She Donated $15 Million and Still Has No Air Conditioning: The Life of Korea's 'Herbal Cuisine Master'

Lee Gyeong-ae has donated close to 20 billion won (roughly $15 million USD) over the course of her life, but her bedroom has no air conditioning, a detail she offered without apology on the EBS program Seo Jang-hoon's Millionaire Next Door, which aired on August 5. That combination of considerable wealth and deliberate simplicity is, she explained, the natural consequence of growing up in a household where the family sold their hair to buy food.

Her father's gambling debts defined her early years. As a child, she dug ginger from the fields to eat, and her family cut and sold their hair when money ran out entirely. Unable to pay school fees, she never attended middle school, instead taking a job at a government tobacco authority drying red ginseng. It was in that period, she has said, that she made a private promise: if she ever succeeded, no one around her would go hungry the way she had.

The path to that success was anything but direct. After marrying, she opened a small Chinese restaurant, reasoning that running a food business was at least a guarantee of meals. The restaurant caught on quickly, drawing more customers than she could manage. Six months in, a competing business bought the entire building she was operating from and forced her out.

Her husband then traveled to Saudi Arabia for work, and the couple spent four years apart while he saved enough money for their next attempt, a coffee shop in a well-located spot. That business, too, built a following through what those around her described simply as her natural touch with food. Three years later, the landlord asked her to leave again.

Two forced closures in a row pushed Lee to a difficult place. In a moment she has spoken about with rare candor, she described contemplating something far more drastic than simply starting over. Instead, she found a new direction in an old memory: the medicinal broths her mother used to boil from roots and herbs gathered on the mountain. She began blending those herbal ingredients into pork rib marinades, developing what would become her signature dish.

With a small restaurant she and her husband opened together, the concept took hold. As the customer base grew, so did the space. Wary of landlords after two evictions, the couple eventually borrowed against their savings and bought land outright, an undeveloped stretch of rice paddies in the hills. Neighbors called the decision reckless. Within a year of opening their large hillside restaurant, Lee was recording single-day revenues of up to 20 million won, and the surrounding roads were regularly backed up with traffic. She recalls stashing cash in rice sacks to sleep on because there was no time to make bank runs.

Seo Jang-hoon, the former basketball player who hosts the program and has a reputation for being an unusually considerate landlord himself, tasted her cooking during filming. "There are people who cook the same recipe and it just tastes different," he said. "She was born with it."

The frugality that followed success was not performance. When Lee needed something to wear to a Presidential Award ceremony, she has received the award three times, she went to a department store, found the prices too high, and bought her outfit at a market instead. Her daily meals are rice, soup, and kimchi. "People ask me why I live like this when I have money," she said. "I'm just grateful that my life is more comfortable than it was. The urge to spend doesn't really come."

What she has spent on, consistently, is others. Beyond the 20 billion won figure, Lee has hosted meals for roughly 3,000 elderly people living alone and people with disabilities each year, donated a 450-pyeong parcel of land to Gwangmyeong City, and visited around 350 small food businesses to share her recipes and techniques without charge. The work is, in her telling, less charity than the fulfillment of something she promised herself as a hungry child. "I decided that if I made it, there would be no one crying from hunger the way I did," she said. "That's all this is."