Ganghwa Island is reached by a single bridge from the mainland, an hour and a half northwest of Seoul. The island is small — about 300 square kilometers — and historically important: a number of the Joseon court fled to Ganghwa during invasions, and the dolmens dating to the third millennium BCE are still standing in the rice fields. None of this has any bearing on mugwort, but it sets the tone for visiting. The island feels older than it has any reason to.
We come every spring, around the second week of March, to spend two days with the family that supplies our mugwort. The harvest window is short — twelve days, give or take, depending on the temperature — and we like to be present for at least one full morning of cutting. This is partly responsibility (the relationship benefits from being a relationship, not a transaction) and partly affection. The island, in early March, is one of the best places to be in Korea.
I.
Mugwort begins growing in late February. By the first week of March it stands roughly six inches tall, with the silver-green leaves of a young plant. The medicinal compounds — cineole, thujone, and a number of other terpenes — are concentrated in these young leaves. Once the plant flowers, in May, the concentrations drop sharply. The mugwort we use is cut before the spring rain, which on Ganghwa typically arrives around the 19th or 20th. After the rain, the leaves wash out — the volatile oils begin to dissipate; the bitter note in the scent softens; the medicinal value declines.
The cutting is done by hand, by women, mostly older. We have asked, more than once, why it is exclusively women's work. The answer we receive is the same every year: "It has always been this way." This is not a satisfying answer, but it is the only one offered, and we have learned not to press.
The cutting itself is fast — a short sickle, two motions per plant, a small bundle every minute. A woman working through a morning can cut perhaps thirty kilograms of fresh shoots, which dries to roughly five kilograms of finished leaf. The bundles are tied with rice straw and stacked in the back of a small truck, then driven to the distillery at the far end of the village.
"You can teach anyone the cutting. But you cannot teach the eye. The eye is whether to cut the plant that is in front of you, or to wait one more day. That you learn over thirty years."
II.
The distillery is a small concrete building behind Mrs. Yoon's house. Inside, a stainless steel chamber holds perhaps fifty kilograms of fresh leaf; steam is forced through it for ninety minutes, and the volatile compounds are caught in a coil that runs into a copper condenser. The output is two products: a clear oil (the steam-distilled mugwort essential oil) and a faintly green water (the hydrosol). We use the hydrosol in our serum and our sun protection — the oil is too concentrated for our purposes, and we do not in general work with essential oils.
We bring our own carboys; the hydrosol is decanted directly from the condenser into our containers, sealed, and refrigerated. It will be flown to Seoul the same day. We use it within four months of distillation.
The yield is unimpressive on paper: roughly one liter of hydrosol per ten kilograms of fresh leaf. Mrs. Yoon's distillery produces perhaps four hundred liters per harvest season, of which we take twelve. The rest goes to a clinical hanbang manufacturer in Seoul, a tea producer in Gwangju, and the village women themselves, who keep a portion for their own use.
III.
The evenings on Ganghwa are quiet in the way that islands are quiet — the dogs in the village go to sleep early; the wind off the tidal flats moves through the rice stubble all night; the temple bell at the far end of the village marks the half-hours. We stay at a small inn run by Mrs. Yoon's niece. The dinner the second night was a stew of cuttlefish, perilla, and the year's first mugwort, served with a single bowl of cold barley tea. The mugwort tasted, more strongly than usual, of itself.
There is something here that is hard to write about without sounding sentimental. We are visiting a place where the work has changed almost not at all over a long time. The cutting motion is the cutting motion. The drying is the drying. The bundles, tied with rice straw, look the way they look in photographs from 1962. We could, in theory, switch to a mechanized supplier; we could buy mugwort hydrosol on the wholesale market and pay less. The arithmetic would be straightforward.
The reason we do not is also straightforward, and it is not nostalgia. It is that the Ganghwa mugwort, harvested by these women, distilled in this small building, is detectably better in our formulations. We have tested the alternative. Customers can taste the difference, in the smell of the serum, even if they cannot name it. We do not, in the language of the business school, have a strong cost case for this. We have, instead, a strong product case. The two are sometimes different.
IV.
We leave Ganghwa at dawn on the third morning. The tide is out; the wide flats are silver under low cloud. Mrs. Yoon and her daughter see us off at the bridge. They will be cutting for another nine days. After that, the season is over; mugwort returns to being a roadside plant.
We will see them again in March 2027.
— Soonji editorial
Ganghwa Island. March 2026.
