Last night I went to dinner at my favorite tiki bar. They serve some delightful Hawaiian food that is a fusion of all the cultures that have called Hawaii home over the last 400 years. Next to my Katsu chicken was a good serving of kimchi. It was spicy and sour and delightful. But it got me thinking, how did it get there? I know chili came to Europe and Asia through the Columbian exchange, but what is Korea’s story? In my mind Korea is an exceptionally remote bit of Asia because of its location on an archipelago. Did this have an impact on how chili and other American plants got to them? Or were they more open and accessible to traders than pop history articles have led me to believe?
I know chili came to Europe and Asia through the Columbian exchange, but what is Korea’s story?
We don't know.
The chilli enters history in Korea in 1614, when it is described as commonly cultivated, and introduced from Japan. Whether this last part - introduction from Japan - is correct, we don't know, but it was a Korean opinion at the time. Korean chilli history is complicated by gochu apparently having been used for some other plant before the chilli arrived (probably for "brown pepper", Zanthoxylum piperitum or Z. schinifolium, the culinary use of which was almost completely displaced by chillies). Of course, this re-use of names isn't anything unique to Korea - the English-speaking world has used "pepper" to refer to black pepper, cubeb pepper, long pepper, Senegal pepper, Guinea pepper, and other "hot" spices as well as using the same name for chillies. The chilli also took time to be accepted into high-class cooking, which is what appears in early cookbooks more often than peasant cooking. In much of the world, the chilli was adopted by the lower classes, by peasants as a home-grown alternative to more expensive spices. For example, in Korea, it took over a century for chillies to appear in cookbooks (e.g., the Eumsik-dimibang (c. 1670) has no chilli in any of its 146 recipes).
The most common modern suggestion is that the chilli was taken to Korea from Japan, during the Imjin War (1592-1598). The chilli would have reached Japan on European ships, either Portuguese or Spanish; the Spanish would have brought the chilli from the Philippines, where they had introduced it from Mexico, across the Pacific. The Portuguese had spread the chilli around much of Africa and Asia, introducing it to West Africa and India by 1540, and to Thailand possibly as early as 1511.
While introduction from Japan is possible, it is also possible that the chilli was taken from Korea to Japan, during the Imjin War. In this case, the chilli would probably have been introduced to Korea from China. However, the introduction of the chilli to China is even more mysterious than the introduction of the chilli to Korea. The four main proposals are direct introduction by the Portuguese, introduction by Indian and Arab traders from India (this might have been the method of introduction of the chilli to Indonesia), overland trade from India through SE Asia, and overland trade from India through Central Asia. The chilli only enters Chinese history in 1671, when they were reported in Fujian (suggesting a sea-borne introduction). It would be quite surprising for the chilli to have only reached China at such a late date, about a century after it had reached China's SE and East Asia neighbours, but in the absence of any written evidence, we only have guesswork.
References:
S. Halikowski Smith, "In the shadow of a pepper-centric historiography: Understanding the global diffusion of capsicums in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries", Journal of Ethnopharmacology 167 (2015) 64–77
DeWitt, Dave, Chile Peppers: A Global History, University of New Mexico Press, 2020