization), which is a type of maple, Acer mono, also known as the Usugumo maple (photo by aristide from here).

One of the people with whom Choe ventured out, 72-year-old Yeo Manyong (yŏ manyong, 여만용?) says "the right way is to drink an entire mal at once." A mal is a unit of measure equivalent to about eighteen liters (though Choe wrote twenty). Dude, it's a unit for measuring stored rice, not for sap you're about to drink!

I suppose that in the days of scarcity and malnutrition, drinking a liquid heavy with natural sugars might have been a good way to store up energy (if the diabetes didn't kick in). Hey, given that these guys reached their seventies when many in their cohort had an average life expectancy in their sixties, I might be willing to attribute some of that to maple sap (plus living so far south during the Korean War).