Gurye
More actions
| Gurye | |
|---|---|
| 구례 | |
| No longer grownSources say growing here has ended | |
| Geography | |
| Country | Korea |
| Province/State | South Jeolla Province |
| Coordinates | 35.24, 127.50 |
| Landscape | |
| Area | 440 km² |
| Terrain | Mountains and the valley of the Seomjin river; approximately Gurye County |
| Growing history | |
| Documentation | |
| Appellations | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Gurye is a former cannabis growing area in Korea, mapped on Gurye County in the basin of the Seomjin river, in the south-west of South Korea. In the 1920s and 1930s most households in the county grew hemp and wove their own sambe, hemp cloth. When the Japanese variety Yashū hemp (野州麻) was brought into Korea under colonial rule, Gurye kept its native hemp. Growing declined from the early 1970s and almost stopped from the mid-1970s.[1]
Hemp in the household economy
Gurye lies in the hills of eastern South Jeolla, next to Gokseong, the home of the hemp cloth Dolsil-nai. It has more mountain land than paddy and dry field; cotton was grown there too, but like Gokseong the county was better suited to hemp. Records of the fifteenth century already list Gurye among the places of the province where much hemp cloth was made, and a Japanese survey of about 1918 counted it among the important hemp-cloth districts of South Jeolla, with Gokseong, Boseong and Hwasun.[1]: 17, 19
Old people interviewed in all eight townships of the county in 2010 and 2012 remembered that in the 1920s and 1930s most households grew their own hemp on a field or a hillside plot beside their main crops. Ramie was not grown; the few who wove it bought the thread at market. Sowing was shared work: the ground was broken with hoes, the men levelled it and scattered the seed, and the women covered it. The hemp was cut in late June and July.[1]: 17, 19–20
Colonial rule changed the seed of the other fibre crops in Gurye: native cotton gave way to upland cotton, and Korean silkworms and mulberries to Japanese ones. Hemp cloth was not a main object of Japanese extraction, and Yashū hemp, though it reached Korea, did not replace the native variety in Gurye.[1]: 19 After 1945 the low grain prices of the 1960s drove farm households to earn more from weaving, and the hemp and cloth they produced increased.[1]: 19–20
From stalk to cloth
The harvested stalks were steamed in a samgut, a large shared task for the whole village. Until the 1950s stones were heated over a fire in a pit by water and drenched to raise steam, either under the hemp in the same pit or in a second pit joined to the first by a channel. Iron cauldrons came into use from the 1950s, and later concrete steaming houses with oil boilers. In Gurye the outer bark was stripped while the stalks were still hot, as in Boseong and Hwasun; in Andong the steamed stalks are dried first.[1]: 20–23 The thread was whitened with lye from the ash of bean and sesame stalks, or a stronger ash of hill brushwood, and from the 1950s with caustic soda bought at market; it was dyed yellow with gardenia. Most cloth was woven at five or six seung; finer cloth of eight or nine was made to order or for good clothes. Treadle looms, spread through industrial cooperatives under colonial rule, came to the richer households in the 1930s and 1940s; poorer households kept the old back-strap loom.[1]: 23–25
Decline
The county's hemp area was 79.9 hectares in 1967 and 73 hectares in 1970. It fell to 28.5 hectares in 1971 and was 33.6 hectares in 1973; Choi's figures stop after 1973.[1]: 25 Choi traces the end of Gurye's hemp to three causes: cheap hemp cloth from China, the falling demand for hemp shrouds as funerals were simplified and cremation spread, and the government's permit system for hemp growing, which came with the ban on cannabis as a drug. A woman of Sandong-myeon, born in 1932, recalled giving up hemp in the late 1970s, when the state no longer let them plant it.[1]: 25 In Gokseong and Boseong weaving went on with bought thread after growing stopped; in Gurye hemp was hardly grown from the mid-1970s, and its hemp cloth ended with it.[1]: 20, 25
Accessions
No accessions documented yet.
Recent news
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See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Choi, S.Y. (2014). "The characteristics and changes of traditional hemp textile production of Gurye at Jeollanam-do in modern times (1920s~1980s)". The Research Journal of the Costume Culture (in 한국어). 22 (1): 16–27. doi:10.7741/rjcc.2014.22.1.016.