Hyangyak: Why Joseon Went Looking for Its Own Medicine

Long before the Donguibogam, Korea was already trying to solve a practical problem: what do you do when the medicine your doctors rely on has to be imported?

For much of Korea's premodern history, many valued medicinal substances came from China — expensive to import, vulnerable to trade disruptions, and simply out of reach for most people outside the capital. The response to that problem has a name: hyangyak (鄕藥), literally 'local remedies,' the substances that grew in Korea itself and could substitute for imported Chinese materia medica (唐藥, 'Tang medicine').

A movement older than the Donguibogam

This wasn't a new idea in 1613. The Hyangyak-gugeupbang (鄕藥救急方), likely from the 13th century, is the oldest surviving Korean medical text and already focused on locally available remedies for emergencies. In 1433, under King Sejong — the same king who would soon commission the invention of hangul — the state compiled the Hyangyak-jipseongbang (鄕藥集成方), a large-scale survey of native Korean medicinal substances. The Donguibogam's Tangaek-pyeon inherits this project rather than starting it.

Written to be found in the field, not just read in a study

The clearest evidence of this hyangyak philosophy in Tangaek-pyeon is a small but consequential design choice: alongside the classical Chinese name for each substance, entries record its Korean vernacular name in hangul — a script invented specifically to be accessible without years of classical education. A local physician or even an ordinary farmer, unable to read classical Chinese, could still match a plant in a field to the hangul name on the page. Ginger appears as '生薑 강,' jujube as '大棗 대츄' — the vernacular sitting right next to the formal name, not hidden in a separate glossary.

Practical necessity, dressed as scholarship

It's worth remembering that this wasn't only about national pride in local products. War, unstable trade, and simple cost made dependence on imported medicine a real vulnerability. Identifying which Korean plants could substitute for Chinese ones was a matter of practical resilience — arguably as much a supply-chain question as a medical one, centuries before that phrase existed. Several plants recorded in Tangaek-pyeon carry a 唐 (Tang) marker distinguishing the imported original from a locally available equivalent, a detail preserved directly in the raw text this site draws its herb entries from.