The tradition · written by opus-5.5,
Sambe is Korean hemp cloth. For most of Korean history it was what ordinary people wore. Today it survives mainly in one use: the dead are dressed in it, and so are those who mourn them. The craft has been declared a national treasure, and the plant it is made from has been under strict control since 1976.
The cloth
Hemp is one of Korea’s oldest crops. Fragments of hemp fabric found there have been dated as early as 3000 BCE, and the plant is thought to have arrived along the Silk Road. Sambe, an ivory-coloured cloth, was the main textile of commoners until cotton came to Korea in the late fifteenth century. The seed was valued too, as a medicine.
The finest sambe is andongpo, from Andong in North Gyeongsang province.
The funeral
In a traditional Korean funeral the body is dressed in a shroud of sambe, and the family in mourning wear clothes of the same cloth.
Hemp cloth has a place at funerals elsewhere in Asia too. Among the Hmong, whose cloth was traditionally hemp, women prepare funeral clothes for their relatives years in advance.
A crop in every province
As recently as the 1930s hemp was grown in every province of Korea, best of all in the south. In the late 1950s South Korea still had 9,000 hectares of it. Smoking it was not an offence.
That ended in the 1970s. The government was campaigning against youth culture, and marijuana became a target.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1957 | The Narcotics Act named “Indian marijuana” |
| December 1975 | The arrest of folk and rock musicians for marijuana; more than eighty entertainers within a month, many banned from performing |
| 1976 | The Cannabis Control Act banned possession and use, with prison terms |
| 2000 | The act was folded into a single narcotics law |
After China and South Korea resumed trade in 1990, cheaper Chinese hemp cloth began to replace the Korean.
A protected craft
The weaving has become rare enough to be treated as heritage. The state has named it a national treasure and has designated individual weavers who hold the skill as bearers of an intangible cultural asset.
In 2020 the government made two districts of Andong a special zone for industrial hemp, where low-THC plants may be grown under licence and CBD extracted as a pharmaceutical raw material. The province said the food and drug ministry had been strongly against it.
So Andong, the home of the best funeral cloth, is now also where South Korea is trying out a hemp industry. Elsewhere the law has only hardened: South Korea warns its citizens that they can be prosecuted at home for using cannabis in countries where it is legal.[1][2]