Peeling Back the History of Jeju
KOREA TIMES
12-22-2009 23:24
 Jeju mandarin orange trees are seen against the background of Mt. Halla, the extinct volcano that rises to 1,950 meters in the center of Jeju Island, the premier tourist destination in the nation. |
By Andrei Lankov
For centuries, Jeju Island, the “Korean Hawaii” was associated not with luxurious resorts and honeymooning couples, but with something different ― poverty and remoteness.
Indeed, stormy seas made regular trade with Korea proper difficult, and the population of the large island had to survive on its own resources.
The poor soil of the island made agriculture difficult, and for centuries its population had to look to additional sources of income or, rather, calories.
Men went fishing while women dived for abalone and seaweed (the famous female divers, known as “haenyeo” have long been a part of Jeju legend). In later eras, men often migrated to Korea and Japan.
And then things changed, somewhat of a sudden. The long suffering land did not become rich overnight, but its fortunes began to improve fast. This small-scale economic miracle was brought about by two new factors: mandarins and tourists.
Indeed, the economy of Jeju relies heavily on mandarins, a sweet-sour citrus fruit related to but different from the orange. In the last few decades it has been one of the most popular fruits in Korea (“proper” oranges are almost unknown here, largely due to prohibitive tariffs which have been lifted recently).
Various kinds of citrus fruits, including some sorts of mandarin, were mentioned in ancient Korean texts, and there are even early references to mandarins growing on Jeju Island, but until the early 1900s this fruit, now so popular, played a rather marginal role in the Korean diet.
However, with the introduction of new seedlings from Japan around 1900, the mandarin plantations began to spread across the southern part of the country. Nowadays these recently introduced sorts completely dominate the industry.
In 1911 a French Catholic missionary, Father Taque, imported 15 mandarin trees from Japan. He planted them in an orchard belonging to the local Catholic mission, and one of these trees is still alive and bearing fruit.
The modern history of mandarin industry in Jeju began from those trees in the missionary orchard, planted less than a century ago.
Shortly afterwards, some Japanese entrepreneurs experimented with orchards in the warm climate of the island. These new types of mandarin proved to be superior, and soon they began to spread across Jeju.
However, the mandarin boom which put the fruit within the reach of every Korean family did not begin until the 1960s. Mandarin trees are more cold-resistant then orange trees, but they love a warm climate nonetheless.
Jeju, with an average yearly temperature of 14.7 degrees Celsius is the warmest part of Korea, and from the early 1960s the local farmers realized that they could make good money by cultivating and selling the mandarins.
In those days, Korean government strictly limited imports, trying to save every won. Even instant coffee could not be legally imported until the late 1960s (people smuggled it in anyway), so no foreign fruits were available in Korea until the 1980s.
Even when the imported fruits first appeared, they were outrageously expensive because of the protective tariff. Sufficient to say, that as late as 1995 the tariff on imported oranges was 94.1 percent.
This created a perfect market niche for the Jeju farmers: they could use their sub-tropical climate to produce fruits that would be difficult to grow elsewhere in Korea. In the 1970s, the Jeju farmers experimented with other subtropical fruits.
Bananas were especially prominent, even though they had to be grown in greenhouses. However, from the early 1990s the gradual opening of the agricultural market undermined these industries: Jeju bananas could not compete with the fruits from the Philippines which were eight times cheaper and still superior in quality.
Thus, the banana industry encountered serious problems once it lost state protection. The mandarins proved to be more successful, even though the local farmers do not feel particularly secure in the face of the unavoidable increase of citrus exports from overseas.
As late as the early 1960s, the mandarin plantations occupied less than 1 percent of Jeju’s arable area. Twenty years later, in the 1980s, some 30 percent of all arable land was used to grow these fruits. Mandarins had become the mainstay of “Jeju commercial agriculture,” even though less than a century earlier the expression would surely have sounded like an oxymoron.
As of 2003, the mandarins generated nearly half of all income in the island’s agriculture sphere (47 percent, to be precise), so it comes as no surprise that the entire island is sometimes called “mandarin paradise.” Indeed, mandarin orchards are everywhere on the island.
In recent years, the Jeju farmers have been harvest 500 to 600,000 tons of these fruits annually (in 2006, the Jeju harvest was approximately 570,000 tons) ― about a hundred kilos for every Korean.
So, Jeju even has a large “mandarin museum” which is dedicated to the past and present of the industry as well as to the alleged miraculous qualities of the fruit.
The mandarin boom was not the only factor behind the remarkable economic growth of Jeju. Tourism proved to be equally important, and it is interesting that both tourism and mandarin cultivation started at the same time, in the 1960s.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.