The Story of Heo Saeng and a Big Commercial Dream

  In the late 1700s, Park Ji-won, a scholar of the Silhak school wrote the novel ‘The Story of Heo Saeng’. As a servant of King Jeongjo of the Joseon Dynasty, he, like other Silhak scholars, criticized the old feudalistic notion that ignored the prosperity of commerce. 

  Unfortunately, many feudal scholars, Seonbis + have held the view that commerce in which some goods are bought cheaply and sold at high prices is an immoral act of making money easily without working.

  At that time, however, scholars of the Silhak school thought that commerce was productive like agriculture and manufacturing, and it compensates for the excess and shortage of production and consumption areas through exchange, and further increases national wealth with the surplus.

  The main character of the novel, Heo Saeng, who was poor, first asked Mr. Byeon, a man of large property in Seoul, to borrow business funds to make money through commerce. Unreasonably, he asked the man of wealth to loan a large sum of 10,000 Nyang in old currency units. On the first meeting, the rich man did not know who the Seonbi dressed in shabby clothes is. However, the rich man lent money to Heo Saeng, without a guarantee or an IOU. Warren Buffett said,

“The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.” ++

  Come to think of it, Heo Saeng met a rich man with a truly commercial mind investing in time and people rather than money, and think to that, he set out on the path of a dreamlike business. Thus, he made a lot of profits by buying and selling fruits in a region close to Seoul, and then, with increased capital, he continued to do business with new items in Jeju, the largest island in Korea.

  Since Jeju is the main producing area of horses, he purchased horsehair, which is the raw material for the traditional hats of the Yangban, the ruling class at that era there, and sold it to land and obtain enormous commercial profits. In addition, he learned a thing or two well.

  After that, Heo Saeng, who became a merchant prince, exported grains to Japan, which was in famine, and gained a huge trade surplus.

 

-Some of the popular Dongdaemun fashion items we exported last week, seoulclick.com- 

  At a glance, he achieved great commercial prosperity as a poor Seonbi, but his dream was in something else. He gathered the unemployed and needy, like today’s homeless people, and moved together to an uninhabited island in the South Sea, Korea. 

  And there he joined forces with them to eliminate feudal customs and inefficient systems and their vices, and to build a new world of welfare through nationalism and modernization. It’s such a story long to tell. 

  In this classic novel, we have learned that the virtue of commerce is that any merchant invests in time and people rather than simply making money, and with such rationality, the trading partners in the marketplace are satisfied together.

  As a matter of fact, it is no different from the proposition of sustainable management we are discussing today. The Dongdaemun market people, descendants of Heo Saeng, are trying to improve the quality of life in the market by selling newly and various fashion products to global consumers at as low price as possible.

  In today’s situation where there is nothing to laugh, we are listening to the desperate speech of Mrs. Jeong Eun-kyeong, chief of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

“For solidarity, we must be scattered.” +++ 

  This paradoxical statement emphasizes that in the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no other way than social distancing for the health of all citizens. As well as her dedication to modeling the K-quarantine, which successfully prevented the Corona pandemic, and such comments are likely to be convincing.

  In an empty marketplace where sellers and buyers cannot meet, the ethical management of online and un-tact commerce, even if they are scattered, will be another new horizon to get happiness together. 

  Needless to say, online or un-tact commerce requires quality managing such as better design and style of fashion products, input of good raw materials and parts, and an elaborate sewing, and so on. 

  We are well aware that the rules of etiquette were as important in cyberspace as in the real world. Of these netiquettes, it is natural to make real people a priority. Without such a netiquette, no merchant could have a trading partner, and without a trading partner, there would be no sales.

+ Seonbi was a kind of scholar among the Yangban.

++ www.google.com

+++ www.naver.com 

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Bong Sul (Advisor, SeoulClick)

Read more: Bong (Bong Sik) Sul, Dongdaemun Style, ebook.kstudy.com, Seoul, 2019.