JINAN, South Korea: A roadside restaurant here was abuzz one recent morning with talk of a $65,000 ginseng plant.

The only customers, a small group of ginseng seekers, had assembled for a breakfast of tofu soup before driving off to a nearby mountain that they planned to scour for the sought-after plant.

Belying the early hour and the rain, their conversation grew increasingly animated with each retelling of the news from the night before: Someone had just found a 235-gram, or 8.3-ounce, 30-year-old ginseng plant, assessed at $65,000!

"Just because the ginseng plant weighs more, it doesn't necessarily mean that its quality is superior, as the television report was implying," said the group leader, Pae Young Gun.

In South Korea  and elsewhere in Asia, wild ginseng roots have traditionally been prized for their supposed preternatural healing powers, properties believed to be missing in the farmed variety. South Korean media periodically report on the discovery of extremely rare wild ginseng plants that command tens of thousands of dollars and fuel the dreams of ginseng seekers across the country.

So armies of them forage through the country's thickly forested mountains, where wild ginseng can be found, if it can be found at all, in nooks with the right mix of air, sunlight and humidity. As mountains are regarded as holy places, the search tends to take on a spiritual, or at least superstitious, dimension.

The finder of the $65,000 ginseng was reported to have seen three pillars of fire in a dream just before stumbling on the plant on Sobaek Mountain, in the middle of the country.

Here in the southwest, Pae, a professional ginseng seeker, was guide to a group of a half-dozen amateurs.

"I used to be really depressed, so I started looking for ginseng," said Pae Duk Soon, a 42-year-old homemaker, who is not related to the group leader.

She isn't in it for the money, she said. In the 10 months she had been looking for ginseng, she had dug up a handful of young, little plants, perhaps worth a few hundred dollars, and given them away to relatives. "But the professionals," she whispered, "get stressed out if they go three days straight without finding anything."

After driving to their destination, Woonjang Mountain, the group split into two, with Pae Young Gun and an experienced member of the group choosing an untrodden path. No sooner had they left their cars than they were climbing up a steep hill and hacking bush with a scythe. Arriving at a clearing on a steep slope, Pae laid a squash, some dried fish and rice crackers at the foot of a tree.

"I'm just telling the mountain gods that we're starting our trip and asking them to look after us," he explained after prostrating himself and pouring out two bottles of a milklike drink. "I'm also offering some drinks to the demons surrounding the gods so that they won't be envious."

It was 17 years ago that the 43-year-old started looking for ginseng after befriending an older seeker during a mountain hike, he said. The older man taught him where to search and how.

"The point is not to be greedy, to empty your heart," Pae said. "Go into the mountain. Make sure you are walking and working very hard so that your labor will be rewarded."

He decided to devote himself full-time to searching for ginseng four years ago after giving up his job as a fisherman.

"Until last year, I was torn - do I like the sea or the mountain more?" said Pae, a stocky, bearlike man able to plow through dense forests of trees and bush with surprising ease. "I made up my mind - it's the mountain."