The Tradition of Moral Commerce and Sustainable Management

Jeju, the largest island in Korea is known as a place where many foreigners want to go sightseeing. It is also a place that is widely praised for its fantastic scenery as if the gods stayed there. Anyone who goes there will be able to see traces of a female merchant doing moral commerce in the late 1700s. Now, there is a tourist attraction where wealthy residents live, but the place where the poor farmers and fishermen lived 200 years ago was rough land. According to records, in 1795, after a long drought, many residents of Jeju island starved and the number of deaths increased day by day. The old people said, “Poverty cannot be saved by even a king.” Especially in Jeju, an island far from Seoul, it would have been more difficult to rescue all of them even if many residents were dying due to drought. At that time, the merchant princess Kim Man-deok disposed of all the money and property she had earned throughout her life, purchased large quantit...