This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project
to make the world's books discoverable online.
It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject
to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books
are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.
Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the
publisher to a library and finally to you.
Usage guidelines
Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing tliis resource, we liave taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for in forming people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe.
About Google Book Search
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web
at|http: //books .google .com/I
|
1 J |
|
|
i |
|
|
^# J |
|
|
u |
^J# |
1 |
|
vcn |
y^.^# |
• |
|
r |
||
|
y ""^ J |
||
|
j! . |
m VI STRATI |
:d >1 |
|
^ |
l^ff^^H |
. i |
^EP^IVAL LOWELL^
l^
L3lto
w^
^
i
"•: 1 ■4
^. J
>i.
/
4
CHOSON
THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM
t
I
•• • • •• •
V'-
• • •
•:*:
• ■
\ ■
■ •
• •
Choson
THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM
A SKETCH OF KOREA
BY
PHRCIVAL LOWKLL
LATB rORBIGN SECRETARY AND COUNSELLOR TO THE KOREAN SPECIAL MISSION TO THR
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA MRMBER OF THB ASIATIC SOCIETY OK JAPAN
ILLUSTRATED
FROM PHOTOCKAPHS HY THE AUTHOR
BOSTON
TICKNOR AM) COMPANY
1886
Copyright, 1885,
By Percival Lowell.
All riyhts reserved.
i 90197
■ • •
•
« •
University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
PREFACE.
ONE evening in August, 1883, I found myself arriving in Tokio, after a journey into the interior of Japan. The thousand lights and lanterns of the great city, as 1 sped through its miles of streets in a jinrikisha, never seemed so brilliant nor so welcoming before. I felt I had reached home. Of leaving it, of sailing for America, I had at that moment about as much idea as you have, good reader, of set- ting out to-morrow for Kamchatka. Coming events cast no shadows before them; for all was one vast shadow, — night. Pour days from that time 1 was on the broad Pacific with the Korean Sjiecial Mission to the United States, and a little more than two weeks later I entered my native land as a foreigner.
It was at the end of Octol>er that we sailed back again from San Francisco for Yokohama. A long passage across the Pacific and un- avoidable delays in Japan made it the middle of Decemb^-r lx;fore we at last reache<l Korea. There, in its capital. Soul, as the guest of his Majesty, I sjient the winter.
Now that you and I, gentle reader, have journeyed r^> many thousand miles in company, we should surely have learneil to know each oth^r : for nothing, we Ixith admit, s^j reveals character as travel. — excejit marriage.
I would add two notes. In the fir?<t place. I wi.^fh to put in a |»h;i for the right pronimciation of Korean word.**. In th^* trani*lit*'ration of the Korean alphalx.-t I have followfnl the scheme suartresu-fl by Mr-ssrs. Aston, Satow. and rhamUrrlain. th** pione^-rs of the j*ubject. Th#- sim- ple vowels a. /. '/. and w are to !>• pronounced as in Italian. O, an exceedinelv interesting Korean vowel, ha^ a s^^und which vari^-s from the French e mute, throuirh short m. to a dejrenerated o. The be«t sound.
vi PREFACE.
ou the whole, to represent it is the German o (o umlaut). What have been written g, e, and e were originally Korean diphthongs, and are still so written, at, at, and oi; but they are now pronounced as single vowel sounds, akin to the sounds the letters represent in French. The transliterated consonants are to be pronounced for the most part as in English, — the principal exceptions being r, which is a general, not a special liquid (that is, it suggests either an r, an /, or an n, according to position) ; an intercalated A, which has the effect of increasing the aspiration of the preceding letter, — as, for instance. Whang ^ Chhung ; and lastly, a reduplication of certain letters, which simply increases the intensity of their pronunciation. Other foreign words have been spelled according to the consensus of scholars on the subject ; for this reason Korea has replaced Corea, and in Manchuria all the vowels have tlie Italian sound.
Secondly, 1 would send with this a note of thanks. The thanks would have taken the form of a dedication had the names not seemed too many to share one book. To William Sturgis Bigelow, Gustavus Goward, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Ernest F. FenoUosa, and Edward S, Morse, 1 am indebted for kindness and help thanks cannot express : I would offer them instead this sketch. To Miyaoka Tsunejiro, Yu Kil Chun, Chen Kyong Sok, Ni Si Ryom, Kim Nak Chip, Min Yong Ik, and So Kwang Pom, I am under the greatest obligations. I would also thank most warmly Hon. Lucius A. Foote, C. L. Scudder, Esq., Herr P. G. von MoUendorff, T. Koyabashi, Esq., and Y. S. Yoshida, Esq., for the many happy days they gave me in both thought and feeling, the remembrance of which has lately, unhappily, been saddened by the death of Mrs. Foote ; while to Hong Yong Sik, the loyal friend, the true patriot, and at last the political martyr, I can now only ascribe a memory. To the Forl)es Albertype Comj)any I desire to express my thanks for the manner in which they have reproduced from my nega- tives the accompanying pictures. Finally, I would thank Mr. Stevens, of the University Press, for his many able suggestions.
Boston, Novem}>er, 1885.
CONTENTS.
CBAPTEB PAOE
I. Where the Day Begins 1
11. The Geography of the Peninsula 11
III. The Climate 22
IV. The Coast 33
V. Chemulpo 44
VI. The Journey up to S^il 54
VII. The Journey up to Soul. — The Second Day .... 68
VIII. The Entry into Soul 78
IX. A Walled City 86
X. The Watch-Fires on the South Mountain 93
XL The Government 100
XII. The Triad of Trinciples 107
XIII. The Quality of Impersonality 120
XIV. The J Patriarchal System 131
XV. The Position of Woman 143
XVI. Presp:ntation at Court 153
XVII. A Day at Home 162
XVIII. The House of the Sleeping Waves 170
XIX. The Want of a Religion 181
XX. The DFJtfON Worship 193
viii CONTENTS.
CHAPTKB PAGE
XXI. Soul by Day 213
XXII. Soul by Night 226
XXIII. A Korean Banquet 238
XXIV. My Fbiend the Mathematician 250
XXV. Abchitectube 262
XXVI. Landscape Gardening 280
XXVII. The Palaces 289
XXVIII. A Chapteb of Horbors 299
XXIX. The Valley of Clothes 307
XXX. Costume 316
XXXI. On Hats 332
XXXII. An Out-of-the-Way Corner in Language 348
XXXIII. The Flower-Stream Temple 356
XXXIV. Winter Reatcls in a Monastery 367
XXXV. Time 376
XXXVI. A Predicament 386
XXXVII. The Beacons of Pusan 394
Appendix 401
Index 405
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
FULL-PAGE PLATES.
PAGE
His Majesty the King of Korea Frontispiece
Morning in the Old Palace Grounds 6
Korean Boats in the Harbor of Fusan 36
The River Han. — Ice Floating down in March 50
River Suburbs of Soul 74
The Sa Kwan and the Colonel 84
The Audience Hall 100
The Foreign Office 116
An Uninvited Circle in one of the Principal Streets, — Soul 128
Rice Shop,— S5ul 150
An Outlying Branch of the City's Wall crossing a Stream . 172
The Pagoda 188
In the Main Street, — S5ul 218
Outside the Old Palace Wall, looking towards Nam San . . 232
On the Piazza of the Summer Palac^e 250
The Red Arrow Gate 262
The Pillars of the Palac^e of Si^mmer 270
The Lotus Pond of the Palace of Summer 280
»
In the New Palace Grounds 2%
Temple in the Valley of Clothf-s 310
X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAOK
In the Valley of the Clothes- Washinc; 314
A Military-Hat Shop 342
Beyond the Northeast Gate 360
" The Fragrant Iris " 372
An Apothecary's Shop 388
WOODCUTS, ETC.
Family Table 139
The Chinese General and the Unfortunate Imp 196
A Tea-Fight of Gnomes 206
A Hasty Sketch drawn with a Pencil, in course of Conversa- tion, BY A Korean who was not an Artist 245
A Korean Sock 328
A Korean Shoe 328
A Korean Boot 330
The Ordinary Every-Day Hat 336
The Scull-Cap, with the Mitre-Hat over it 337
A Court Hat 339
A Mitre-Hat, the Cue seen underneath 340
The "Chef-de-Cuisine" Hat, not, however, a Culinary Badge 340
A Large Hat 342 note
The Hybrid 346
Yang 381 note
Yang and Yong 381 note
MAPS.
Map of Korea 13
Korean Map of the World 25
THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
CHAPTER I.
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS.
IT is fortunate that the one hundred and eightieth meridian falls where it does. From Sibena to the Antarctic Con- tinent this imaginary line traverses nothing but water. The only land which it passes at all near is one of the archipela- goes of the South Pacific ; and there it divides but a handful of volcanoes and coral reefs from the main group. These islands are even more unimportant to the world than insig- nificant in size. Those who tenant them are few, and those who are bound to these few still fewer.
The line is not only injaginary ; it has not even an astro- nomical reason for its existence, like the equator. It is purely and entirely an arbitrary convention ; and yet its position is of exceeding importance to mankind. From the very conven- ience of this position we are apt to forget its value ; for the line is the gi'eat day-origin. It sets, not the time of day merely, but the dav itself. At the line two davs meet. There, tliouorh time flows ceaselessly on, occurs that unnatural yet unavoid- able jump of twenty-four hours ; and no one is there to be startled by the fact, — no one to be perplexed in trying to reconcile the two incongi'uities, continuous time and discon- tinuous day. There is nothing but the ocean ; and that is
tenantless.
I
• • •••
• •• «• • • •••
• •
••.^ THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
Had it been otherwise, — had the line crossed some continei where man dwelt, — there might have been two great town ten miles apart, with diflterent days yet the same hour. " Notl ing new under the sun ! " Why, two days would be bom wit every sunrise. And persons induced to do so, from financial < other causes, could go skipping across the line, doubling certai days of their weeks while they forever obliterated others.
Now, as we pass this meridian westward, we simply dro a day into the deep ; and but few of us pause to consider tha we have in reality buried a cause of strife, — an immaterii something which, had it not been for tlie uninhabited oceai would have thrown the world into inextricable confusion. Th point at issue is nothing less than the agreement upon a con mon day for the whole world.
The form of the earth and her rotation give man a certai natural measure of time. As she turns upon herself, the sui light and the shade mark out for him a division he calls a day and for any one place the darkness severs one day from th next, but for the earth as a whole the day sweeps endlessl round. There is no line to determine where this unendin light shall cease to be the old day and become the new : th symmetry of the globe renders such a thing impossible. Ma must place it for himself
Now, so long as civilized nations — or at least all such « knew or cared about one another — lived close together, it mai tered little whether they all agreed upon the same origin c not ; and it mattered less where they placed it, provided onl it was far enougli away from all. But wlien they came to car about the antipodes, the case changed. Whether they had eac made for themselves their own day, or had consented to worshi at the connnon shrine of a convention, the problem would hav been equally embairassing. Indeed, had the world reached ths stage of scientific and practical development in which t.li
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS. 3
knowledge of its surface in its entirety became necessary, before man's migrations Iiad carried him to what we now call Europe, no little annoyance might have resulted from his position ; for, with himself as centre, the beginning of his day would lie at the one Imndred and eightieth meridian, because as 'far away from him on the one side as on the other. K, then, his own meridian had lain not in Europe but in India, the other would have crossed the American Continent, to the great confusion of its present inhabitants. There would then have been no natural gap. An imaginary line only would make it Wednes- day here and Thursday to him who stood a stone's - thro w away. Most fortunately, then, the impossible hiatus occurred where no continuity was needed. The attempt to make both ends meet — the end and the beginning — was rendered un- necessary by the great Pacific Ocean. Most fortunate was
•
it, indeed, that opposite the spot where man was destined most to think there should have been placed so little to think about.
There is one loss which most travellers count a gain. It is the parting with that day which we drop from out the circle of our year into the depths of tlie Pacific Ocean. We fall asleep one night in the new world to awake on the after-morrow's morning in the old. The day that knows no to-morrow — was yesterday.
And we are somehow glad. We vouchsafe the event a feel- ing, in our joy that we seem by so much nearer to our jour- ney's end. We hardly give it a sober thought. Still less do we imagine that we shall meet its spirit in the land whither we are bound, — that we shall find that for once the fancies of far-Eastern superstition and the prosaic dictum of Western science are at one.
Long before such a thing as a prime meridian had entered the thoughts of men, before they could dream that their early
4 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
beliefs would later receive a certain sanction from science, t races of the Asiatic Continent had mused about the dai beginning, and put its birthplace where we have agreed find it to-day. Tlieir myths, and tlie names those myths ha left behind them, are a pretty, poetic forecast of our stern matte of-fact convention. Modern science needed a starting-poi for the day ; ancient fancy sought tlie place from which eve: morning came fortli the sun : and the spot they fixed upon the same. Our present fiction was an old-time fact. The si rose from out the ocean ; to the far-Oriental it seemed that ] must have slept there. To them his abode was a fairy, palac to us it is a geometrical line. Thus sadly has scientific necessi caused illusion to narrow and disappear.
The continent upon which tliese early races found themselv did not girdle the globe. If it had they might perhaps ha been endlessly pursuing and destroying one another round tl circle. As it was, its general profile shaped their course the sea. Their birthplace had much to do with the directly which they took ; but apparently the direction in itself, tliat toward the rising or the setting sun, had little or nothii to do with it. Such thoughts came later. They went becau they were driven, probably not by foes behind them, but 1 the restless spirit within. While the Aryans went westwar certain of the Turanian peoples struck east ; and from th moment they separated, not by distance only, but in thougl in customs, in those ways of looking at things which we are U apt to call innate, once and forever. They had difltered a litl when thev set out. There was a whole world of feelings b tween the two ere they had both completed their long joume As with the west, so in the east. Horde after horde we forth, — at first, no doubt, to seek new pasture-lands. Lil many a wanderer since, they forgot the object that hj brought them, in the charms of their new surroundings.
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS. 5
Arrived at tlie sea-coast, tlieir material advance was stopped ; for they possessed neither the means nor the knowledge to venture upon the boundless bosom of the ocean. The land is man's friend ; the ocean is at best but neutral. The mind must abet the wish, be it ever so strong, before man will become a sailor to lands beyond the sea. But if they went not in body, their dreams sped away to an earthly paradise beyond the water, — a happy material immortality where all was young and fair. The names they have left behind them bear witness to fond beliefs ; and so do the names of their lands to the journey that brought them thither.
The Japanese were among the first, and they went the farthest. Tliey came, in all likelihood, through what is now the Korean Peninsula. Urged by the same desire that pushed our forefathers across the Asiatic Continent into Europe, they themselves at last ventured upon the sea. We can imagine them risking their way across the strait that separates what have since become their islands from the Korean Peninsula: first to Tsushima, which, from the highlands of tlie hilly coast, they could see, — a streak of darker blue against the sky ; thence thev made out Iki ; and once there the islands would be a wall in front of them. But beyond these islands there was nothing but the restless, everlasting blue. To their watchful, anxious gaze, as they stood peering across the deep, no land was visible in the waste of waters. But every morning the sun rose in fiery splendor from out the ocean. Surely it was here that the day began. There could be nought beyond save the regions of the blessed, whence the day was born anew each morning for the dwellers upon this earth ; and so they named their land '' The Day's Beginning," ^ long, long ago in the morning of the ages.
* Nihon, from wliose characters, as pronounced by the Portuguese, comes our word Japan, is the collective name of the islands that compose the Japanese Empire. It
6 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
But these beliefs were not confined to tlie Japanese. Both before they sailed, and long after the wanderers who never returned, and even the memory of their wanderings, had been utterly forgotten by those who remained behind, such beliefs existed. From before the time of history, the races along the Asiatic eastern watershed have turned their gaze, and imagina- tions that pierced beyond their gaze, toward the rising, as we do toward the setting, sun. All those longings, all those castles in the air, dreams of possibilities, — impossibilities, — which come unbidden to him who watches the sun as it sinks to rest, these peoples saw when it rose from out the deep. And so it happens that the peninsula which had been the pathway of the Japanese, and was destined later to become a dwelling- place permanent beyond its fellows, comes to our notice first as a mythical region of ultramundane bliss. It was called " The Land of the God-men." In it gi'ew, not the apple of the Hesperides, but the imaginary cactus that cured all ills, — that conquered disease, that brought immortality. '* The fairy palm " the Chinese called it ; and the common people in Korea see it in tlie mountain ginseng to-day.
But a new horde from the north poured forth, and the gods took wings before them. Less adventurous than their prede- cessors, they crossed not the sea ; they tarried in the land and became a part of it. Yet they forgot not their old traditions ; and as year after year and century after cen- twry slipped away, we may imagine that they may almosi
is couiuionly, but sumewhat loosely, trauslated ** the risiug sun." '^ Ni " mean originally ** the sun," and thence, by an easy transition, its signification was ex- tended to mean *Hhe day." "Hon" means *' origin." The two together, therefore mean " tlie origin of the sun or day." " Nihon," which is Sinico-Japaneso, would in pure Japanese, be expressed by ** hi no nioto," and not ** hi no de," which is th« expression for '' sunrise." The character signifying '' to appear, to rise, as of the sun,' is quite distinct from that which is read ** hon," which denotes **an origin, a beginning a birth, as opposed merely to an appearance." A strictly literal renderins: bears out th« mythological origin of the name, — to my thinking, even more poetic than ** The Lam of the Sunrise."
J- '■«•'
• • I I
; r
: J
« I
|
— ■ |
.\ |
■ ' |
«ii |
|
• |
? ■ ' i . |
«» |
To |
|
1' |
\ |
1 |
|
|
• 1 |
• 1 : "1 |
1 V |
: V |
|
• |
1 1 ■ 1 * ft |
« ■ \ 1 I |
' • » - |
I >
........I
I
: ^;
- I *
m . • y
' I '1 ■ •
M • .
■:■]'■ i}. i\'>» -M
.'• ■'"It L'tMis
■ I
. »•■ ;
• • ^
I ■ •
.,Mf..i. . .
• ■ ■ ■
. I
■ I ■ •
* ii;-; '■.'■■ .J: : ' 'liO 1
.- ' •
I'l .
. ^
■I 1
.-. • I'!- 1. ■ '.
|
§ -kM^*^^ |
|
|
MSMi^ |
|
|
= ^ |
|
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS. 7
have looked upon themselves as the successors of the former myths. At any rate, the sun rose for them in the peaceful splendor that wraps the morning hours there even to this day, and the sunbeams fell into the valleys between the hills and nestled on the land. "Morning Calm" they called it; and it seemed not so much a name as its very essence. The drowsy quiet of the spot lulled them to rest, . and they fell asleep. They were in the world, yet it was to them as if it had passed away. And so they slept on for ages.
Like the palace in the fairy tale, everything remained as it had been centuries before. Change knew them not, and time stood still. Individuals passed away and were forgotten, but the race seemed immortal. No alien might approach the place ; and their neighbors to the north and west seemed quite disposed to respect their seclusion, exacting only a tribute for the privilege they enjoyed of being left alone. What they took into their sacred precincts that they kept. Albeit most of what they took had been bon-owed from their neighbors' customs, they clung to it as if it had been the fruit of their own ideas. And so it came to pass that we have here a most remarkable phenomenon, a living fossilification — the preservation intact in this world, the law of whose very existence is change — of the life, the thought, the manners, the dress, of centuries ago. In the Koreans of to-day we are not only looking upon what is strange, we are looking upon what has once been and has elsewhere passed away. Like the old Etruscan king, as he was seen for a moment when his tomb was exposed to view, they stand before us to-day just as they appeared on the day of their inhumation. Like him, too, will not the vision all crumble away to dust on contact with the air of the outer world ?
But Nature, as well as man, has singled out the peninsula for a charmed region of the past. When the long equinoctial summer drew to its close, and the icy hand of winter crept over
8 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
the north of Asia and entombed the mammoths where we find their skeletons at the present time, a uumtle tell over what is now Korea and the countries round about It may have been that the surrounding water for a time kept the fauna warm, or they may have been so hemmed in that Nature at bay fought for her life ; but whatever the cause, the fauna lived on. Whatever change thei^e was, they acclimated themselves to it The tiger kept his haunts in the jungle, and the great bustards continued to roam the plains. Even the crocodile clave to the muddy banks of the estuaries which for centuries had been his, in spite of any falling off in the temperature of his habitat
Escape may have been cut off. At all events, it was easier for the fauna to remain, even under what at fii-st were adverse circumstances, than to migrate. It is not a little singular that this should have been the case It is certainly surjirising that the Bengal tiger, so called, — a beast that we habitually asso- ciate with the damp, hot jungle, — should be found in the dr}' and cold climate of Korea and Manchuria. Yet there he is; and his appearance is just what it is in the jungle of India, only that he is a trifle smaller. And yet he frequents, from preference, not the warmer vallevs, but the forests on the sides of the moun- tains. To suit his condition, his hair has lengthened and his fui is all tlie handsomer. His pluck in remaining has met with it^ due reward. He is most highly honored, much more so than he would have been in the land where he more properly belongs. His name, it is true, is a household word on the lips of botli peoples: but in the north it commands not only dread bul admiration. He is regarded as the archetype of strength and coura^re. His j)icture is the symbol of military greatness: and cm the old battle-fla^s it used to be borne before the amiv when the Korean soldiers marched to war.
The ti<rer did not remain alone ; his former associates
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS. 9
stayed likewise. The leopard continued to live where his race had lived before him. Even now, after centuries of persecution, he abounds there in such numbers that the skins fonn the most common of the insignia of official rank. Those from neighboring Manchuria — because to Manchuria, unlike Korea, there is access from the outer world — are to be met with, outranking the native product in lands whose specialty such things are supposed to be.
With the flora the case was' different. Those species that covered the land in its early balmy days the peninsula knows no more. Their sun went south ; they could not follow, and they could not live without him. They died.
Perhaps no better criterion of the rank of an organism can be chosen than its strength to endure adversity, — physically speaking, its power of adaptability. To flourish when all is fair around it, when it meets with nothing but smiles, is of the lowest; but to stand when everything compasses its destruc- tion, " hie labor, hoc opus est." We praise it as it shows itself in the characters of men; and we do well. But it is deeper than this. It is one of the fundamental laws of Nature. All alike, the lower with the higher, will thrive when given what they want ; but to mould what is given into what is wanted, this is an attribute only of the latter. " Quand on ne pent avoir ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a," might truly be called the password to race immortality. Just in proportion as the range of the capabilities of any organism becomes extended, as the compass of its powers increases, so will it resist. Increase takes place first in the complexity of bodily sti-ucture, and then, as we ascend the scale, in that of mind; and complexity in mind makes possible simplicity in matter : and this, it seems to me, renders it possible for us dimly to conceive how an infinite mind may, for its own existence, be independent of matter.
10 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
The plants, then, could not adapt themselves. All remaini of vegetable life, such as grow within the tropics, have lonj ago disappeared from Korea. It is now, for all its past, lik« any of its sister latitudes for vegetation. And man has sAAei in the change : he has done his best to leave no aborigina vegetation at all ; and in the southern half he has very fairly succeeded. He has completely domesticated the land. Indeed it is not a little surprising to observe how completely what w must suppose to have been originally a shepherd people ha transformed its business in life. Agricultural, sedentary, fixed — such have become pre-eminently the characteristics of tb race. What was once a tribe of nomads has entirely and pecu Harly forgotten its wandering instincts. They journeyed cen turies ago to the land of myths, and became a part of it, — they settled in the heritage of tlie gods, and were content ; an< a halo as of immortality lias rested upon them to this day.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA. 11
CHAPTER 11.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA.
1^0 most minds there lurks a certain cliarm in the mys- terious. The very fact that secrecy wraps a subject as witli a mantle renders us all the more eager to tear away the veil. The possession of this feeling is at once an exciting cause and a sanction to knowledge. We realize its power as regards persons, things, events ; less commonly is it a motive force to the study of a whole nation, and yet it is in this connection that I would call upon it now. I ask you to go with me to a land whose life for ages has been a mystery, ---a land which from time unknown has kept aloof, apart, so that the very possibility of such seclusion is itself a mystery, and which only yesterday opened her gates. For cycles on cycles she has been in the world, but not of it. Her people have been bom, have lived, have died, oblivious to all that was passing around them. They might have been denizens of another planet for aught they knew of the history of this. And the years glided into cen- turies, and the centuries grew to be numbered by tens, and still the veil remained as tightly drawn as at the beginning. It was but last year that Korea stepped as a debutante into the society of the world.
There is a certain natural fitness in beginning the description of a country by positing its geography. It is kindred to the way we commonly make one another's acquaintance. We learn to
12 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
recognize tlie form before we become familiar with the spirit ; and tliough the hind is not the people, as the body is not tlie person, yet both land and body have mucli to do with the character of those who tenant tliem.
If we will cast our eyes upon a large map of the world, or still better upon some large globe, we shall discover a peninsula just to the west of the Japanese islands. It is the peninsula of Korea. We shall know it, by inference, from the scarcity of names upon it. Of a land of which next to nothing was known, next to nothing could be represented ; and we shall hardly be glad to learn that almost all of what we shall read will be in- coiTCct. Map compilers are artful. They put in much more information than they possess ; and then, when even that does not suffice to cover the paper, they reduce the scale of the drawing. By this artifice the areas unavoidably left blank are much diminished in extent. Unfortunately, then, all that we shall be able to make out from our atlas will be the exist- ence of the peninsula, and the name Korea. We shall not dis- cover that as much more countrv to the north of it is Korea. too ; for the frontier line on the map will not be such as would satisfy either China, on the one hand, or Korea on the other, or Russia, that all-devourer of other people's property in this part of the world, on both.
It is hardly surprising that our maps of Korea should be inaccurate. Where no one was allowed to land under pain of losing, not his theodolite alone, but his head, — an even more important instrument in the matter, — topographers were few. Over a century ago the Jesuits in China, indeed, — who did and taught everything from religion to civil engineering, and whose career was more remarkable than the wildest imagination would have dared to paint it, — did make an attempt to survey Korea, hut with scanty success. China was willing enough, but Korea was not.
12 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
recognize the form before we become familiar with the spirit ; and thougli the hind is not tlie people, as the body is not the person, yet both land and body have much to do with the character of those who tenant them.
If we will cast our eyes upon a large map of the world, or still better upon some large globe, we shall discover a peninsula just to the west of the Japanese islands. It is the peninsula of Korea. We shall know it, by inference, from the scarcity of names upon it. Of a land of which next to nothing was known, next to nothing could be represented ; and we shall hardly be glad to learn that almost all of what we shall read will be in- coiTect. Map compilers are artful. They put in much more information than they possess ; and then, when even that does not suffice to cover the paper, they reduce the scale of the drawing. By this artifice the areas unavoidably left blank are much diminished in extent. Unfortunately, then, all that we shall be able to make out from our atlas will be the exist- ence of the peninsula, and the name Korea. We shall not dis- cover that as much more country to the north of it is Korea, too ; for tlie frontier line on the map will not be such as would satisfy either China, on the one hand, or Korea on the other, or Russia, that all-devourer of other people's property in this part of the world, on botli.
It is hardly surprising that our maps of Korea should be inaccurate. Where no one was allowed to land under pain of losing, not Ins theodolite alone, but his head, — an even more important instrument in the matter, — topographers were few. Over a century ago the Jesuits in Cliina, indeed, — wlio did and taught everything from religion to civil engineering, and whose career was more remarkable than the wildest imagination would have dared to paint it, — did make an attempt to survey Korea, but with scanty success. China was willing enough, but Korea was not.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA. 13
Tlie career of these French Jesuits in China was little short of supernatural, and it is a matter fraught with no small inter- est and wonder that their teacliings in religion were not more successful than they were. If ever apostles came attended with miracles efficacious to the converting of the unbeliever, they did. They reformed the calendar ; they taught mathematics ; they designed bridges : in truth, it would be easier to enumer- ate what they did not do. They gained the imperial ear; their word on all practical subjects became law to a people as numerous a« the whole of Europe was then. They became the wise men of the land, and yet they converted relatively few. It looks as if they were much more scrupulous abroad than at home about the dosfmas of their divine mission. With all respect to so subtile a body, it would seem tliat here was a chance for the clothing of themselves with a little assumption of supernatural authority much more productive and none the less credible than inftillibility at home, and such a chance as may never occur again. But peace to their ashes ! They did nmch good, and even to the most zealous of their opponents it nmst seem that they accomplished but little harm. And with all the folly and evil of their mistaken lives, they have ex- hibited examples of courage, of self-renunciation, of greatness, which cause us, as w^e read of their martyrdoms in that distant land of Korea, far away from all they held dear, to feel an answering throb in our own hearts. It is so easy to see the wrong in our fellow-man, and so hard to do honor to the truly good qualities of those we oppose. It is indeed a beautiful thing to have said of one what Coquelin (Ain6) said of Jacques Nor- mand : "II a trop de cceur pour que son esprit soit jamais n)6chant et trop d'esprit pour que le sentiment soit jamais exag^re."
Their topographical attempts on Korea resulted ])rincipally in failure. The best map of the country is one compiled by the Japanese Government ; and it is from this that tlie one
14 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
given has been reduced. It is, however, a map made fi'om external, — that is, coastwise, — not intenial surveying. The Japanese liave not been allowed to penetrate the land freely; and it is from charts and miscellaneous information about the interior, digested and compiled, that they have consti-ucted this really admirable map. In 1876 they made the first treaty bj' wliich Korea had ever deigned to acknowledge tlie existence of the outer world ; and then they proceeded with their men-of- war to make some excellent charts. Their map, as a whole, is neither so accurate nor so complete as it might be, for the rea- sons mentioned above ; but in the main it is con-ect. It does not call the capital by the name of the province, as a most famous European atlas does; nor do the rivera that are drawn on the paper run across existent mountain-chains in Nature.
But, praiseworthy as it is, the Japanese map is to be seen, not heard. This somewhat enigmatical sentence is literally exact. The facts are these : On the Japanese map the names of the places are printed in Chinese characters, which the Koreans themselves use in the same way. Now, this would be as perfectly intelligible to the ear as to the eye, if all those who used the Chinese characters pronounced them alike. But they do not. Each of the three nations — China, Korea, and Japan — pronounces them after its own fashion. The re- sult is, that, though using w^hat are meant for the same words, neither nation understands the others. A Japanese reading from his really fairly accurate map would quite fail to make any Korean comprehend what he sought. They could write to one another, but they could not talk. Something of the same kind, though not nearly to the same extent, is to be met with in those words of P^'cnch origin which the English language has embodied. No Frenchman to-day would under- stand them from an Anglo-Saxon tongue.
THE iSEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA. 15
This renders the identification of Korean places coming through the medium of the Japanese, whether by spoken in- formation or when read off their map, impossible even to a trained scholar unless he happen to be as well versed in Ko- rean as in Japanese, — an exceedingly rare accomplishment at present.
To remedy this difficulty, Mr. Satow, late Second and Japa- nese Secretary of the British Legation in Tokio, has compiled and recently published a Korean map, giving the names of the places in English spelling. But as such detailed knowledge, at our present stage of acquaintance with the land, would be neither useful nor specially interesting to the world at large, I have not thought it advisable to ask for permission to copy it. As time goes on, it will become more and more valuable. At present, it is more particularly for the use of students of Korea. But our map, — for the one published by the Japanese is the product of methods similar to our own, — though more accu- rate, is hardly so interesting as is their land, seen through their own spectacles.
There was brought to me one day, as a curiosity, in con- sequence of my having expressed a wish for old books, what turned out to be an exceedingly interesting volume. It was an atlas compiled by a Korean, some fifty years ago, from a still older Chinese one. Such was the date assigned it by the Koreans themselves, and the internal evidence bears out the assertion. It is due unmistakably to the influence of the Jesuits upon Chinese notions of geography, but has wandered as unmistakably from what they could possibly have taught. In plan it is similar to our own atlases. It begins with a chart of the heavens ; then follows a map of the whole world ; then one of Korea ; then the environs of the capital ; then the capi- tal itself on a larger scale ; and it finally winds up with a sort of family tree of the emperors of China, the kings of Korea,
16 THE LAND OF THE MORNING GAL&L
and the Chinese philosophers. It looks like the result of a compact between Western teachings, Chinese philosophy, and the eternal pre-eminence of the Middle Kingdom. Perhaps the most generally interesting map is the one of the world, a fac-simile of whicli is hero given. It reminds lis strikingly of our maps of " the world as known to the ancients.^ It, too, is drawn in a sort of perspective, on the principle that whatever is distant must be small, because to the mind of the artist insignificant ; only tliat here China, instead of Ancient Rome, is the point of view from which he surveys the outer barbarians.
We are not left to guess at the countries represented. Their identification comes from a transliteration of the characters, even in the case of those for England and France. Thus the names make ceKain what tlie contours suggest. Tliroughout the whole we see the hand of tlie Jesuits, whose teachings were accepted, but were reduced in scale, so that the dignity of the Middle Kingdom might in no wise suffer from the additional knowledge. These instructors considered it unnecessary to in- tr<jduce America into the map. They only vouchsafe her the following questionable footnote : —
" Below this South Pole there is a barren land bv the name of South America, which, together with the continents we have here given, make up the five continents of the world. Once a French ship at the Great Billow Mountain (this means the Cape of Good Hope, as explained by the map) saw a land in the dis- tance. On reaching it, she found it (America, as it was after- wards called) to be one vast level wilderness. When the night came, the stars seemed to the ship's crew to be much more numerous than tliev remembered tlieni at home ; and when the day dawned again, they could discover no human being living there. The only sounds of life wliidi they heard in this great wilderness were the cries of some paiTots in the distance.''
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA. 17
For a piece of unintentional satire, this is exquisite; and the idea of reaching South America by taking a short cut over the South Pole is worthy of the bold disregard of nat- ural impediments that suggests our North Polar expeditions. I forbear to draw any conclusions from the wilderness and the parrots.
To show how fairly accurate at this time was their geograph- ical knowledge, when not stretched by a desire to seem gi-eater than their neighbors, I may mention in passing the map of Korea. Though the details are not what they should be, the general features are in the main coiTect. The boundary-lines of the provinces of the kingdom are curiously enough pro- longed, out into the water, as far as this is represented. The device was perhaps suggested hy the fact that in some in- stances numerous islands, too small to be shown on the map, rendered it necessary ; and a desire for uniformity prompted the rest. The wavy lines that picture the sea have at least the merit of suggestiveness.
Let us now take up again the Japanese map, only a few of whose names have been translated. To give translations of the others, in the present state of the country, would be unnecessary, except for historical purposes. To the student of Korea's past alone would they convey any meaning. They have therefore been omitted.
Of special importiince are two sets of geographical details ; and the interest attaching to them springs from two diametri- cally opposite reasons. The one is connected with the land's long night of seclusion ; the other, with her opening to the rest of the world.
One still occasionally meets ^vith the expression "the island of Korea.'' The phrase is a bit of early hearsay now crys- tallized into an article of geographical faith, much in the same
manner as formerly, though without even so much excuse, there
2
18 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
were said to be two emperors in Japan, the one a spiritual, tlie other a temporal, head to the nation. No such separation between matters of this world and of the next ever existed in Japan ; and similarly, whatever geology may eventually inform us on the subject, man from his own experience never knew Korea as an island. He has often wished that he had. The Koreans themselves would have been only too happy to make of this fiction a fact. Unfortunately for their desire for privacj', it was not only not an island, but they were not able even practically to render it such. Though sei)arated from the rest of mankind on three sides by the sea, on the fourth they offered a long line of assailable teiTitory. This they were never able to defend. Luckily for them, their neighbors had not the craving for possession, the greed for land, — that ogi-e- like propensity of nations to grow by swallowing all that lies adjacent to them. So when these last had pushed the Koreans back to a certain natural barrier, there they suffered the line to rest. This boundary is one which Nature fii-st, and fable afterwards, has in some sort marked out for reniembrance.
At the northwestern corner of the map lies a l)igh peak, known from the snow which rests upon its sunnnit as the Ever-White Mountain. It is famous as the birthplace of Korean folk-lore, and a great deal tliat is mythical hangs about it still. It is said to be thirty miles hi<i^h. This sounds like even a stretcli upon a certain Japanese method of measur- ing tlie height of mountains, where, for the height proper, is substituted the lengtli of the ascent, and a mountain is called as many miles liigli as the path up it is long. But here there is no well-worn })ath, and it would seem as if the deviations from the straight road had all been counted too. To its inaccessi- bility is due, })robably, the supposed existence of a little lake near the top, which is said to give birth at once to two
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA. 19
streams. From the snows as they melt, these two streams, on opposite sides of the mountain, fall down through the half-light of the forest to the sunshine of the valley below. One of thiBm forms a river, called in Korean ** The River of the Duck's Green," which then flows southerly and separates Korea from China. Tlie other is the Tu Man Kang, which flows northeasterly and divides Korea from the last acquisitions of Russia in the far-east. Thus the Ever-White Mountain, to- gether with what flows from it, marks the only land-boundary of the kingdom. The Sea of Japan on the east, and the Yellow Sea on the south and west, make the other bamers that have helped so long to keep Korea to herself.
Having seen liow Korea is cut off^ from the continent, the next set of positions to be noticed are of precisely an opposite nature, — namely, tliose points at which she has at last suffered herself to be approached, — the treaty ports. In modern far- Eastern geography the treaty ports j)lay a very important role. They are far more than merely ports of the country on whose sea-coast they lie. With one or two exceptions, prin- cipally the capitals of the lands, they constitute the only places where Europeans may live. They thus become practically for- eign colonies ; for the foreign community lives under its own laws, quite independent of those of the country in which it is. To foreigners, therefore, they are in some sort the far- East itself, — that part of it alone which they may call home, but which, with the patriotism of their several races, they never do so call, no matter how many years their sojourn in them may have lasted. The result is that in Japan, for instance, Yokohama is to most foreigners a more important name than Tokio, though the former has at most but sixty thousand in- habitants, of whom about a twentieth are Europeans, while the latter has twelve hundred thousand, and is, beside, the capital of the empire.
20 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
In Korea the treaty ports are thi'ee in number, — Wensan on the north, Pusan on the southeast, and Inchon situate half- way up the west coast. By the revised Japanese treaty of 1880, and by the subsequent treaties with America, England, and Germany, these three places have been opened to foreign trade. Of these, Wensan has a productive country behind it, productive so far principally of skins and hides; Pusan, a liistory and a Japanese colony ; and Inchon, its proximity to the capital to recommend it. They are also very favorably situated for an equal distribution of sea-coast in di-aining the commerce of the interior. These advantages will become more apparent as soon as there is any commerce to di*ain. There is another matter that hampers their general usefulness, — the climate. It is only during the summer months that they are all available. Such is the rigor of the climate, that the harbor of Wensan, the most northern, is frozen over from November to April, and that of Inchcin more or less blocked during the same period. Without constant navigation, therefore, to keep the channel clear, they become for a great part of the year un- approachable. Inchcin, indeed, would hardly become so were it not that it is situated near the mouth of the river Han, whose current brings down, whenever the weather moderates, large masses of floating ice, — an almost more serious obstacle to vessels than a solid sheet would be. Pusan is open the year round; but it is so far from the capital — at present the ob- jective point — that for purposes of reaching Korea it may be said not to exist. By the present means of conveyance, it is ten days distant from the capital, Soul.
And this brings us to wliat is peculiarly the most impor- tant phice in Korea, — Soul. Central in interest, it is also central in position. Of tlie many capitals wliicli the peninsula has liud, it is tlie last. It is also the southernmost. Taken east and west, or north and south, it is almost in the middle of the
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA, 21
land. Its position may be approximately learned from some of our own atlases, where it figures under the name of Kinkitao. This is not its name, however, but a misspelling of the name of the province in which it lies; just as the harbor of Pusan was set down in the early charts as the harbor of Chosan, be- cause, in reply to questions of men-of-war's men as to what it was called, the natives answered, **Chosc)n," — the name of the country, — supposing the question to refer to the greater, not the less. It is suggestive to note how precisely opposite the answer would have been in Europe or America, where, to the peasant, the national is lost in the local.
On the Japanese map, Sciul figures as a rectangle of some size. This representation is due to its intrinsic importance; but it is amply justified topographically, from the extent of ground the place covers.
22 THE LAND OF THE MOKNING CALM.
CHAPTER III.
THE CLIMATE.
NEXT to the physical features of any land, the most im- portant question we can ask in regard to it is of its climate.
In the minds of a great many people there still lingers a trace of tlie old Roman classification of the world into citizens and barbarians. It lingers, I mean, in a certain geographical sense. Tliere is a prevailing impression, indefinite but wide- spread, that countries not the birthright of men of European blood must be tropical in their climate. So a friend of mine once cleverly put it, as we sat crouching over a fire on an afternoon toward the end of May in the capital of Japan. If exceptions are recognized in the belief, it is only in favor of those places visited by North Polar expeditions.
Now, to any one who has happened to inhabit one of the lands included in this generalization, — almost as pleasingly loose in its ai)plication as is the word Turanian, — the notion has seemed an anuisinfi: dehision at certain seasons and a bitter satire at otliers. To read epistles from well-meaning friends, congratulating you upon tlie delicious heat you are enjoying, — the very thought of which, they write, contrasts most painfully with their own cold surroundings, — to read these held in hands which threaten momentarily to freeze is not jocose. Your first feeling is one of wicked joy that your friend is as badly treated
THE CLIMATE. 23
as you are ; your second a still more fiendish one, to an- swer him in the vein he expects, and so keep him enviously wretched.
The belief is not without some show of excuse. The foreign lands first visited by Europeans were indeed tropical, and the temperate zones they later came to know were so far away from home that exact information about them found difficulty in reaching the mother country ; not to mention that the road to them, whether they lay to the north or the south, to this side or the other of the equator, necessarily traversed, in either case, the subtropical belt. But whatever excuses can be made for it, the impression is none the less eiToneous.
Perhaps such current expressions as ^* in those latitudes," " foreign latitudes," and the like, have helped to keep alive the dehision ; for familiar phrases go for much toward the shaping and preserving of general opinions. Insensibly the mind comes to ascribe an intrinsic truth to its own formulae. In this case it was not unnatural that the imagination should seek to clothe Nature herself with a certain strangeness, in order to suit a tale that was strange. The very terai " latitude," which should have been earth-wide in signification, came to seem restricted to something peculiar ; and the tropical belt, because heard of first, furnished the material for the clothing of the idea.
Now, these phrases were all very well in their day for the purpose for which they were originally employed. When men went abroad to seek for foreign lands rather than foreign peo- ples, latitudes were the best standards of comparison ; for the most marked and obvious differences in Nature linked them- selves at once with latitude. Then, again, it was in ships that the early explorers journeyed; and ships, as they had given rise to the idea, helped to perj)etuate the expressions. A some- what parallel case of misleading is to be found in the valuable projection of Mercator, — hi valuable for that for which it was
24 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
invented, and worse than useless when introduced into the teaching of tlie geography of the land. Every one can re- member, when a school-boy, firmly believing that Greenland was considerably bigger than South America ; for so it was represented on the map.
But when, in addition to the foreign places themselves, tlie people living there came to be a subject of interest, the appli- cability of the criterion ceased. Tlie substitution of the term " longitudes" in place of " latitudes " would have been more to the point ; for almost all nations which have risen to greatness have dwelt within a narrow belt of parallels coincident roughly with the temperate zone, and more accurately still witli certain limiting isothermal lines. Apparent exceptions, like that of the Aztecs in Mexico, fall really under the rule ; for these people inhabited a high plateau, whose climate differed entirely from that of the sea-level at the same parallel. Wliat is true else- where is equally true of what we call the semi- civilized nations of the far-East ; and for the same reason, — the presence of a degree of cold sufficient to create a stimulus to work, and yet not severe enough to destroy it.
In saying, therefore, that Korea is civilized, we define its cli- mate, and from that follows approximately its latitude. We place it, by inference, not in the tropical, but in the temperate zone ; and this is where it lies. Its latitude ranges from 33| degrees north latitude, — that of the island of Quelpart, the farthest of the great southwestern archipelago, on the south, — to 43 degrees of north latitude, on the north, where the Tu Man Kang bars the Russian advance, and from whose opposite bank the town of Vladivostock looks longingly southward to the coveted land and watches its opportunity to spring across. It might — indeed, most certahily would — have done so, had Korea slumbered much longer.
The climate of the country is what its latitude and its
* . ; 'mjraw '""J
g^_n
if iiiis^«
l)UT ONE-FIFTH THE AREA OF. THE OB.\0\^K\-.
K^£A * LILAC).
THE CLIMATE. 25
position with regard to the continent would lead us to expect ; only that the position is here of greater importance than usual in the question. The situation of the peninsula has altered the relation of the winter and summer isotherms more than we should perhaps have predicted.
As we know, the position of a coast, whether it lie on the eastern or western limiting edge of a large bodj- of land, is as great a factor in the matter of climate as is tlie absolute par- allel. Not only is the mean annual isothermal line deflected from the latitude it occupies in the centre of the continent, but the relative positions of the summer and winter isotherms are altered, and the changes on the western side are very different from those on the eastern. This is even more markedly the case with the Asiatic than with the American Continent. We must compare the climate of Korea, then, not with that of Europe, — which it does not in the least resemble, — but rather with that of the eastern seaboard of America. Similar prevailing winds and similar ocean currents tend to the same climatic result. We may therefore say, generally speaking, that tlie climate varies from one like that of Washington, for the southern part of the peninsula, to one like that of Maine in the extreme north. Like ours, its summer is short and hot, its autumn clear and beautiful, and its winter cold but fair. But there is one season which I have omitted ; and I am afraid that when I come to speak of it, it may seem to destroy the resemblance between the two. Its spring is a true spring. No feverish anxiety there to hasten on in the middle of January, as if it feared that it might be late ; then a hasty relapse again into winter, finding itself long before time ; and then a period of vacillation every other day, until, having frittered away all the time at its disposal, it is obliged to plunge all of a sudden bodily into summer. There is no such weakness, no months of indecision, there. The spring makes its advances slowly but surely, and the trees with their
26 THE LA>^D OF THE MOKNIXG CALM.
blossoms can count upon it. They open their buds, — the earliest while the snow is still upon the ground, — and break into flower : and they never sufier for the trust they give it.
Tlie Koreans besrin their vear a month later than we begnn ours. Owinff to this reckoning and to the steadv character of the spring, there is a natural reality in their conventional birth-time of the vear. The vear begins for man when it begins for Nature; and the earth awakes from her winter's slumber with a blush, for it is in tree-flowers that she shows her return to feeling.
Tlie plum-tree is the first to bloom, — not the edible plum, but that species which is known in Japan as Ome. By the end of Januar}- it begins to blossom, — a pretty pinkish-wliite flower. It is quite beautiful in itself: and then from being the first, it is specially prized. It is not easy to convey to the Western mind an idea of the mingled love and admii-ation the far-Ori- ental lavishes upon it. The feeling is mostly a perversion of what was meant to flow into other channels : but though spring- ing, to a great extent, simply from within, there is in these far-eastern lands, even to the foreign eye. much to call it forth.
Few of the better houses at tliis season of the vear are without a })luni-tree, or at least a branch of one. It blossoms in their gardens : but this is not a close enough companionship fcir their love. It must be where thev can constantlv see it ; so it is taken into the house and blossmns in the room in which its owner spends most o( his indom- life, — for, however many nM»ms may make uj) his house, there is one which is particu- larlv his dwelling-place bv dav and bv nijrht. Poetrv and painting vie with each other in their attempts fittingly to pmist* the flower. Sonnets innumerable are written in its honor, and have been from dim antiquity. It is the motive or the accessory in jiii^tuivs without number, and its name is
THE CLIMATE. 27
one of the commonest of the flower-names of girls. The glory of the tree vanishes with its flower, for it bears no fruit.
Early in April the cheny-tree comes into bloom ; and of all the superb succession of flowering trees and shrubs it is the finest. It is all flower, — one mass of blossoms, — and flower is all that it is, for its fruit is not worthy the name. Nature rarely yields botli in perfection from the same tree. With us we are granted the fruit and denied the flower. We may think not. We may admire tlie apple blossoms, the peacli, the pear ; but after we have once seen the gorgeous, lavish, spendthrifty man- ner in which Nature scatters her tree-flowers in eastern Asin, we begin to think that at home we have been robbed.
In Korea the sight is fine, but in Japan it is even finer. It is not that the trees dififer. The flora in this respect is prac- tical! v the same for the two lands, but the social condition of the people is quite difierent. In Japan, eacli kind of tree, as its turn brings it round, is made the occasion of a festival. It is an epocli. In masses the people flock to see the sight ; and crowds, such as are never to be met with at any other time, collect in those places that are famous for their trees. And yet even with all this tribute of adoration, the beauty is but par- tially done justice to. The blossoming of the cherry-tree is one 6f tlie great events of tlie year. To see it is a sensation. It carries you away. You feel as if the earth had decked herself for her bridal, and you had somehow been bidden to the wed- ding. Tliere are several kinds of cherry-trees : some have single flowers, like ours ; some double ones ; but all are covered thick witli tlie white blossoms, touched ever so faintly with pink. The trees, laden with their masses of light and color, — the two seem one for the delicacy of the tint, — stand out in dazzling contrast with the brilliant blue of the sky; and the gi'ound beneath is white, like snow, with the fallen petals. And un- derneath this splendid canopy is the passing to and fro of the
28 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
pleasure-seeking multitude. What the sight is, may perhaps be judged from the fact that men of naturally slothful habits have been known to get up at frightfully matutinal hours, and then ti'avel several miles, in order to see the trees be- fore the morning's mist has risen from tliem. Some varieties are earlier than others, and particular places are noted for particular kinds. This week it will be Uyeno ; the next, Oji or Mukojima or Koganei. One place of entertainment suc- ceeds another, — a long, continuous, and yet ever-changing fete.
The cherry-blossoms past, the wisteria begins to open its grape-like bunches of flowers. In its turn it becomes the event of the day. Crowds gather in tlie gardens where it grows, as they did two weeks before at the cheny-trees, and pleasure- parties are made up to go to see it. After the wisteria, comes the tree peony ; then the iris. It is one long chain of flowers ; and this is spring. It is more of a siglit in Japan, because the public is greater, and gardens and parks have been planted on purpose that it may be enjoyed. In Korea there is no pub- lic, properly speaking ; the people are an unconnected mass of individuals. Collectively they amount to nothing, and singly they are too ])oor to procure what they would like. Everything is for tlie official few. In their gardens, but on a small and therefore not nearly so impressive a scale, may be seen the same beauty that conunands in Japan an annually recurrent national admiration.
And spring lingers : it is in no huiry to leave a land that seems to have been created for it. The dawn of the year con- tinues where the dawn of the day began. From the end of January till the beginiiin<r of June it is spring. And it never goes of its own accord : it is fairly driven out by the summer rains ; for from early in June till the middle of July lasts what is called the rainy season. Though not a rainy season proper.
THE CLIMATE. 29
it is, as it were, a counterpart in a small way of what takes place within the tropics. During this month the sun rarely shines ; it is cloudy almost continuously, and nearly every day it rains. The weather is very much like that of our summer storms, only that one storm follows without a break upon the ending of the one before. It stops raining only to gather force to rain again, and the clouds remain the while to signify the rain's intention to return. In cold and gloom the sky weeps for a month the departure of the spring, and the first hot day rarely comes upon you before the middle of July.
Then follow two months when it is hot, — as hot as it is any- where at any time, except, indeed, in peculiarly favored locali- ties, like the Red Sea ; much hotter, for instance, tlian it is on the equator. And this suggests a common misapprehension about the heat within the tropics. There is a vague general impression that the heat there must be very great. This is, however, a fallacy. Of course, it is warm ; but for taking the palm away from the land of its birth there is nothing so de- serving as a good July day in New York. The apparent paradox is not difficult of explanation.
The word " tropics" is often used very lightly in popular par- lance, as if it meant that belt on the earth's surface which sur- rounds the equator. Of course, it means nothing of the sort. If we would confine ourselves to the longer expression " within the tropics," it would be better; for the word *' tropic" is the name, as the reader is aware, of those two imaginary lines upon the surface of our globe at which the vertical sun at noon seems to turn from travelling northward or southward, as the case may be, and moves backward again toward the equator. The sun then is just as much overhead on tlie tropic of Cancer, say, twenty-three and a half degrees north, at the summer solstice (this apparent standing still of the sun), as it ever is at the equator, which, be it remembered, does not take place in sum-
30 THE LAND OF THE MOENING CALM.
mer, but in spring or autumn. But — and this is the impor- tant point in the whole matter — it is much more overhead on the parallel of the tropic, so to speak ; for it rises at that season — as by turning a globe the reader will see it must — to the north of east and sets to the north of west Its path is therefore botli longer, and remains more nearly vertical, for the hours on either side of the noon point than ever is the case at the equator ; so that for a few days in the middle of summer, such a place as Hong Kong gets more heat than for the same length of time ever falls to the lot of Singapore. Tlie climate naturally shows it. Hong Kong in its hot weather swelters under a temperature unknown at any season at the Sti-aits Settlements. I have purposely chosen these two places for comparison, because they are in other respects pretty similarly situated. Both lie ui)()n islands off a coast, and that coast, in a general way, the same.
Now, as one goes north, the sun rises farther and farther to the north of east, and sets farther and farther to the north of west, on this midsunmier day. The day gains in length as it loses ill momentary exposure, — that is, in the more or less nearly vertical position of the sun for each instant of time ; and these varyiii": elements are so connected as to make the amount of heat received at this time by the north pole actually greater in the proportion of five to four than that received at its most favorably placed season by the equator.^ The reason that Arctic* ex])lorers do not suffer much from it is that it is tran- sitorv. The air and other substances do not have time to
^ A simple? intcejration sliows tliis. The amoinit of hoat recoived at the equinoxes by tho earth's surface at the equator is represonted hy tlie formula ^ j^^ sin. 6. dO ; which tj:ives the value 2. At tlie pole, at tho suniiuer solstice, the aiiionnt received is exj>ressed l>y /J "^ sin. 2.* J P. r/^: whose value is roughly 2.5. At their respective iiKixiiua of exjiosure to th(i suu, therefore, the pole receives more heat than the equator in th(? proportion <>f ;*) to 4. The evident continuity in the value of the more general function, c»f which these two are particular cases, shows that the maximum for other latitudes increases steadily as we pass from the equator to the i>olo.
THE CLIMA.TE. 31
become thoroughly heated, saturated as it were, and thus aid, themselves, in the heating effect.
We see, then, that such a place as New York does not start so far behind in tlie race for temperature as we miglit at first suppose ; so near, indeed, that any Httle accident of physical geograpliical position is quite enough to render it hotter, at its hottest season, than the rest of the world.
In Korea, tlien, during July, August, and September, it is hot, at times very hot. The effect is increased by the physical conformation of the land. The narrow valleys that lie among the hills collect all the heat they may, and then have but little opportunity to part with it. They thus succeed in reaching a temperature impossible for places devoid of such protection.
With the autumn comes beautiful weather, and the same gorgeous change of foliage as in North America. The maples die in color, and under the scarlet of their leaves may be seen the same admirers that came to worship the glory of the spring. Red seems peculiarly the tint of coming and departing. We know why it is so at the beginning and the end of the day ; we have not yet learnt why it should also be the sign of the birth and death of the year.
By the end of November, in Korea, winter begins to set in ; and soon the ponds and the rivers freeze, and the snow falls to bury the year that is past. The temj)erature descends to a fair degree of cold. During the winter I spent in Siiul, it went down to nine degrees above the Fahrenheit zero, and for days together it never rose above the freezing-point night or day. The changes are not very violent ; tliough, on the other hand, the temperature is not peculiarly steady. Slight thaws alter- nate with cold snaps. It clears with a north wind, that feels as if it had itself been frozen as it came across the Siberian steppes. Well it may, considering that it is hardly more than a steppe from you to the North Pole.
32 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
Owing to the latitude of Soul, thirty-seven and a half degrees north, the sun's power there, even in midwinter, is so great that the snow at the sea-level never lies deep upon the ground. After a heavy snow-storm, the evening before, it is surjDi-ising to those accustomed to more northern lati- tudes to notice how quickly it vanishes in places exposed to the sun. If it were not for repeated additions, there would be very little even in the depth of winter; and as the sea- son advances and the days lengthen, you may trudge home- ward some night through a heavy fall of snow, to find on the next afternoon no trace of it left. You have therefore, almost simultaneously, the coming of snow, like a snow-storm in New York, with a disappearance of it worthy of Virginia ; and yet it may be far colder on the day it vanishes than on the day it appeared.
To this fact it is due that we find in Korea so few of the inventions common, in one form or another, to all countries where, during a part of the year, it is cold below freezing. Sleighs do not exist. In the matter of sleds there is cer- tainly in the neighborhood of Soul, about the middle of the country, north and south, nothing but a certain kind in vogue among tlie fisliermen on the ice, wliich they use to sit on while fisliing, and on w^hich afterwards they drag home the result of the day's w^ork. As for skates, the idea is unknown. In fact, beyond the fishermen, above mentioned, the average Korean avoids venturing upon ice in winter as he would into water in summer. The frozen state seems to be just about as awe- inspiring to him as the liquid one is commonly elsewhere.
THE COAST. 33
CHAPTER IV.
THE COAST.
AN atmosphere is as a garment to a land : it enhances its beauty by partially concealing it. To this land of morning myths Nature has given a most fitting mantle. The atmosphere that envelops the coast, lends it now fog to hide, now mirage to magnify. Both the concealment and the illusion are due to the same cause, — to a certain ocean current.
Along the eastern coast of Asia flows what is called, in Jap- anese, the Kuro Shiwo, or Black Tide. It is an ocean current similar to the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic seaboard of America. These two, which similarity of position has similarly engendered, are among the largest of ocean rivers. They are, indeed, rivers in that they flow intact through stationary surroundings ; but, unlike those on land, their history is not one of gradual accre- tion, but of repeated separation. It is with the first great loss of the Black Tide that we have now to do. One compact mass, the stream flows northward from the caldron of its birth, till it brings up somewhat abruptly upon the southern end of the Japanese islands. It strikes them so full that a part of it is cut oflF. The trend of the coast causes the greater portion to keep on northward and eastward, just skirting the land, and con- tinuing on past the Kuriles, Kamchatka, and the Aleutian Isles, to descend the upper American shore. In times past, man has involuntarily used it as a highway. Junks blown off to sea in
34 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
stomis have been cju'ried by its force across the ocean ; and many a waif has, after its long journey, been cast upon the shores of another continent.
No such distant wandering is destined for the other branch. Turned more directly north, it enters the strait which separates Japan from the peninsula of Korea, in whose midst stand the |>jur of ishuids, Tsushima, guaixiing the approach to the Sea of Ja|>im. This is the end of the milucky stream. The place is a lH>rtoct cul-de-sac. Although it has not the appearance of it on the map, practically there is no exit Ha\nng once wandered in, the stream can onlv revolve round and round; for the stnuts between the mainland, Saghalien, Yesso, and the main island, resjH*ctively, are but shallow. Not long ago, Mr. Milne informs us^ Jaj>ani wiis tied to the great continent ; and these bn^aks in the chain have since been made, due to ocean forces, wliioh have jvrhaps been aided by the restlessness of the im- prisi^nod ouiTent. Itself warm, it is cliilled by the reception it mivts with at the hands of the northern sea. It cannot escapee ; it will not min^rlo. So it leaves the cold water for the more ivnctMual air : and thus for a j^ut of the year we have fog, at ;u\othor tin\o nur;i:rt\ Ourinjr the summer months the coast of the jvuinsula and the neiirhK^ring shores up along Siberia aiv veiled in mist. As the weather irtns colder, the heaw con-
~ ml
doused vapor is gnidually absorbeil by the air and disappears to the ovo, while the evajH^nuion from the smrfaoe of the water si ill o^\os on ; and of the land, fn^m having seen nothing at all, wo oo\no to soo twioo as nnioh as rv-allv exists.
riio oharaotor of tho oiv:u<t. however, is such as not to need tho n\a»;Io tonoh of tho air. It :s irnuid of itself: mirage only ^vndoi> it \Noinl A In^ld and hillv oour.irv rises, ransre behind vauj^w till tho j^wplo ot' tho nunr.;:;.v..> :s ^^^T in the blue of the nIv\ , whilo tV.Mn tho >onthorr, o\:ro:r.i:y of the }>eninsula, half- w;u \;p tho lot\titl\ ot* i:> wosurr. sivlo. :h:s n^ainland is girdled
THE COAST. 35
by a fringe of islands. Some are mountains, sunk to their waists in the sea ; some are but isolated crags that rise abruptly from the water's edge. All are high, reaching, in places, one or two thousand feet. When doubled by mirage, the eifect is comparable only to what we see represented so often in the paintings of the people, — precipices hung in air.
To one approaching Korea from the sea, the first land he will make will be the high hills around the harbor of Pusan ; for most of the boats that latterly have begun to run between Korea and her neighbors touch first at that port. Whether the steamers are from Shanghai or Yokohama, they make Nagasaki, in either case, their point of departure ; and then a run of from thirteen to sixteen hours takes them across the straits to Pusan, on the southeastern end of the peninsula. The first impression, as the distant streak of blue resolves it- self into the semblance of real land, is forbidding enough, — crags which are uninhabitable and mountain-slopes equally tenantless. Rounding one of the latter, which proves to be an island, the steamer opens out a nearly landlocked bay, surrounded almost entirely by hills. At its entrance stand three pinnacles of rock. They look as hard and remorseless as the sea that hurls itself against their bases. Ohilling as is the view seaward, to look up the bay is no less desolate. The perpendicular lines of crag have given place to the curves of the hills; but there is nought to suggest the pres- ence of man. Even trees, which seem the nearest approach to the human in a landscape, are wanting. One's first idea of Korea is as of the spirit of desolation made visible.
Turning still, the steamer suddenly brings into view a little knoll, at whose base are grouped some score of houses. They are not so far off but that a glance shows them to be not Korean, but Japanese. It is the Japanese colony of Fusan. It is in some respects a remarkable colony. In the first place, it
36 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
is the only one that the Japanese have ever had The spirit of trade — the great colonizing motive-power — is not a strong element in the Japanese character ; the Chinese are the Eng- lish of the far-East Secondly, it is historic. For centuries it has been a bit of transplanted Japan. Ever since the invasion of the peninsula in 1592, the Japanese have held it almost with- out a break ; it has been a little fortress by itself in an alien land. Yet, though it has lived amidst Korean manners and customs for so long, it has not been in the least affected by them : it is still Japan. Nor have the Koreans, in their turn, been leavened by it. The natives of the neighborhood, im- pelled a little by the desire to trade, and more by thp curiosity for foreign sights, visit it by day, but they return at night to their own town. The only thing they have deigned to acquire has been some knowledge of the Japanese language; so that to-day interpreters from Korean into Japanese are either men from the neighborhood of Fusan or else returned refugees.
The Korean town of Pusan lies about two miles away, round the bay. When you learn to distinguish the thatched roofs of the houses from the brown of the withered grass, it can just be Lut from the steamer's anchorage. From Fusan a road leads over ih e seaward slopes of the hills to it, and you are first made aware of its existence by seeing a procession of distant ghosts slowly winding their way along this path. The white dresses of the Koreans, and their slow decorous movements, lend themselves involuntarily to such spiritualistic hallucination.
From having doubted their actual humanity you will next come to doubt their sex. On going ashore you are at once surrounded by a respectful but expectant crowd. With the men gathered about the landing-place are mingled a number of young and pretty faces. They belong to persons of less stature than the men, similarly clothed but differing from them in being hat- less, and in wearing their hair in one long loose braid down the
1 ; . ■•i '
.* *-
■■■^\., .
-> *■■■".
^^■;
^^^•■^:- :,:•!;..
■/■ i. ' ■«
THE COAST. 37
back, after the fashion of young girls at a certain age with us. Every stranger has mistaken them for girls, and not a few men-of-war's men have boasted of the impression they have produced upon the fair ones by well-directed attentions. Great has been their sul)sequent discomfiture, and hearty the raillery of their comrades, when told that the objects of their devo- tion were only boys ; for this manner of wearing the hair is the common practice in boyhood, and simply denotes that the boy is still unmarried. For their want of stature and their pretty faces their youth, not their sex, is responsible ; and for their being mistaken for their sisters, the entire absence of visible femininity the cause. As for real women, it is no easy matter to see any. Those of the better class are strictly se- cluded from their seventh year onward, and the poorer fly at one's approach like startled deer. To the foreigner the first step in the discrimination of sex in Korea is that all that is seen is male.
However well acquainted one may be with China or Japan, his first impression on landing in Korea will be that he stands on terra incognita. At first sight, nothing reminds him of that land, only fom-teen hours away across the straits, a part of which, indeed, — the islands of Tsushima, — he may still see, by climbing a few hundred feet above the town. He feels that he is on unfamiliar soil. Nor does he feel it more than do the Japanese themselves ; and a common sense of isolation begets a mutual feeling of affinity, such as years spent in the home of either people by the other would never induce. Na- tions, like men, show their most agreeable side when away from home.
Fusan is composed principally of one long street, turning half-way in its course at right angles to itself. The village has taken the form of a carpenter's square, with the bay, or rather two bays, to mark its outside limits, and a steep hill.
38 THE LAND OF THE MOBNING CALM,
in what would be the inside angle of the square, to bar its extension inhind. Down the middle of the main street runs a canal a few feet wide, spanned at intervals by planking. Along its sides are rows of trees. At tlie outer corner of the scjuare is the knoll from which the town takes its name ; for Fiisan — in Korean, Pusan — means "kettle mountain," and the name was given the place from a fancied resemblance in this knoll to a kettle upside down. A Japanese temple now crowns the top, and the whole is covered with trees.
The Koreans that lounge about the streets of the settlement, and that may be seen coming and going over the rough hill- j)atli, are itinerants from the Korean Pusan. The same curiosity that prompts any one who comes upon a tml of ants ceaselessly piu'suing their journey along a highway of their own, to follow up the line, in order to discover the spot of exodus, tempts the stranger to w^ander out in search of this human ant-hill, Pusan, and see what it is like ; for from the Japanese town it is in- visible. The end, to a ceilain extent, justifies a tramp over anything but a pleasant path ; for an hour's walk will show him liis first Korean walled town.
After several futile ascents and descents, necessitated by projecting spurs of the hills, the path descends finally to the shore, wliere on the long sands native craft are being beached to discharge the catch they have just gathered from the sta- tionary nets in the bay, and all about the sand are strewn fish of every description. The beach is the market; and a strolling crowd keep it lively and gay by incessant bargain- ing and an occasional purchase. While the stranger examines the fish, the crowd examine him. Just off" the beach begin the houses, — the outskirts of the town. They are not above ten fectt high at the ridgepoles, and seven at the eaves ; and the streets are narrow alleys, in keeping with the one-story dwellin^^s. A few hundred yards of winding lanes, enlivened
THE COAST. 39
by an occasional hasty scuffle which means that some woman has been surprised into flight by the sight of a stranger, lead to the wall of the town. Seen from without, it is apparently a solid sti'ucture of stone ; but on mounting to the top, which is done from within, you discover it to be made of earth enclosed by a shell of granite blocks. It is twenty feet on the outside, not more than twelve within, and is crenellated on the outer edge. Between the parapet and the inner edge is a broad walk of beaten earth. Though the height is not great, it is enough to overlook all but the more imposing buildings, such as the mag- istracy. On both sides are meadows of thatched roof ; for the town has grown since the wall was built to protect it. Like a great snake, it can be traced lying in sinuous irregularities around the older part of the town. A gateway — as imposing a building as any in the place itself — gives the road admit- tance. A stone's-throw within stands the magistracy. Though a low building of one story, it rises above the neighboring roofs, and is second in height only to the gate.
A short distance from the town is another magistracy. It is a collection of buildings surrounded by its own stone wall. In this is a gate similar to the city gate ; but outside of the whole, and some little way off from it, is a most singular structure. It is a sort of skeleton gateway, — the scaffolding for a gateway which the architect had thought of building and then, conclud- ing to abandon the attempt, had been too lazy to remove what he had put up in preparation. So it might appear to any one who saw it for the first time ; for it stands all alone by itself in the middle of the road, a couple of cross-bars connecting two tall posts. It is akin to the torii of Japan, and is the outer portal to the magistracy. A portal, and yet entirely discon- nected with that of which, in one sense, it forms a part, it seems to typify Pusan itself; for you enter at both to find yourself nowhere, after all. At Pusan you are in Korea, and
40 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
yet you are not. Though you might thence travel overland to the capital, practically to reach it the road lies once more by sea ; for to travel overland is a wearisome journey of ten days, devoid of all those means of comfort and of locomotion which to a European are a part of the necessaries of life. When the journey by sea is an impossibility, because the port on the western side of the peninsula, the one near Soul, is inaccessible for the ice, Korea becomes once more shut off from the rest of the world.
From Pusan it is a voyage of thirty-six hours, when every- thing is propitious, to Chemulpo, the port of Inchon on the western coast. If anything goes wrong with either the weather or the vessel, — and such, at the period of which I write, was very frequently the case, — it may take an indefinite time to reach one's destination. (We were comparatively fortunate; we were but two days and a half from port to port.) The coast is but imperfectly charted ; and if it comes up to blow or the fog rolls in, navigation at once becomes dangerous, and vessels make for some natural harbor to await a better season. Besides, the greater part of the few steamers that ply there, are not what they might be ; and accidents — serious, fortunately, only to time — happen at intervals.
Just as the sun was going to his setting, and the shadows of the hills behind were creeping stealthily out over the town, like giant arms extending to enfold it in the embrace of night, the steamer weighed her anchor, as if hastening to escape, and stole past tlie gaunt sentinels at the harbor's entrance out into the deep. As she turned the point and began to breast the wind and the sea that rolled in from the southwest, everything changed of a sudden to an ashen gray; and a chill, to the thought as to tlie senses, took the place of the peaceful quiet of the bay. Tlie sea had lost its color; and the spray, as it dashed up from off the vessel's bows, seemed to heighten
THE COAST. 41
the cold, hard look of all around. Then all deepened into night.
The next morning we were off the southern end of Korea, amongst the archipelago of islands. A solitary ship, ofiF a still more solitary coast. The Japanese captain, dressed in European clothes, together with the pilot, a man of the same race, slowly paces the bridge, and anxiously watches the islands as they grow from out the deep, the only beacons on an almost unknown coast. Group after group rise into view, like deeper blue dots, upon the blue circle of the horizon, increase in size and distinctness, are passed, and sink again in like fashion in the distance behind.
As soon as one passes Quelpart, the largest of these islands, as also the one farthest to the south, there is a most marked change in the character of the sea. Off Japan and through the Tsushima Straits, the water is a beautiful blue ; but the Yellow Sea, into which we now come, thoroughly deserves its name, yellow being a poetic idealism for the color of mud. The Whang Ho Kiang and the Yang Tse Kiang, besides numer- ous smaller streams, bring down vast quantities of sand and mud in suspension, the very name of the former river tes- tifying to its peculiarly muddy character. These rivers, from the shallowness of the sea into which they empty, spread out to a vast distance and color the water. To increase the efiect, the tides are enormous ; and it is no doubt principally to their scourings, sweeping in and out four times a day along a wide expanse of flats, that the result is due. We can notice a kin- dred effect in the color of the English Channel and in that of the head reaches of the Bay of Fundy, in both of which places the tides are peculiarly liigh, combined with a shallow depth of water. In the midst of these flats stand innumer- able islands. Any one who has seen the Mont St. Michel and its attendant setting of ooze will, by depriving it of man's
42 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
handiwork and then multiplying it indefinitely, be able to form a very good general idea of the west coast of Korea.
These islands or hills — for, amphibian-like, those nearest the mainland are either, according to the state of the tide — are forbidding when more closely approached. They are really submerged hills, which Time and its follower, Disintegration, have been at work to render bare. In the smaller ones thev have succeeded in their process of denudation ; and precipitous rocks, devoid of soil, rise from the water's edge like the skele- tons of their former selves. So they must look to Korean fancy ; for, in poetic metaphor, the people call rocks the bones and soil the flesh of the wanii living earth. The larger still have the appearance of mountains, though much has been washed from them by the rain to help make up the ooze around them. A short grass covers tliem ; but of bushes and trees there are almost none. Only along the foot of some of the slopes a clump may now and then be descried ; and it invariably betokens a collection of low thatched roofs. Tlie barrenness is to a certain extent a consequence of the soil, but to a much greater degree the result of the need for fuel. As the Government has forbidden the working of the coal-mines, the population is driven to timber, even to twigs, for the means of warmth during tlie rigorous cold of winter. Its ruthless hand luis not spared beauty, nor been stayed by thought. Only superstition has caused it to pause, and that at the very summit of its profanation. All tlie more conspicuous for their lone- liness, two or three trees stand out to view, here and there, upon the very top of a hill. Seen against the brighter back- ground of tlie sky, they look like silhouettes of solitary vegeta- tion. They would seem to be the last survivors of destioiction as it creeps slowly upward. But it is not so. Their position, indeed, but not their inaccessibility, is their safeguard ; for they are sacred. They are symbols of a cult which, for no merit
THE COAST. 43
of its own, has outlived the religions that were planted long after. And so there they stand to-day in grand isolation, sin- gled out from all that once have been, proclaiming a supersti- tion of a far past, like sentinels in sight of one another across the dreary expanse of waters.
Two days out from Pusan found us steaming, like some lost vessel, up the long reaches that were to end at Chemulpo. "The world forgetting, by the world forgot," only a strong faith in human testimony justified the assumption that we were approaching anything. The feeling was heightened by the strange look of both people and land. About me were men clad, as imagination might paint the denizens of another planet, but not such as I had once supposed existed on this ; while, on turning to the coast, I seemed to be earned back in geologic time as before I had felt changed in space. Around me lay suggestions of the earlier unformed ages of the earth. Huge porpoise-backed mounds, unsightly because deprived of Na- ture's covering of trees, and vast plains of mud alternated with stretches of sea. The scene had the desolateness of the early geologic ages.
Especially dreary was the spot on the December day when I first saw it. Over it was spread a leaden canopy of cloud. The weather was cold, and it had begun to snow. The flakes fell softly down and disappeared alike in the heaving water and the hardly more stable ooze ; while a few gulls, like un- easy departed spirits, circled endlessly hither and thither, vainly searching for something they never found.
44 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
CHAPTER V.
CHEMULPO.
CHEMULPO is, by nature, a desolate-looking spot Man has made it more so. It is the port for Soul. To call it the port of Soul would be to dignify it, and belittle the capital out of all proportion. It was formerly a little fishing- hamlet, a few thatched huts nestling in a hollow of a bare hill. It faced neither the sea nor yet the land, but as it were a compromise, — a small island with a corresponding col- lection of thatched roofs. So like their surroundings are these twin villages, that one has to look carefully for them to di8(*over them. It would wellnigli be possible to sail by and report the land uninhabited. Especially true is this in winter when grass and thatch are the same dull brown; and there are almost no trees to l)reak the uniform monotony.
The place is not a harbor. In this region of islands and mud-flats a harbor is an impossibility. It is a roadstead, and an uncominonly distant roadstead at that. Out beyond several islands, utterly cut off not only from any view of the town, but from the slightest suggestion of the presence of man, lie the one or two foreign vessels which may at the moment be anchored ofl* the ])lace. It is a voyage in itself to come ashore.
On the seaward slope of the same hill has sprung up the nnishrooni Jai)anese colony. It contains but one European- built house, which, paradoxically enough, is the Japanese
CHEMULPO. 45
consulate. It is painted white. Its size and its color make it a landmark far out to sea, the only sign at a distance that one is not approaching primitive desolation.
The place lies at the mouth of the river Han, — if, indeed, a stream whose cun^ent loses itself gradually in the ebb and flow of the sea for eighty miles above the point where it enters the ocean, and which then, long after it should have parted with its identity, still persists in wandering aimlessly about among innumerable islands, can be said to have a mouth. The village is not far from the nearest point on the sea-coast to the capital, and it is the nearest point of the sea-coast to the sea. Usually the port of any city fulfils but one condition of proximity, Chemulpo has to try to satisfy two. Even as it is, the steam- ers lie more than a mile out. Owing to the character of the land, isolated hills and level valleys between, and to the great rise and fall of the tides, the coast may be said to be amphibious. At high water, islands like huge lazy porpoises dot the surface of the sea ; when the tide is out, they change their element, and assume the role of mountains in a peaty district. The height of the rise is between twenty and thirty feet ; but this is enough to lay the strand bare for miles, so that, at low water, the sea would seem to have left never to return. What were large bays have become glistening ooze, and the ocean itself can only be made out on the verge of the horizon.
The Koreans have never been a maritime people. The disposition of the race forbade intercourse with their neighbors by sea as well as by land, and the piratical craft of these same neighbors destroyed any domestic coast-trade that sprang up, and compelled the Koreans to retreat, snail-like, yet closer into their shell. Nature certainly offered little to tempt them out Owing to the great rise of the tides, wharves are wellnigh im- possibilities, even supposing the idea of such contrivances ever entered the heads of the people, which, from collateral evidence,
46 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
seems very improbable. They would therefore have been obliged either to moor at an incredible distance from shore or wait for high water to beach their boats. In the first case, it would have been necessary to wait for high tide to get out to their boats; and in the second, to wait for a like opportunity to get out in them, for the unstable ooze which is left bare much resembles a quicksand. Of the two evils they chose the latter. They thus became dependent upon the moving of the waters, which rose favorably either for landing or leaving practically but once a day. If they got off, they found great difficulty in getting back, and if they returned, they could not get off again ; so that, in their case, both the will was weak and the way wanting, and they stayed at home. The result is that to-dav the eastern half of the Yellow Sea is as deserted as the coast looks desolate. Only now and then one comes across a junk carrying supplies to an island village, or bound fishing. Instead of the fleets of huge square sails, as in Chinese or Japanese waters, there is but an occa- sional wanderer, like some belated traveller hastening to be gone. Two masts are the rule ; and the latteen sails are laced horizontally, like the Chinese, to slender strips of bamboo, which, with the unavoidable vertical seams, give the effect of a patchwork of a dirty yellow. This peculiarity in the lacing is one of tlie most obvious differences between Japanese and Chinese junks, for in the one case the lines of the sails nm verticallv, in the other horizontally. However, though belong- inc to tlie same general stvle of boat, tlie two so differ in detail that tlioy can be distinguished almost as fiir away as they can be seen. Tlie Japanese are the more beautiful.
Dulv rcspeetinfT otlier causes, one may draw inferences of a nation's devotion to any pursuit by tlie wealth or poverty of the nomenclature on the subject. Both tlie Japanese and the Korean tongues testifv to their orifrinal inland origin by the paucity of
CHEMULPO. 47
nautical names. Boats are classed, with touching simplicity, as "boats" and "little boats." No discrimination is paid to the means of propulsion ; and as for form, the one kind differs from the other only as an adult specimen differs from the young. The stern of these craft is high, and the bow low. At a distance the eflFect is to reverse the apparent motion to our eyes, accus- tomed to the opposite construction. There is, however, a good reason for the seeming inversion. Their build is not to enable them to battle with the seas, — few of which they are supposed to encounter, — but to give the helmsman a better view.
As for the Korean sailors, they hold in appearance a middle position between the Japanese and our own, — that is, they neither resemble a set of old women nor do they look like tars ; for, of all incongruous associations, a Japanese junk and its crew are the oddest. With their heads tied up in blue and white cotton cloths, the hardy company of mariners, en- gaged in sipping tea and jabbering, suggest to the stranger some afternoon party of grannies accidentally blown off to sea. But there is plenty of pluck underneath the checked handkerchiefs. The Korean sailors look for all the world like their relatives on land, only a trifle dirtier.
The meaning of the name "Chemulpo" is " various articles river bank." It would be interesting to discover whence came this name. There is a Korean tradition in regard to it, which, however, smacks of an ex post facto flavor. A thousand years ago, so it runs, it was prophesied that the spot would eventually rise to be what it now hopes soon to become, the foreign trading-port of Korea. The prophecy included the neighbor- ing magistracy of Inchon, whose characters mean "the river of the love of humanity." Owing to its being the magis- tracy, it is the place mentioned in the treaties. Like many another figure-head, it dozes in indolent seclusion, wraps itself in the name of office, and leaves the work to be done
48 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
by inconspicuous Chemulpo. It lies about five miles away over the hills in a little valley of its own, and it is almost too small and insignificant to presume to its title. It rejoices, however, in a multitude of names, — not names that really differ from one another, but something after the familiar Eliza- beth, Elsie, Betsey, and Bess fashion, so to designate it for want of any more accurate simile. The Chinese character with which the name is written is unifonnly the same, but the expressions of it vary. Both Koreans and Japanese bor- rowed from China, many centuries since, her system of ideo- graphs, and attempted to imiuite their pronunciation. So radically different, however, were the tongues of the boiTOw- ers, that they twisted out of all recognizable sound what they took. Under this metamorphosing process the town becomes either Inchon, Genchuan, or Jinsen, according as it comes from Korean, Chinese, or Japanese lips. You may hear it in all three forms within a few minutes.
Chemulpo itself bears a very strong resemblance to a mushroom Western village. It is in the earliest stages of the hobbledehoy period, when its wants far outstrip its capabili- ties. A few shanties hastily thrown up shelter temporarily the small Japanese colony and the handful of Europeans in the customs service. The only house w^orthy the name is the Japanese consulate. It stands with its outlying houses in an enclosure formed by a high palisade; and patrols are kept constantly on duty, for it is meant for defence as well as for habitation. It is but eighteen months since the Japanese le- gation fought its way from Soul to the sea.* Its dead sleep now on the neighboring hillside, and the white stones that mark their resting-places stand out to the eye from among the short brown grass.
^ Tlic iirst retreat in July, 1882. is meant. When this was written, it was little thought that there would be a second so soon.
CHEMULPO. 49
From Chemulpo to Soul is a distance of twenty-seven miles. So it is called. It is as accurate as estimates repeatedly quoted but never verified by tneasurement are likely to be. Like the enchanted valley it has so long been, the city lies quite truly over the hills and far away. And yet all these ascents and descents jDrofit one nothing ; for Soul itself, though utterly se- cluded, withdrawn even from a distant suggestion of the sea, lies but a few feet above tide- water. The road thither — one of the main thoroughfares of the kingdom, as it has suddenly become — is only a broad bridle-path. Horses, chairs, foot- passengers, and bulls of burden share it The great mass of the people walk ; officials either ride on the ponies of the coun- try or are carried in palanquins. The latter is the commoner means of transportation.
The ordinaiy Korean chair, or palanquin, is not comfortable to European legs. Luxurious as it sounds, and pompous and dignified as it looks from the outside, it is a hollow sham. It owes its name only to analogy. It is not a chair at all, but a square box on poles. It is an empty cube, two feet and a half eacli way. The box, however, is fitted up to cheat the occupant into the belief that he is in a walking room. Lit- tle windows look out in front and on either side, each fitted with its tiny pair of sliding screens. Into these are let still tinier panes of glass, two inches square, so that even in cold weather the traveller may not be quite cut off from the outer world, should he care to look. But such are their size and position that he must peer on pui-pose, or he sees nothing. Commonly one feels very much as if at sea out of sight of land. The swinging motion helps this delusion. Two men caiTy the box, and divide the burden between their arms and backs by means of a yoke with sti-aps that fit over the ends of the poles to which the box is fastened. This contrivance not only brings their whole bodies into play, but affords a pleasing
50 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
security to the carried ; for jostles are by no means infrequent in the narrow crowded streets, and the chair might be, and often is, knocked out of the coolies' hands. At such times, thanks to the straps, nothing worse tlian a sudden jerk is the consequence. On journeys two other men accompany as a relief. Each of them is armed with a long stick. It is their duty at intervals to insert this under the chair and lift it up to ease their fellows. By this means the unavoidable rests are less frequent. As no warning of the change of portage is given, the eflfect is as unpleasant as it is unexpected. The contrast to the ordinary motion is very much like that due to coming suddenly on pav- ing-stones in a carriage after a smooth bit of road. When the rest does come, it is an even chance whether carriers or can*ied are the more tired, European legs have been used for so many generations to walk with, not to sit upon, that where they are not considered as entitled to consideration, comfort is out of the question.
The scenery between Chemulpo and Soul one might describe as wanting. It is, perhaps, as dreary as any in Korea ; and this not so much from the gi-eat underlying features of the land as for a dearth of pleasing details. We may find difficulty in believing, after Clifford, that space is corrugated ; but any one looking upon this portion of Korea would realize that the earth certainly can become so. A sheet of paper soaked in water and then suffered to dry spontaneously will furnish an excellent example of the profile of tlie land, for the surface of the earth there looks as if at some past g-oologic epoch it had been criinii)led. Ranf^o after range of hills necessitates continual as- cents, to be rewarded only by immediate descents on the other side. Expectancy is balked by the certainty of a prospect to come exactly similar to tlie one which has been left behind. Now, tliese ranf^es nu'ght be very picturesque were they well wooded, l)ut tliev are not; and in this bareness lies the im-
<■
A.
>. V'
<.. -.^
.,•*
. . Tf..
■. • •«
I
; I
\
I
•••••.
:•./-
•••,
CHEMULPO. 51
attractiveness of the scenery, — it being a treeless region, and one deprived, principally by man, of Nature's covering. Above are hills covered with short brown grass and occasional patches of young pine ; below is a vast checker-board of rice-fields. The whole landscape wears a dull sombre brown hue, relieved in winter only by the white of the ice and snow. In the sum- mer time the rice shoots and the wild flowers give it something of beauty, but when these are wanting it is mournfully color- less. To one coming from Japan, the contrast is most striking. Where color is so essentially a part of any view that the very name for landscape embodies it, it is no wonder that the few Japanese wanderers hither miss their lovely land ; for their word " keshiki " ("scenery") means, analytically, " landscape color," and where thoughts are turned more to Nature than to man in admiration, it may be translated, not inappropri- ately, "couleur locale."
The country, though in no sense densely populated, is, after all, not so sparsely inhabited as one at first sight imagines. The houses are deceptive in both size and color. There are several villages scattered along the line of the road, and many more a little distance from it; but it passes through no large towns. This is because it is a new road. Its surroundings have not yet had time to grow up to its own importance.
Another feature of the country is the absence of barriers. Generally speaking, there are no stone walls, fences, or other obtruding marks of personal exclusiveness. Only in imniediate connection with the houses themselves are hedges or walls built, and then only to enclose a bit of land peculiarly do- mestic. For the rest, the eye roams at will. This absence of boundary-lines is due not to the fact that the Koreans do not divide their land individually, but rather that the land to be divided is of such a kind that prominent marks of division are not only unnecessary, but impossible ; for rice is the principal
52 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
agricultural product, and most of the land under cultivation is laid out in rice-fields. As these are under water for the greater part of the year, the barriers between one man's land and his neighbors' subserve the double purpose of division lines and causeways of approach.
The roads in Korea are of the poorest Tliey hardly de- serve so fine a title. They are simply tracks. They were not made ; they gi'ew. At least they have the appearance of having done so, and certainly no labor is ever bestowed upon them after they are once started. But this is quite in keeping with Korean customs. In the peninsula nothing is ever repaired.
Though the roads are not much of a comfort on the journey, care is taken that the traveller shall not miss the one he wants ; for they are thoughtfully provided with sign-posts. A certain figurative suggestiveness is universally accorded to the sign- post It is granted a certain personification, that it may seem the more naturally and vividly to convey its information. We are all of us familiar with the conventional hand that with stem inflexibility indicates the road we ought to take, but a sign-post with a face is peculiar to Korea. To come upon one of tliese mute and motionless guides suddenly on turning a comer is somewhat startling. The face, though unfortunately grotesque, is a portrait It is the portrait of a gentleman or of a noto- rious malefiictor ; for accounts differ, and the portrait does not explain the character of the original. He lived, according to Kcn-ean indefiniteness, a thousand years ago. Some say that he was a famous general who gave his attention to opening up the country, and instituted an improved sj'stem of roads throughout the land, especially in out-of-the-way districts (for the eastern provinces were at that time trackless), and that his efligy was taken for the sign-posts, to commemorate his work, — an admirable hint for redeeming from utter worthlessness some
CHEMULPO. 53
of our uglier public statues. Others affirm that he was a cele- brated criminal, as bad as he could be ; and they go so far in evidence as to narrate his particular crimes. To deter others from following in his footsteps, they add, his likeness was placed at all the cross-roads. There is, thus, some diflFerence of opinion as to his moral character, though the general verdict seems to be that he is guilty. But everybody knows his name, which is Chang Sun. On the lower part of the post, which will pass for his body, are the characters that represent his name, and below them are painted the necessary itineraries.
64 THE LAND OF THE M0SNIN6 CAUL
CHAPTER VL
THE JOURNEY UP TO S6UL.
TO travel with another, while it halves the seeming length of a journey, shortens at the same time the road to that other's character. The first day on Korean ground, dependent, as perforce you must be, for attendants, if not companions, upon the men of the land, will disclose to you one of the most salient of the national characteristics. This is an insatiable appetite.
With the native means of locomotion, the journey from Chemulpo to Soul takes a full day. Bound from the sea- coast up, it is specially important to start betimes, as the city's gates are closed at nightfall, and any one reaching them too late must stay without. Disagreeatle as it is anywhere to arrive after dark, here the precaution to avoid doing so becomes a necessity to any arriving at all. In view of this, therefore, and of the fact that, being December, the days were at their shortest, and the time at our disposal reduced to its mini- nmni, it was imperative to leave early. Everything had been made ready the evening before, and there was no reason why we should not set out at a respectable hour in the morning.
So I thought as I fell off to sleep, and so I remembered to have argued as memory struggled back in the morning. This induced me to get up.
But I had reckoned without my Koreans; and, unfortu- nately, we were not together. The Japanese consul had kindly
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. 55
made me his guest, not because he was Japanese, but rather because he was not, — at least, in wliat prompted the invitation, his mode of life, — for he possessed the only European house in the settlement. This was the occasion; the deeper cause lay in his great kindness and hospitality, which were charm- ingly combined with diplomatic astuteness and savoir faire} The Koreans who were to accompany me to the capital had quarters in the native town. They were under the direction of a colonel in the army and a returned refugee. The latter was neither personally nor politically an outcast, but simply a man with a history, — one which, as he told it to me later, brought back to memory the stories of the " Arabian Nights." The minister himself had gone up the day before, to report to his Majesty the result of his mission. He was to send down palanquins for us, as none were to be procured at Che- mulpo. The palanquins had safely arrived, but still the Kore- ans tarried. As they failed to come, word was sent to remind them that time does not stand still. The answer, both in letter and in spirit, strikingly resembled, as it appeared in the light of after events, the advertised " immediate despatch " of vessels about to put to sea. To judge from the reply, we were already oflf; and yet, somehow, we did not go. The language lends itself easily to such pleasing delusions. One hour, two hours, three hours, passed by, not without frequent requests sent to the Koreans to hurry matters. At last the cause of the delay came out : the escort were waiting to dine.
The average Korean does not eat that he may live, but lives that he may eat This view of life is never more painfully apparent than when one is about to set out on a journey. After
^ In the Japanese system, the diplomatic service and the consular service are not rigidly separated, as is the case with most European countries. Japan is like the United States in this, but fortunately unlike them in that her representatives abroad are men trained to the position. The system, in fact, resembles that recently adopted by France. Korea has not yet reached the point of haying any system at all.
56 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
everything is in readiness, and any other people would be actu- ally on the road, the Koreans sit down to a slight collation. The uncertainties of travel add, to their minds, a further inducement to so generally precautionary a measure. The consciousness that they ai-e thus sure of one good meal and that they may not get another, sharpens an appetite that by nature needs no whetting. For such special cause is never in the least important to the act. The idea that eating can be looked upon as a necessary evil is foreign to their conceptions of things; as they practise it, the act is usually unnecessary and invariably considered good. To most Koreans it is always meal-time.
Finally, toward the middle of the day, they appeared, — I am afraid their repast had been unduly hurried, — and we started off amid the farewells of the kindly consulate gathered in force on the steps. Leaving with joy the holes and pitfalls which may eventually grow into streets, but which are now only dangerous gaps between the shanties that cling to the side of the hill, the caravan struck into the path. It was a motley assembly in personnel and equipage. The company consisted of a Chinaman, a Japanese, several Koreans, and myself. The means of conveyance were no less various. We had a horse, some palanquins, called by courtesy chairs, and two jinrikisha, — the last a species of large baby-carriage drawn by a man. The jinrikisha were a foreign importation ; we had just brought them over from Japan. They were among the first to arrive in the country ; and great things were expected of them by the Koreans, who had learned to like them abroad. But the roads in the peninsula are altogether too rough — even the best of them — for wheels, and the native coolies are perfectly inno- cent of the way to handle the vehicles. We had not gone a mile when one of the two broke down, and spilt the Colonel, who had been trying to look as if he enjoyed an uninter- rupted succession of jolts. The unfortunate jinrikisha was
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. 57
smashed beyond the possibility of mending on the spot, and had to be abandoned. Then the horse went a great deal faster than the chairs, though his pace was not such as to alarm the most timid, and disappeared in the distance ahead. To my own lot fell one of the palanquins, — or, to use a more descriptive word, boxes, — and what with the freezing cold and the cramped position I soon found it intolerable, and took to walking; whereupon my coolies, left to themselves, abused their liberty, and were not even to be seen, so far had they lagged behind when I bethought me to vary discomforts by entering it again.
Amid this general wreck there was but one tiling that remained praiseworthy. As might have been expected, this was the commissariat. From Japan the Koreans had brought over much beer, which, with kerosene and matclies, are the products of Western civilization that first strike the native fancy. Before leaving Chemulpo they had taken the precaution to lash a couple of bottles of the beer into each chair. These gave a well-regulated, almost military look to the column when closely scanned; but then the leader of the party was a colonel in the army. This admirable commissariat unfortunately availed nothing ; for in losing one's chair, one lost of necessity its con- tents, and to the loneliness of desertion was added the misery of being cut off from one's base of supplies.
As the reader has gathered from the description of the scenery, there was a certain monotony about it which turned one's attention all the more to his fellow-travellers alonsr the highway. They would have arrested it in any case. From white dots in the distance, they developed, on a nearer ap- proach, into figures clad in bluish-white tunics suggestive of dressing-gowns, black halo hats, and large goggle spectacles. There were plenty of them ; and the greater number walked, only the occasional few riding on horses or being carried in
1
58 THE LAND OF THE MOENING CALM. •
palanquins like our own. Otherwise they represented all classes of society, from the highest to the lowest. Their long flowing robes suited well tlie natural dignified slowness of their behavior. Whether it is the quiet temperament that fashioned the clothes, or the clothes that subdued any natural excitability in the people, is a problem resembling that of progenital priority between the egg and the hen. At any rate, the two are now in complete accord.
To suppose, however, either from the temperament or the dress, that the Koreans are not a people who travel, would be a mistake. Although far-Orientals are slow in their actions, as compared even with the European middle classes, not to speak of energetic and nervous Americans, they are, in no sense, people that stay at home. Travel in China, Korea, or Japan sui*passes that in olden times in Europe; and even in these days of travelling facilities, rai)id transit, and studied accom- modation, the practice is probably quite as much in vogue in the far-East, if we reckon it — as of course we should, where it is the spirit of travelling we are considering — from the time spent, and not the distance traversed.
To what causes this ant-like activitv is due it is not easv to determine, especially in Korea. In Japan the pilgrims fur- nish the largest contingent to the travelling class ; but the j)i]griniage itself is more of an excuse than an end. The journey is quite as much a pleasurable excursion as a re- lip'ions devotion. The latter gives, as it were, a sanction to what would otherwise be looked upon, however enjoyable it niio^lit be, as an unpardonable waste of time ; for it is princi- ])ally the workinpf middle classes who undertake it. In fact, most of the piljj^rinis l)elong to so poor a class that they could not afford to travel were tlie journey at their own expense. TIk^v enroll tliomselves as members of associations to which
ft
they annually contribute their mites, and these enable a certain
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. 59
number to make the pilgritnage every year. A different set are sent out the next summer ; and so the list is gone through, until eventually each member has had his journey.
But in Korea the travelling public is differently constituted. You cannot take it for granted that those you meet are the pic- turesque transmutation of the force of faith into the energy of action. On the contrary, you see here the result of purely secular causes, and not a reflection, however dimmed, of deeds which shall profit in scectdu sceculorum. Nor are the white- robed wanderers principally pedlers, though such exist. In addition to itinerant hucksters that thrive by perambulating, tlie world over, there is a large class in Korea who journey either for pleasure or for some other reason than trade upon the road. If we define a traveller par excellence as a man who is singular enougli to journey for his good and not his goods, a large proportion of those we meet would still have a right to the name. In the first place, the Koreans are passionately fond of scenery. The possessions of each prov-
*
ince in this respect are not only thoroughly known, but they are systematically classified and catalogued. A grove of trees is celebrated here, the precipices of a mountain there, the moonlight falling on a pool of water in a third spot, and so on. Such places people come from long distances to see. Then, again, every year it is fitting to visit the tombs of one's ancestors; and all who can afford to make the journey do so. Annually, also, the literary examination is held at the capital, and students gather from all parts of the country to attend it. Severg-l hundreds in this way journey as many tens of hundreds of miles, and then return again, the greater part unsuccessful in the contest, to their homes, to try their luck once more another year. Lastly, among the official class there is a good deal of promiscuous travelling hither and thither, either to get a place, or to keep one's place, or to
60 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
wring money out of some one else who holds a place by- threatening to defame and oust him unless he pays.
The travel differs in one respect from that among us. It is nearly all within the limits of its own country. Each of the three nations — Japan, Korea, and China — is intensely pa- triotic, and cordially dislikes and despises the others. Con- sequently, in olden times there was little desire to urge men abroad. Besides, they were, as a rule, too poor to go. To journey to foreign lands was an unusual occurrence until West- em nations forced themselves upon the people, and by showing them a little of the luxury of Western ways, gave them the desire to leam more. Nevertheless, such mternational jour- neys have been undertaken; and it is almost proven that most of what we call the civilization of China was imported from the Altaic table-lands by Chinese travellers. In fact, as has been elsewhere pointed out, the more we learn of the past the greater we discover international intercourse to have been among the old-time nations of the world, in spite of the draw- backs with which it was attended. But such journeys were, after all, sporadic, and did not affect the general restriction in the countries in question.
In consequence of this spirit of travel, the roads present a lively appearance ; and often in the distance a highway can better be made out by the people who are strung along it than by any other indication.
The custom also affords a foreigner an excellent oppor- tunity for the study of physiognomy; and it is surprising to note, under such conditions, how quickly you pass from the stage in which all faces look alike to that in which you would never mistake one man for his neighbor, though both might be to you unknown.
The speed of a company is unfortunately, like the strength of a chain, dependent upon its weakest member. The halts of
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. 61
the palanquin-bearera reduced ours to an average which, under the circumstances, became little short of agonizing. Were we to arrive that night or not ? And if not, what ? For, on inquiry, I learnt that such a thing as an inn did not exist. While there was light there was hope ; and with hope, vexation of spirit. It was almost a relief when the setting of the sun took away all doubt with him. The gloom of the improbable settled into the darkness of certainty. We were not going to reach Soul that evening.
Experience may be rough in its teachings, but it impresses its lessons. I learnt more about wayside lodging in general that night than much study in some comfortable arm-chair before a good fire could possibly have yielded me. To begin with, inns, I discovered, are unknown in Korea. This may appear surprising at first; but the dearth is explained when we consider for a moment the constitution of society there. The reason lies in the absence of a middle class ; for it is to its existence that we owe a patronage which has evoked not only such simple inventions as inns, but those more complex contrivances with which we make life easy to-day in our own part of the world. When that class which as individuals is powerless, but as a class is strong, wants a thing, it gets it by the economic force of numbers. Conveniences are provided for the many, which the wealth of the few fails to procure. Now, an inn (one of the simplest and therefore the earliest of such productions) is both impossible and unnecessary in a land where men are divided only into two great classes, — the upper ten thousand, on the one hand, and the lower ten millions, on the other. The officials are but a handful in number, but they are Korea; while the rest help only to swell the number of the population. The officials form an oligarchy ; and when they travel they quarter them- selves as a matter of course upon their confreres^ and put up at the various magistracies which lie along their route. They thus
62 THE LAND OF THE MOBNINO CALM.
get the best the land can give, and the help of the magistrates' band to provide amusement, and so promote digestion. Ex- clusion from the privileged few engenders a feeling of common brotherhood among the masses, so that when they journey each after his kind is extended hospitality by his neighbor. The wayfarer carries with him his food, which means principally his rice, and his lodging is kindly given hun by the first house at which he is minded to stop.
In keeping, as it were, with the military character of the Colonel, we were not going to adopt either of these modes ex- actly, but something which savored slightly of seizure. There was a liouse, the Koreans said, about an hour's march ahead, which they had in mind. This they intended to make their own for the night. The weary hour slowly dragged along, till at last we stopped at what we were told was the place. I crawled out of my box much numbed, and entered the enclos- ure. Some women were tending what stood apparently for the kitchen fire, in a side room. So I sauntered in ; whereupon they incontinently fled, and this in spite of the circumspect manner in which I flattered myself I had looked at everything else while intent upon them. It is not only stars which can best be observed by looking a little off them ; and the edge of the retina is more sensitive than the middle for other than purely astronomical purposes. The precaution was not appre- ciated. They regarded me as a sort of tiger, I was told, — flattering, but fatal.
On reaching the guest-room we found it already occupied by some interpreters of Chinese, on their way to Chemulpo. At this sad discovery the Colonel was seized with a violent fit of repentance. He at once began to reproach himself to me in no measured terms for the pass matters had reached. He said he was bad, very bad ; that it was all his fault. His contri- tion was touching. I was nnich moved, though quite convinced
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. 63
that, on the return of a like opportunity to dine, he would exactly repeat his dilatorineas of the morning. However, re- pentance, if not efficacious in the present, is to a certain extent an effacing of the past ; and far-Eastern politeness finds words much cheaper than deeds. At all critical points of that dis- astrous evening he repeated his would-be expiatory formula. It finally took to itself the similitude of a propitiatory prayer to inexorable fate. Apparently it had as little effect on des- tiny as it had on me. However, as in duty bound, I protested the entire groundlessness of his only too evidently justified self-accusations.
After the inevitable slight collation which filled up the awkward gap of waiting while the coolies rested, we pushed on ; for there was another house, it appeared, which the escort considered suitable for seizure some distance farther ahead. It was getting every minute colder and colder, and by this time had grown pitch-dark ; for the night was cloudy.
We halted a moment to light our lanterns. In Korea all wanderers abroad at night are required by law to be funiished with lanterns, which, as they swing to and fro by the motion of the men who cairy them, look like fireflies flitting about in the darkness. A tallow candle is enclosed in a white paper screen, and this is dangled from the hand by a string. Some- times the lanterns are given names, — an honor which poetry is fond of bestowing upon almost everything in the far-East Bv this distinguished attention their lustre has been much diminished; for the names are painted in large black charac- ters, through which no light can possibly pass. My own lan- tern was significantly entitled " The Bright Moon ; " and never was moon more needed than over that particularly rough road on a cloudy night. It took three characters to paint this name ; but they tried to make up in meaning for what they obscured in light, for they represented no less than two moons
64 THE LAND OF THE MOENING CALM.
and a sun. To express the idea of brightness, the Chinese, and copying them the Koreans, have found it necessary to outdo Nature. She considers one liuninary at a time sufficient for purposes of illumination, but to tlieir minds it requires both at once to indicate true brilliancy. So bold a conception as a conjunction of the sun with the full moon did not deter them in the least.
With the darkness and the lanterns, the caravan took on an even more picturesque appearance than it had worn by day. The shouts of the men, their occasional stumbles, and the little earth-born moons flitting from place to place, as they were specially needed, looking in the distance like so many will-o'- the-wisps, made up a scene as delightfully fantastic as the march would otherwise have seemed uncomfortable ; and the sights and sounds came to me in the interior of a box swaying in its motion like a ship at sea.
In spite of the rugs with which I vainly endeavored to keep warm my legs crossed in front of me, my feet ached with the cold, and I began seriously to consider how much longer the thing would be endurable, when suddenly the swinging motion ceased, and I was violently set down upon the ground. There is at times in the acts of palanquin-bearers a resolute abrupt- ness which is simply startling ; it is only equalled by their more usual automatic inflexibility of purpose, — a dogged de- termination that is beyond praise as it is also quite deaf to expostulation. Tliey are somewhat like well-regulated ma- chines which, once set going, it is impossible to stop, and, once stopped, take forever to wind up again. In this case, for once, their actions coincided in intent, if not in execution, with my desires; and I willingly emerged with some diffi- culty, feet foremost, and then began to tramp rapidly up and down, in the hope that circulation might be coaxed into returning-.
THE JOUKNEY UP TO SOUL. 65
In the mean time any lingering scruples on the part of the owner, any reluctance to receive us that he undoubtedly felt, were being cahnly set aside, and we were asked to enter. Passing through a doorway in a wall of mud, we found our- selves in the courtyard. The night was so dark that the buildings which surrounded it could hardly be made out against the sky. In the midst of this cavernous enclosure several figures were bustling about, revealed in silhouette by a luni glow that came appai-ently out of a hole in the ground. Into this hole the figures were busily engaged in stuffing brushwood. The subterranean crater and its attendant de- mons were all that was to be seen. It argued for the warmth of Korean hospitality, but it vividly suggested the jaws of some infernal region. It was called, in Korean, not inappropriately, "the mouth." It timied out to be, inoflfensively enough, the opening to the khan, a sort of underground furnace, whose flues take the place of basement to a house, and are made of such materials — stone and wood — that the floor above, once heated, is kept warm during the night. The men were at tliat moment heating it up for us. The room on top of it was in this case exceedingly small, — a mere little cell, about eight feet square, and having for apertures only a small door and a tiny hole completely covered over with oil-paper, so that very little light at any time, and absolutely no ah*, could enter through it
Supper, such as it was to be, was preparing; and in the mean time my young Japanese and I squatted on the floor of the cell, — for there are no chairs in a Korean house, — wrapped ourselves in our robes, and, longing for the earth beneath to heat, already felt a trifle warmer by anticipation, but for any material change waited for a long time in vain. At last, after repeatedly feeling carefully all parts of the flooring, we discovered a slight increase in the temperature
(J 6 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
of one comer. From this comer, the one nearest to the fire without, the change slowly spread till every part of the oil- paper, which lined the stone beneath, had become warm to the touch. From the floor the heat was communicated to the air, and we began to throw aside our wraps, one by one ; and by the time supper was over and we were ready to go to sleep, the room had become quite comfortable. Relying upon things remaining as they were while we slept, and ignorant of the character of the demon we had evoked, we dozed off; but oblivion was short-lived. It was not long before I awoke with a start to find myself in an atmosphere like the inside of a furnace. The heat was stifling. I scrambled to tlie door, threw it open, and tried to breathe; but the doorway was very small, and instead of leading into the open air, it gave exit into an anteroom open only on one side, so that the ventilation in consequence was almost nothing ; and the heat from below, instead of abating, increased. I threw off as much of what was still left of my clothing as I dared, with the air outside many degrees below the freezing-point, and, so freed, again courted sleep, but all to no purpose. I was painfully awake. Then I tried science, and endeavored to estimate dispassionately the comparative discomforts of in- tense heat and extreme cold under my exceptionally favorable oj)portunity for experimentally contrasting the two within so short a time; but feeling overwhelmed philosophy. I could only cursorily note the nmcli greater sensitiveness, as a ther- mometer, of the foreign over tlie native body ; for was it not from Korean kindness that I was at the moment profiting I Perhaps even this generalization was hasty ; for though the Koreans were slec^ping (piietly enough in some neighboring rooms, their comfort had not been so particularly looked to as mine. I was the victim of the too complete fulfilment of my own previous desires ; for I myself had unwisely
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. 67
urged them to feed bountifully the flame. Then 1 yielded to misery. I reflected upon tlie exceeding vanity of human wishes. I moralized upon the universal trutli of our obtain- ing in this world, if we only know how to wait, all we can desire, and sometimes much more. And then I fervently desired that for once, at least, the more might mercifully become less, and 1 tried to imagine I detected symptoms of cooling off. For some time I failed even in deceiving myself. At last my longings were fulfilled. Owing to the men whose duty it was to stuff in the brushwood, having long since fallen asleep, and the tire for want of fresh fuel liaving now been extinct for some hours, the constant radiation into the air and tlience through the doorway ultimately produced its effect; and, the room becoming once more habitable, I fell asleep.
68 THE LAND OF THE MOENING CALM.
CHAPTER VIL
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. —THE SECOND DAY.
TO one reflecting on the utter contrast between the feelings tliat enwrap us with the deepening gloom of night and those we inherit with the birth of the new day, it would almost occur to doubt a continuous personal identity. In the gloam- ing our sensitive side, our feelings, our passions, seem to awake to a strength, an acuteness, that had lain dormant during the light For joy or for sorrow, the heart measures then all things by itself. But with the mom awakes the thrill of being. We feel the throb of the life within us that answers to the pulse of the life without. Action in thought has paled before the thought of action, and we forget our world of fancy in our fancy for the world.
I stepped out into the clear blue winter's morning. It is not altogether a conceit that the hour to see the Land of the Morning Calm is that from which it took its name. Of the two paintings in colors which Nature grants us every day, at the opening and the closing of it, — for all the rest is, in her chiaro- scuro, blue and green, — the sunsets in the far-East are rarely fine. As for the sunrises, whenever I liave by accident wit- nessed Aurora arise from her dewy couch, I have been so over- come with her roseate blush of surprised confusion that I felt like an im})ertinent intruder, who would better have waited until he was expected by the sun. But the early morning hours in
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL.— THE SECOND DAY. 69
Korea are certainly very beautiful. The landscape lies, as it were, in a trance. A misty haze gives a dreamy look to the distance, and the morning seems to tarry till tlie middle of the day.
As for the house, — a work of man, — it had lost a good deal of its picturesqueness of the night before, seen now under tlie scrutinizing light of day, and stood revealed, I must con- fess, in much plainness and more dirt. However, as our ob- ject was to leave it as soon as might be, appearances did not signify. As for the cell, I will do it the justice to say that it compared very favorably in size with its fellows of tlie same rank in life, as I involuntarily discovered in the course of the next few hours.
A Japanese cook, skilled to a certain extent in the art of European cookeiy, did the best he could under the circum- stances to give us a breakfast. He had been imported on pur- pose. To live continuously upon native dishes anywhere in the far-East is to almost all foreigners disagreeable, not to say inju- rious. To banquet after that fashion occasionally is one thing, and to adopt it as a steady form of diet a very different matter. In the former case you get, in the first place, the best of its kind ; and then, if one dish does not happen to please you, and you are hungry, you eat all the more of another, so that you end, as a rule, by eating too much rather than too little. After a little familiarizing practice, a Japanese feast, even to a Eu- * ropean palate, is delicious. But to eat thus for a livelihood, not en amateur, is no such enjoyable affair. Even in Japan, where the experiment is tried under more favorable condi- tions than in China, and far more favorable than in Korea, it is not easy. To start with, it is usually when travelling in the interior that it is attempted ; and the inns, though as good of their kind in Japan as anywhere else in the world, are of course wanting in the luxury of the city restaurants. To
70 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
European culinary ideas of essentials, the situation is one grand negation. When we say that the cow is never milked and rarely killed, and that yeast is unknown, we express the facts ; but one must have made the experiment to realize fully what is meant. It means no milk, no butter, no cheese, no bread, and in the country often no meat, and sometimes even, as a last deprivation, no eggs. Life resolves itself into this all-embracing question : To which of the two great classes of mankind does tlie traveller belong, — to those who like rice or to those who do not f If he belongs to the first class, he can just manage to get a living ; if to the second, he is hopelessly lost. As a passing tribute most justly due, I may add that no food I have ever seen is so artistic and beautiful to look at as the Japanese.
Korean cooking, judged by our standards, and also by as nearly impartial criteria as possible, is better than the Japanese. The Japanese admit it themselves. It is much more substan- tial. Unlike the latter, the Koreans eat a gi'eat deal of meat, though in both countries rice is, after all, the staple of subsist- ence, and more than takes the place of wheat with us. But enough. I am becoming like unto a Korean myself, and prac- tise on paper what I have just held up to opprobrium. I reserve what I have to say for a more appropriate occasion, for all this has been suggested by the lightest possible of breakfasts.
For the moment the important matter was not so much what we ate as how often we ate it ; for every stopping- place was turned by the Koreans into an extempore buffet. When we had time, we retreated into a room, like the cell of the nig-lit before; when we had not, we took our refresh- ment al fresco : but we always ate.
The excuse for stopping was that the palanquin-bearers might rest. This they were obliged to do every mile or so.
THE JOUENEY UP TO SOUL.— THE SECOND DAY. 71
involuntarily furnishing us with a practical exact comparison of tlie superior advantages of wheels ; for in Japan, where the kuruma men (the men who wheel the jinrikisha) draw the same weight these others carry, and at mucli greater speed, — twice as fast, on the average, which means four times the exertion, — they stop to rest only every five miles. This would give us about one to twenty for the ratio of fatigue of the two means of transport. When they do halt, rice and tea are all they take, in either land.
One never regrets the land of the rising sun in the land of the risen more than when it becomes a question of motion. In lieu of one of the most delightful means of conveyance, tlie jinrikisha, — which, with the hansom cab, is in some sort the poetry of transport, — one finds himself a prey to that instru- ment of torture, the native box ; for there is not a single wheel in Korea. The thing remains uninvented. That veritable round of pleasure, as it is to man}-, has no existence there. But even to one who looks upon it with impartial vision, simply as a means of shortening distance and devoid of itinerary delight, not to have it at all is as great a discomfort as it is interesting as a phenomenon.
Here are a people who have never reached that stage in prac- tical physics where the immense use of the wheel as a factor in transportation is discovered, — indeed, have not even reached the point where the thing is invented at all. We have not here so much as the Church and State phase of its introduction ; for commonly before it comes to be honored as an article of use, it is used as an article of honor. It is met with first in ceremonials, religious or royal. It figures as a car of state, in which now a king, now an effigy of the gods, is dragged slowly along in the pageant of procession. As such it existed in Japan. And yet so little real acquaintance with its peculiar })roperties does this be- token, that when a few years ago the first wheeled vehicle for
72 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
general use was invented, and by a European too, the Japanese called it simply a " wheel." In revenge, as it were, for the neglect, the invention has thriven exceedingly throughout the far-East, — this ^* man-power car," as the Chinese call it. One finds it as far from its birthplace as Singapore, where it is drawn, comically enough, by the lazy though mercenary Chinaman, and yet, thus handicapped, competes with horse and carnage. With one of these vehicles still struggling along with us over the uneven path, we emerged, after a couple of hours' journey, upon the top of a short rise, and upon a view quite out of proportion to the size of the hillock that gave it Beginning at our feet, and occupying not only the foreground but all the middle distance, lay spread out before us an immense plain of sand. It would have seemed limitless but for the ranges of mountains that rose beyond. Scattered over its surface could be seen black and white dots in irregular files, going and coming like trains of ants. They were figures walking, of men and bulls of burden, and marked the highway to the capital. The main road, never very well tlefined at best, coming upon the vast sand tract, is utterly lost, auul separates into filaments {\s a stream in falling is scattered iuti> drops ; and the various j)aths, continued by custom as they Wi^ro created by caprice, divide at will to unite again at the lorry at the further end. For the plain is the bed of the river Ilan in the spring-time of its fulness; at all other seasons the stream fi>Uows a nuioh nan\>wer pathway. It cannot be made out across the sand : for it clings to the edge of the bluffs as it* foariuii* to lose itself in the s;imeness of the waste, and its hauks ou the noaivr side aiv suftioient to hide it from view. In winter it lies jrathoivd into a deep sullen stream, half avsli^op uwilor its oovorlid of ice.
It is talloil at this point the river Han, but this is not the nanio it hoars thronuhout its leuirth, Korean rivers remind
THE JOUENEY UP TO SOUL.— THE SECOND DAY. 73
one of the oft remarried. The same stream bears a differ- ent name for every few miles of its course. N6e Miss Cold- stream up among the mountains, she no sooner gets into the world than she changes her name for another given her by the land she blesses. As she flows on, time and distance tear her from her love, but only to wed her to another. And so it goes on, a new name taking the place of the old, until at last she too disappears into her Nirvana, the sea. '
" Han " means " Cliinese." It is the name of that dynasty i¥hich had the greatest influence on Korea, and the one under ivhich she first conformed herself to Chinese thought. The Chi- nese, among then: other self-given appellatives, have always been prone to call themselves after their ruling dynasty. Most natu- rally, therefore, other nations, on making their acquaintance, learned to call them by the name they gave themselves ; and then, getting accustomed to it, continued its use long after the Chinese had given it up, — a curious instance, indeed, of being more conservative than the most conservative people in the world. It was in this way that we came to get our name for the country, — China, — from the Tsin dynasty. The Malays so mispronounced what they heard; and the first Europeans, imitating them, still further mangled it. With Korea the case was slightly different. Being a neighbor, and also for centuries a tributary, she has never since the first been behind the age. Her people use "Han'' as we might have used "Tudor" or " Hanoverian " in speaking of anything English, if only the ruling house in Great Britain had given its cognomen to the land. The name, therefore, carries on its face a history and a date. The date is of five hundred years ago ; and the history will be better told when I come to speak of Soul itself, with whose history the name of the river is closely bound up.
After a most wearisome toil over the sand, which seemed to the muscles even more endless than it had looked to the eye,
74 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
and just as I had finally made up my mind to the belief that a small creek at the place where we had entered the expanse nmst have been the river, — for we had now got almost under the cliff's, and there seemed no room left for a river, — we came upon it. It was a sheet of ice, through which, in one spot, a passage had been cut for the ferry-boats, and the dark green of the water took on a more brilliant color from being reflected from the pale blue transparent ice. The river was evidently quite deep at this point, and the banks descended somewhat abruptly, even on the side away from the cliffs. Although it is seventy miles from this point by the river itself to the sea, the tide is felt many miles farther still up-stream. This does not preclude the fact of a strong cmTent when the tide is out, as the rise is so great at the river's mouth. Tlie ferry-boats were large scows, flat-bottomed, into which we all got, — men, palanquins, jinrikisha, horses, and bulls. It was so primitive a method as to bo eminently democratic. Tliere are places in the world where one would not be over-desirous of crossing with a do- mestic menagerie ; but here the beasts were as quiet and well- behaved as any of the other pas.^engers. It speaks nnich for ouo side of the character of the people, that they have so hu- manizing an influence uinm the brute creation. This is a point in which we should do well to copy the maimers of the far- l^ast. Dur very nomenclature points to a vicious state of things. We talk about breaking in a hoi^se, and we find sometimes a }Xooi\ di^al of tUrticulty in doing so. We might as well talk of brtNikiuii* a croinxT we were trvinji: to train on a wall. We alli>w the animal to grow up in as nearly wild a state as possi- bK\ and then, all of a sudden, at our caprice, he is expected to Inu^owii^ tame. Xo wonder coercion is necessiiry, and no NNonilcr it rarelv wht^Uv succeeds, Throui^hout the fiir-East both horses and cattle — which means, for beasts of burden, in Japan both cows and bulls, in Korea only the latter — grow
• •_
• •
• •
•:•:•. :•;-•
•• •
• • •
• ••• •
• •• «•
• • •••
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. — THE SECOND DAY. 75
up to labor from their birth, in anticipation long before it be- comes a fact, and are treated with gentleness all their lives. In Japan, colts always run beside their dams on transport jour- neys ; and thus, from the moment they can amble, begin their apprenticeship by learning the roads. As they get a little bigger, a wisp of straw is tied to their backs to simulate a burden, and give them the feeling without the fatigue. Then, as they become stronger still, a real load, proportioned to their youth, is put upon them, which is gradually increased as they are able to bear it, until they attain adult stature and adult habits together.
On the further side of the ferry begin what may be called the suburbs of the city of Soul, — a series of detached villages, gradually consolidating as you approach the city proper. They are the river-ports of the capital. What little commerce by sea is carried on, passes through them. The banks of the river are lined with the masts of the native craft, like a thicket of bam- boo ; and when a fair wind gives them a chance, they spread their sails and sweep slowly down the river.
Tlie distance from here to the city gates is about one and a half miles. Leaving the river banks, we toiled slowly upward, now through narrow lanes between the low mud walls of the houses, — for few of them here belong to the better class, — now on raised paths between the rice-fields. Men and boys collected in knots, and stared curiously at the passing proces- sion. Though almost hidden from view in the inside of our itinerant boxes, some lynx-eyed loiterer among the crowd spied the one strange figure within and passed the word to his fellows. The less curious only stopped in their walk and turned slowly round, as if on pivots, their eyes remaining fixed on the mov- ing sight ; while the more inquisitive and audacious made no scruple to bend down and peer in, sometimes almost thrusting their heads inside the box itself In spite of being thus a prey
76 THE LAND OF THE MOBNINQ CALM.
to curiosity, their demeanor was dignified, much more so than would have been true in Japan, and slightiy better even than in China; and though they differed in expression somewhat, I cannot say that I think them either more inquisitive or ruder tlian is the case at home.
Tlie trail gradually became steeper, entered a defile, and passing through a cut in the hills emerged upon other suburbs more densely populated than those below. The travel in- creased, the houses thickened ; we turned a comer, and the great walled city of Korea lay spread out at our feet
I have seen sights as beautiful, as strange, before; but I never beheld anything that so completely realized the fancies of my boyish dreams as what I stood gazing upon then. There they all lay spread out before me as if con- jured up to life, — the imaginations of the time when, as a lad, my thoughts sped away from the pages of the " Ara- bian Nights " to the dreamy Orient In front of me rose the south gate, — by name, " The Gate of Everlasting Ceremony,'' — one of the eight clasps of the city's girdle. On either hand stretched a crenellated wall, encircling as with an arm the spot it loved. Protected within, nestling to it for safety from without, huddled the low one-storied houses, — a sea of roofs, some tiled, some thatched. I seemed to recognize the very spot where the princess of my youth was let over the wall and made good her escape. I saw the house where the robbers rendezvoused on the night before the deed. The men I descried walking about, bore the look of those with whose lives the old tales had made me familiar. It was all there before nie. It was all real, and I was myself an actor in the scene.
Entranced, oblivious, I was at last roused from my reverie by a voice at my side begging me to enter my palanquin ; for it was highly undignified, it pleaded, to walk where one could
THE JOURNEY UP TO SOUL. — THE SECOND DAY. 77
be observed. I acquiesced ; and as I stepped inside, felt as if the act was in some sort an entrance to the life of which it unavoidably shut out the vision.
We descended, a few hundred yards, into the thick of the throng, and amid the bustle of pedestrians, palanquins, and bulls of burden, — the ebb and flow of the tide of Korean life, — were carried through the southern gateway of Soul.
78 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ENTRY INTO SOUL.
ONCE through the gate, I found myself in the midst of one of the main thoroughfares of the city. The street was thronged. Men in crowds, clad in their white-flowing robes, were slowly passing to and fro. There was the appearance of being busy, without any of its hurry. The greater number were moving, but their motions were slow and dignified. There was bustle, too, after its kind, yet all without speed. Bulls of burden plodded along in the centre of the road ; while every now and then some horse with his rider ambled by, giving to the whole, by contrast, a seeming dash of liveliness. Pedes- trians journeyed more particularly on the sides, yet there were plenty of them in the middle ; nor was there any line of demarcation between the two kinds of travel, — no sidewalk to separate man from beast. One level breadth, the street stretched from booth to booth. Only just as it touched the houses, was there any break in its uniformity. By the side of these ran a narrow ditch, half gutter, half moat. The affair is probably related to both ideas. It is now certainly used as a gutter, and it was in all probability descended from a species of ancestral moat ; for botli here and in Japan, where the same tiling exists, it has very much the look of one. This gutter was hidden from view, in tlie street through which we were being carried, by the rows of booths which occupied the side of the
THE ENTRY INTO SOUL. 79
highway ; for, wide as the street looked now, it was, in fact, much wider still. Nor was it so crooked as it appeared. This effect, again, was due to the booths. These booths were for the greater part small open-air shops. As they were as large as the houses, or nearly so, and were permanent, not temporary structures, it was not till some time afterwards that I learnt that they were only intruders. Each stood by itself, and without the slightest regard to the position of its neighbors. Tlie only rule seemed to be that they should not encroach too far upon the thoroughfare. The highway was very mucli like a river with a superabundance of islands in it, and the current kept the centre of the stream clear. This trespassing upon the pub- lic domain is common to most of the wider streets. They were left so broad, originall}', that the people deemed them a waste of space, and have appropriated a part of them to individual uses. In ordinary times the practice has been no hindrance to travel ; for the street is really sufficient for its purposes, as it is. But every now and then the king decides upon a promenade, and then there is no room for the royal procession. On such occa- sions the booths are all taken away, and the 'street swept and garnished of the artificially grown fungus. The next day they all make their appearance again, as if nothhig had happened to disturb them. A short time ago, a minister, imbued with the spirit of refonn, issued an edict abolishing the century-sanc- tioned squatters. But the measure was so unpopular that it had to be revoked. Even in so downtrodden a people as the despotically ruled Koreans there w\as still enough of humanity left to resent being made tidy. Who has not felt the same intense aversion to having his littered room put in order for him I
Meanwhile we went on and on, until it seemed to me that the city was interminable. That the view I got of it was through the tiny windows of a box, did not tend to diminish its apparent
80 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
size. Besides, within the box was the old discomfort, — cold and cramp ; and I will confess that in my then state of mind the sight of the inhabitants did not aflfbrd me neai'ly so much pleas- ure as a glimpse of me seemed to give them. At last, after a couple of miles of street, — as I afterwards discovered the dis- tance to be, — we turned sharply to the left, passed through a gateway, traversed a courtyard, passed under another gate- way, and entering a second courtyai'd were deposited on the gi'ound.
The long journey was ended. I stood within the threshold of what had been prepared for me as my home, on this the other side of our globe.
But though I had crossed two thresholds already, I was destined to pass over several more, wind in and out through a labyrinth of buildings, and finally ascend a short flight of steps before I was at last ushered into a handsome room, in which I was invited to sit down. The request was meant, too, in European fashion ; for, on looking about, I saw foreign chairs and a table. These, it afterwards appeared, were given a short time before to his Majesty, and had been sent from the palace to furnish the house. The escort then produced a box of Euro- pean biscuit, and opened some beer. Everybody gave me a warm welcome, but no fii'e. I sat, smiled, and shivered. My good hosts were to all appearances insensible to cold. Later, on donning their dress, I discovered the reason. Of course, tea was served to us at once, and the subterranean oven was imme- diately kindled ; but it was a long time before I could swallow the one for its heat, or feel the effects of the other for the want of it.
The sliding-doors, being negligently left open, contributed nothing to an increase in the temperature of the room. When I began to get the reins of household government into my own hands, on the following day, I suggested that they should be
THE ENTRY INTO SOUL. 81
kept shut. Those appointed to see to my comfort replied that they would do all in their power to have it so, but that they >?'ery much doubted their ability to succeed ; for the servants, tiliey said, were not in the habit of paying the subject any £ittention, and it would be impossible to train them to it. It is, at times, a disheartening truth that doors in the fai'-East are made rather for the purpose of being opened than shut, and that servants are servants only in name.
House-warming (here most literally applied) well begun, I "was conducted over the rambling collection of houses which ^as to be mine as long as I chose to remain in it. It was a set of buildings so connected as to give the idea of a suite of Tooms seen from witliin and a suite of houses looked at from without. It was known as the Guest-house of the Foreign Office. This was a recent title. Before this it had belonged in turn to various Koreans ; am6ng the last, to Min, the pres- ent court favorite. It had almost as many gardens and courts as it had buildings, and one might easily have lost himself while still strictly within the limits of his own dwelling. As to the whole compound, of which it formed the northeastern comer, there was so much of it that simply to enumerate the parts would be an unpardonable presumption upon the reader's patience. By the time I had mastered its intricacies, I had learnt the rest of Soul pretty well by heart.
As for the interior, it was furnished partly from royal and Foreign Office loans, and partly from native attempts to copy foreign descriptions. Besides the chairs and tables above-men- tioned, there were some wooden wash-stands, made in Korea, — the hasty inventions of genius. Then there was my bedstead. It might, with more propriety, be described as a bed-instead. It was a rectangular box, made of pasteboard and thin strips of wood, about a foot high. On this was spread a futon, or quilt,
upon which I laid my sheets and blankets. These hybrids
6
82 THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
were the welcome to those diplomatists whom the opening of the Hermit Land had brought to Siiul.
In my tour of inspection I came across another hybrid, — a most singular production. It was a painting on one of the walls. It purported to be a circular opening, to give, there on the flat wall, a vista into student land. It represented the shelves of a bookcase, its compartments filled with the helps to learn- ing. In one were some Korean books, not all rigidly upright, but leaning against one another as if overcome by the weight of the wisdom they contained ; in another, brushes in marble stands ; in a third, the ink-slabs ; and so on. Truly, an experi- nientum Jiorribile in corpore vUi. It was evidently the chef- d^ceuvre of some artist who had made a voyage to Shanghai and, becoming enamoured of European art, had tried to re- produce its worst variety, jprostituting the details of his daily life in the attempt. It was more than a relief to turn to the native flower-pictures on the opposite door.
With the exception of the few pieces of furniture, the house was still in pure Korean garb ; and, for a Korean house, it was a very rich one. There were scattered through it the usual painted scenes and painted panels. The interior of the par- ticular house which constituted my sitting-room was especially liandsome. The whole of one end of it was covered with a picture representing a flock of wild ducks alighting. A circular opening, closed with sliding screens, — not an uncommon form of aperture, — connected with the rest of the suite ; and on these sliding screens were two paintings, — an owl in the moon- light on the inner side, and a sort of triumph of a Korean Galatea on tlic outer.
Tlie niakesliifts of furniture seemed like intruders, they looked so out of place with their surroundings ; yet they were the fomidations ui)on which the best of native intentions was to rear my domestic liappiness. The desire was great, but the
r
THE ENTRY INTO SOUL. 83
means, to our thinking, scanty ; for the servants were as incom- petent as the appliances were wanting. One's every-day routine is commonly considered sacred, probably from being too dull to tell. It is a secret which we jealously guard, because we fondly believe that to be distinctive of ourselves which a mo- ment's thought would teach us to be the common heirloom of mankind. But in this case the situation had in it something original. The mode was not a routine, but an experiment. It wss neither Korean simplicity nor European luxury. It was a sort of cross between the two, — one peculiar to the time and place, — which, in its exact details, will probably never be repeated. I may be said to have lived on inventions of native ingenuity, and to have tasted dishes which, on tlie part of the cook, were experiments justified only by success ; for lie was as Tiew to the ingredients as I was myself. He was forever getting liold of something strange, and trying his hand on it; and I must say his talent was equal to the emergency. As I have said, he was a Nagasaki man, whom the Koreans had brought over for me from Japan. He proved to be a jewel. At first he seemed homesick, and inquired anxiously how long it would be before we sailed. But the Jap is wily. . He was eager for departure, not that he miglit return to his native land, but because he had conceived the ambitious project of founding the first foreign restaurant in Soul. But lie never volunteered this to me, and only acknowledged the intention when directly tiixed with it, on the occasion of bidding me good-by at the sea-coast, months after, though he was about to stay behind in Korea for the purpose. I had learnt the fact from one who had made him offbrs for the future, wliich the man had refused. So I left him at Chemulpo. Whether he carried out his scheme, and whether, if he did, he survived the mas- sacres of the next December, I never heard. But he was a good servant to me.
84 THE LAKD OF THE HOBNINO CALM.
All the otlier servaiitH were Kqrean. There were so many of them that I never so much as took the pains to learn the names of more than one or two ; and I never was sure of their exact number.
Details of one's household arrangements sound sadly out of place in a description of the charmed valley of Easselas. There is something almost belittling in our modem conveniences. As for the feebler minds in a communityi they actually worship) these expressions of the mind, its images of wood and stone, firmly believing that they are thus showing their superior nineteenth-century civilization. One sometimes wonders how far some of those who affect them the most patronizingly, would get, if left to their oii^ni unaided devices to originate. On the other hand, there is a certain grandeur in the sim- plicity of the life of an Oriental. He almost rises above the body by neglecting to occupy himself with its momentary comforts. Except, perhaps, for his peculiar fondness for eat- ing, the Korean is no exception to the general rule. How- ever large his house, he is content to inliabit but one room. He sleeps in it at night; he eats, studies, and lives there by day. Thick quilts, upon which he and his visitors squat, cover a part of the oil-paper floor ; and at one end, facing the entrance, is a low table, eight inches high and not much wider or broader, that holds his writing materials. For his life cen- tres upon his brush : it is to him the medium of expression of both tliose arts in which alone he lives, — painting and poetry. His walls are hung with pictures, and his floor littered with books and rolls of writing; for he is always in pettOj if not in fact, at once artist and poet.
Two functionaries were appointed to look after me. One of these lived in a part of the suite of houses. He was a colonel in the aiTiiv, mv old friend of the escort. His busi- ness was to act as head of the household and officer in charge
• I'
: 1
|
■W |
' |
||||
|
::.• |
|||||
|
■Eli^B |
M |
||||
|
^Bi^B |
Bj |
■ |
|||
|
1 |
t |
||||
|
■■JnlH |
J |
||||
|
s H |
*>jtc'' ■* |
fl |
|||
|
^H^'^^i ' ~^ ^ |
fl |
||||
|
> |
|||||
|
Vi |
|||||
|
^ |
IJM |
||||
|
|B|[.f;V. wBff SBwwyU |
|||||
|
z |
"HM |
||||
|
> |
BV^^I |
1 |
|||
|
i^ |
^^^ |
H |
|||
|
l^^^l |
FV |
||||
|
n |
K^"^?^!^^ |
m |
|||
|
r |
■■JT' ' ^1 |
bH |
|||
|
2 |
W' ?'' f^M |
■ |
|||
|
r |
w |
b |
• •
••
• •
.• •
• •.
• •_
• • •
• •
•- : •
• •• • • • ••• ••• •
• •
>• •.
THE ENTRY INTO SOUL. 85
of the treasury. He was as good and kind a soul as ever walked this earth, and very quiet and deliberate. He seemed to radiate a mild glow of content whenever he came in to see me. The other was one of the secretaries of the Foreign Office. His duty consisted in periodically visiting me, — once a day on the average, — discovering what I might want beyond what lay at hand, and seeing to its fulfilling. The Sa Kwan — such was his title — was a most celebrated folk-lorist. He was admirably adapted to his temporary office, for he was a bom entertainer. In any other land he would have been a diner- out. The stories he could tell and the legends he knew would fill a volume by themselves. Superstition had consecrated him one of her liigh-priests. He was a consummate Korean my- thologist, except that he believed what he narrated.
86 THE LAND OF THE HOBNINO CALM.
CHAPTER IX.
A WALLED cmr.
THE name ^^ SSaP means simply ^^ capital" There is noth- ing very original in this name. It lacks even the trifling merit of spontaneity. Though the word is pure Korean, the idea is borrowed. It is an imitation of the Chinese assumption of peerlessness.
To an inhabitant of the Middle Kingdom, there is noth- ing to be compared, in dignity or importance, with his own land. The very name he gave it betrays the feeling. He himself stood at the centre, all else upon the outskirts. Pekin and Nankin were to him " the northern and southern capitals," in all the dignity of simplicity, because to him they had no peers. In copying, therefore, the customs of China, the Kore- ans thought it fine to ape its pomp. What the Chinese had taken for granted, they must needs assume. They had not the blindness of self-conceit to plead, for their own model was but too evidently their superior. The Japanese did the same. They were even more ludicrously illogical in their behavior; for they did not so much as clothe the idea in native garb, and thus crivo it at least the semblance of originality. Tokio and Saikio, "the eastern and western capitals," are not only bor- rowiMl in thought, but the very expressions are mispronounced Chinese. Thus their desire to seem as great prevented them from ever seeming gi-eater; for, in lowering their aim to copy a title, they necessarily lost all inducement to surpass it
A WALLED CITY. 87
Soul is the name by whicli the capital is commonly known ; but there is another which even more marks an intellectual dependence upon China in the past. This will be better given and explained when we shall have glanced at the situation of the city.
The site of the city of Soul is very striking. An amphi- theatre of high peaks almost completely encloses a small circular valley two to three miles across. In this little valley, thus cut oflF by Nature from the rest of the world, stands the capital of the Hermit Land. Round about towers the circle of hills, whose slopes on the one side seem placed to give pano- ramas of the life at their feet, while on the other they form a barrier against the intrusion of the outer world. Their bases rise with considerable abruptness from the little stretch of level ground, and their summits are fringed with crags and pinnacles that continue still to defy the levelling forces at work around them. The nakedness of the land — characteristic of this part of Korea — here has a touch of grandeur in it, and the bare granite rocks are all the more imposing for being destitute of vegeta- tion. The highest peak of all is called, in Korean, ^' The Three peaked Mountain." But the French named it better when, in 1866, on the occasion of their warlike demonstration against Korea, they had it as a beacon before them on their journey up the river. They called it ** The Mountain of the Cock's- comb," as its jagged peaks flushed red in the first rays of the rising sun, and, like its namesake, seemed to awake before the rest of the world to tell of the new day to the valley still slumbering in the mist. Its exact height is not known, for it has never been measured ; but all that there is of it is seen, which is so rarely the case with mountains, — for the valley itself, whence you view it, is almost on a level with the sea. In winter it is draped in snow ; for its peaks are so sharp that it is only in places that the snow can find a lodging
88 THE LAin) OF THE HOBNINO CALM.
and glisten here and there in silvery streaks against the grayer rock. Upon its slopes tigers are said to abound, and leopards certainly, exist Its foot-hills are composed principally of a sort of sand, and support only a stunted species of pine, wliicli grows as sparsely as it grows smalL The formation of these foot-hills is most curious. They resemble ridges in the sand of some sea-beach which is tilted at a considerable angle. They are due partly to natmul formation and partly to the wasliing out of the rains. On considering such a mountain- chain, — the common type in this part of Korea, — you cannot help thinking of some past great passion of the earth which has burnt itself out and left behind only a superbly grand monument of ashes.
Nearer to the city, resting like the pinnacle of some sup- porting buttress upon the foot of the Cock's-comb, is the North Hill ; and opposite it, across the amphitheatre, rises the South Mountain. The former is eleven hundred, tlie latter eight hundred, feet above the houses. Both are wooded to their summits, — the South Mountain heavily, the North Hill only scantily, — and both are equally untenanted by man.
So striking a situation is not the result of accident. The city of Siiul is a monument to the last dynastic revolution in Korea. On the overthrow of the then ruling house, it was founded by the successful insurgent as the capital for liis new line. Each dynasty in Korea has had its own capital, much as a private individual would possess his own house. The usurper's first care, therefore, after seating himself on the vacant throne, was to move this throne to a new spot He came by his new dignity in some sort accidentally. He was a general by the name of Tai Jo, and on the occasion of one of the many invasions by the Chinese, was sent to repel tlie invaders. Realizing the futility of the attempt, he summoned a council of war, and announced his intention of treating witli
A WALLED CITY. 89
the enemy and then returning home. He did so; and this led, not unnaturally, to a breach between him and the king, which ended in his deposing his Majesty and reigning in his stead.
For Korean national interests the success of the so-called patriot was most unfortunate. Right as his judgment may have been in regarding tlie result of a war with China as disastrous to his country, and wise as it undoubtedly was to make what terms he could, his subsequent wholesale adoj)tion of Chinese customs was suicidal. He made of his country not only a tributary of China, but her intellectual slave ; for at this time swept in that deluge of Confucianism which has swamped the land to this day. For centuries, indeed, Korea liad bor- rowed, not one thing but many, from the court at Pekin; but now everytliing had to be modelled after foreign thought. The results were even more far-reaching, as we shall see later, than Tai Jo could possibly have foreseen or even hoped.
Dazzled by the brilliancy of tlie dynasty whicli had then just begun its reign in China, called for its greatness tlie Ming, or " Bright," he did not hesitate to per23etuate, by the names he chose, his unbounded admiration. To his capital fell the first badge of Sinicomania. He called it Han Yang, or *^ The Sunshine of China ; " and such, in both fact and feeling, he meant it to be. To do this, he selected, in the first place, a spot which Nature herself had fortified, and then he set himself to add to Nature's work. Along the very suunnit of the mountains he built a wall. Here, unfortunately for his Chinese predilections, the sar- casm of destiny willed that he should perforce follow a Tartar custom. Very possibly he was ignorant that it was such. The wall was of the same kind, indeed, as those which surround all large Chinese cities, and has its most famous example in the so- called Great Wall of China. But in spite of a most natural in- ference, the Great Wall of China is not Chinese. To surround
90 THE LAND OF THB HOBNINa CALM.
one's oities or one's country with walls is not a Chinese idea. It was a practice brought in by the conquering Tartar hordes. To them are due the hundreds of miles of barrier ihat defend the Middle Kingdom on the nortL They built these colossal ramparts to keep out their own kinsmen, lest the latter should follow in their footsteps, and deprive them in their turn of what they had won.
The wall of Soul is imposing in itself; in position, it is wellnigh matchless. In building it, difficulty was ignored and height forgotten. From whatever point you gaze, within the city or without, it is one of the most striking features of a most striking landscape. Rising steadily from the south gate, it cUmbs the mountain to its very top, and now dips, now rises, as it follows the irregularities of the summit At one time it disappears behind some nearer spur, and then again comes into view higher still on a projecting ridge. It falls to meet the northeast gate, at the summit of a pass, descending, apparently, only because it must, and starts steeply up again to the high peaks of the Cock's-comb. There it winds in and out, now lost, now reappearing, till distance merges it with the moimtain's mass. Like some great python, it lies coiled about the city, stretched in lazy slumber along the very highest points, — over peaks where it can, along passes where it must
From without, the wall looks formidable enough. It ap- pears to be a solid mass of masonry. In truth, like all these walls, it is a shell of granite blocks enclosing earth. Wherever the ground is level, its height, except for its outside parapet, is the same on both sides. But in places where a steep descent offers an opportunity, the falling away of the ground is taken advantage of, and tlie wall gains in height on the outer side as much as is rendered unnecessary on the inner. The wall is crenellated along its outer edge by a parapet, and the embra- sures and loo])hoIes give it at a little distance the appearance,
A WALLED CITY. 91
to modem vision, of a train of cars. Behind the parapet runs a broad pathway of beaten earth, to wander along which is by far the loveliest walk in the city. Like everything else, the wall is sadly out of repair, and loses yearly in strength what it gains in picturesqueness. As you stroll along its top, you come, on the inner edge, upon great chasms that yawn obstruct- ingly at your feet, wliere some block lias given way, and the rains have washed out a gully that falls away toward the town. Great trees in the neighboring gardens raise their heads above the wall, and send out protecting branches to shield it from the sun. Destruction has not as yet overtaken the outer edge, be- cause ruin has been stayed by man. The path itself now rises, now falls, turns here to the left hand, and there sweeps round in a grand curve to the right as it follows the wall in its end- less twistings and turnings ; while below lies spread out the city on the one side, and on the other is a sheer descent to the level of the plain.
At irregular intervals stand the eight gates. In theory they stimd at the cardinal points and their half-way divisions. Prac- tically, they stand where they may. They are as imposing as they are important ; and they are among the finest buildings in the city, unless it be contended that they are outside it. For each, though connected with the wall, is, in truth, a building in itself. They resemble houses raised on perforated founda- tions. So much so, indeed, that as you approach one of them from the top of the wall, you would imagine that you stood on a level with the ground before some house of the better class. You almost forn^et that underneath vou is a solid arch of stone, till looking down you catch sight of the crowd perpetually swallowed up on the one side, and dis- gorged again on the other. Fitting into this arch, that from above seems a tunnel, are massive wooden gates, four inches thick, sheathed with iron.
92 THE LAND OF THE HOBNING CALM.
These gateways have names in keeping with their importance. Tlie west gate is called " The Gate of Bright Amiability ; " the south gate, '* The Gate of High Ceremony; ** and the east gate, " The Gate of Elevated Humanity." The various gates diflFer in size, the east and south gates being much the largest Some of the gates, too, are consecrated to particular uses. The south- west gate is the gate of criminals ; and the southeast one, the gate of corpses. A criminal condemned to be beheaded is always taken outside the city for the execution, and the pro- cession invariably passes out through the southwest gate. To pass out by any other gate would be to defile that gate. The same is the case with the southeast gate for the dead. Only the body of a dead king may be borne through any other. This gate is also called " The Gate of Drainage,** because the river flows out beside it Lastly, the north gate stands high upon the Cock's*comb. It is always kept shut, except at such times as it may be needed as a means of escape for his Majesty ; for this purpose alone is it used.
THE WATCH-FIRES ON THE SOUTH MOUNTAIN. 93
CHAPTER X.
THE WATCH-FIKES ON THE SOUTH MOUNTAIN.
IF you should chance to be abroad in the streets of Soul in the gloaming, that lingering farewell of the day that is gone, your eyes, as they followed your tlioughts from the gloom of the highway to tlie fading glory in heaven, would surely rest upon tlie towering form of Nam San, or the South Mountain. Dark, mighty, mysterious in the twilight, its mass stands out in bold relief against the southern sky. In this liglit it seems fairly to overliang the city, as if about to fall upon and cover by night what it has guarded by day. Instinctively you watch it as it slowly disappears into the growing darkness of the sky around. Just as it is lost in the gloom, and your look, freed from tlie spell, returns to the street, and a shudder creeps over you to find that all has become suddenly so dark, four little stars flash out where the top of the mountain lay a moment before. Poised so high in the heavens, they might well be the light from other worlds. They are the watch-fires on Nam San, — the nightly sign to the capital that all is well.
Stars they look to be; bonfires they really are. And the word is the true symbol of their meaning. They are lighted, not as warnings of danger, but as signs that throughout Korea all is security and peace. For fifteen minutes they burn there to tell Soul of the message from the provinces, and then they vanish again into the night.
94 THE LAin) OF THE WSKSmOt OJOM.
The system of which they are the final* link in the chain extends throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is a sort of light telegraphy. On prcmiinent heights along the entire sea-coast and across the northern land-frontier of the kingdom are distributed cairns for bonfires. They gird the land like a cordon of sentries. Wi&in sight of these, to take up and transmit the message they send every night, are posted others on the tops of neighboring hiUs ; and so they succeed each other, one hill telling the next, till the news reaches the central point of each province. From these centres the mes- sage is sent along in like manner from point to point, on towards Soul, till at last all are received together upon the
top of the South Mountain.
•
To telegraph good or bad news, as the case may be, there is an elaborate code of signals. On the summit of Nam San are five cairns. In times of peace, four only of these are lighted ; and each of the four, respectively, represents two out of the eight provinces into which Korea is divided. As peace is fortunately the normal state, the system in this case is the simplest possible. The danger-signals are complicated, so com- plicated that to give a careful account of them here would be useless. We should be making an exposition of the signal ser- vice of the Korean War Department. An example or two will serve as a sufficient illustration. If, for instance, an enemy makes his appearance off a certain province, say ChuUado, an extra bonfire is built close to the main one that represents the pro\dnce of Chullado, and to its right, its left side being allotted to the use of tlie other province which it represents. Then, again, in times of danger other bonfires are lighted above the first in number, according to the imminence of the danger, — one when the enemy are observed off the coast or near the frontier, two when they are about to cross it or disembark, three when they have done so, and four when the fighting
THE WATCH-FIRES ON THE SOUTH MOUNTAIN. 95
has actually begun. As I never saw them lighted, I leave to the reader the difficult task of understanding their possible disposition. The system is carefully expounded in Korean books on the subject.
In the day-time the caims tliemselves, even when you know where to look, can barely be made out from the city, — from the plain, it would be more exact to say ; for they lie, in fact, within the city's wall. Although they are separated from the mass of houses by the wliole mountain-side, which is covered with forest, they are nevertheless a more integi'al part of Soul than the densely settled suburbs that nestle to her outside the gates. For the city's wall runs directly over the middle of the mountain ; it climbs by a series of steps — so steep is the profile of the rise — to the summit, tops a sharp ridge, and descends again in the same fashion on tlie otlier side. Taken in connection with the mountain itself, it is certainly one of the highest fortifications in the world, — eight hundred feet of Nature's breastwork, topped by fifteen feet more of man's. But for Soul this is, relatively, rather low ; on the north the height is many times as great.
Here, as elsewhere, advantage has been taken of the ridge. The wall has been placed just beyond the highest point, so that but one side of it had to be built. As you stand upon it, your look sweeps down through the forest, ofi* into the distance, to where the river Han, reflecting the sun, gleams like a belt of silver in the plain. In one vast semicircle it girdles the amphi- theatre of peaks that surround Soul ; and beyond it rises range behind range of mountains, like tlie billows of a frozen sea for the snow on them. At this height villages merge into their sur- roundings, and you are left to commune alone with a scene as grandly desolate as the ice and snow that cover it.
Parallel to the wall, on the other side of the narrow ridge that makes the summit, wliicli is of the form of a thin lonir
96 TH£ LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.
saddle, and rises somewhat higher on both sides than in the middle, are built five well-like structures of stone. They are of the same form as the wells, — circular, — and are of about the same diameter^ — five feet across. These are tlie cairns.
On the southern edge of the ridge stands a ho]ise for tlie shelter of the people engaged in tending the watch-fires, and near it is a small temple. Its isolation preserves it, for it is against the law that it should exist within the city walls; and technically^ though hardly for practical purposes, it does lie within them. It corresponds to a shinto shrine, but with images, paintings, and rich and gayly colored ornaments crowding its eight feet by ten in a way quite unlike the stern simplicity of its counterpart in Japan. Its isolation was also the cause of its being. The temple is said to have been built in memory of the last king of the last dynasty. The king liim- self does not lie buried there ; but after Sdul was founded, the new line, which owed its existence to the extinction of the one before, resolved in this inexpensive manner to honor its pre- decessor. This place was fixed upon for a site, first, because it was high, and thus would do the king the greatest honor, and secondly, because it was remote, and so would do the people the least harm.
The ridge itself is a little bit of park land, where grand old trees possess, in undisputed sovereignty, their own square rods of eartli, and the wide branches arcli, in lordly protec- tion, over a level greensward of silky mountain grass. Be- low, on the steep slope, hustling one another for pre-eminence, grow the rank and file of a fairly primeval forest. Through vistas in this you can catch glimpses of the city far be- low, — a mass of purpHsh-black roofs in a great hollow towered over by sharp and jagged peaks. You seem to be invading its privacy, looking down upon it thus, — to be
THE WATCH-FIKES ON THE SOUTH MOUNTAIN. 97
gazing from the standpoint of another world upon some charmed valley.
But a little below the summit, where the shoulder of the mountain falls abruptly away, is a view yet finer still. It is a place where the ledges break suddenly off, and the trees can find no foothold on the bare rock above, and no slope to cling to for some tens of feet below. It is a spot, chosen by Nature, from which to scan the city at your feet. You are so high above the town, and yet so near it, that it lies there like a map spread out before you, — a map that is alive. The streets come out like bright ribbons between the dusky houses, and the men in their light dresses look like slowly moving white dots as they walk along them. And yet there is no sound ; it is only a pantomime of the life of Soul.
Close imder your feet, leading diagonally away on the right, is a very conspicuous thoroughfare. It is the main entrance to the city. It leads from the south gate, which lies concealed on the left, to a sort of square in the very heart of the city. On it the white dots are near enough to be made out as men walking. This street, as it advances, curves gradually to the left till it crosses on a stone bridge one of the dry streams, and then widens into the square. This square is a veritable human hive. On one side of it rise the only two-storied buildings in the place. They are at present tenanted by the largest merchants of Soul, who hire the buildings of the Government, into whose hands they liave in some mysterious manner fallen. On the other side is the big bell, encased in a small house of its own.
At riglit angles to this street runs another from the east to the west gate. Running, as it does, almost directly across the line of vision, it is so hidden as to be indistinguishable. Con- sidered both for its length and width, it is the most important street in the city. The other highway is the principal entrance ;
this is the principal internal thoroughfare of Soul.
7
98 THE LAJSD OF THE MORNING CALM.
Following it fartlier to the left, — thnt is, fartlier to the west, — you win see a very broad avenue branching off to the north. At the upper end of tliis is a large, conspicuous building. It is the outer gateway of the Old Palace. Even at tliis distance it IB one of the most striking objects in the view. From it up to the base of the North Hill, — the conical peak directly across the valley, — stretch the Palace grounds. Tlie two buildings that tower in its midst are the Audience Hall, on the right, and the Palace of Summer, on t|ie left. ItB endouug wall can easily be made out, as it starts from the gate and sweeps around on either hand, meeting again on the slope.
To the right of the Old Palace, but separated from it by a portion of the city, are the New Palace grounds. Its wall is visible, but the buildings within are hidden by the toees. Be- tween the two is the Foreign 0£Sc6, fully two miles away from where we stand.
Just at our feet, witli its back up against the base of the South Mountain, stand the buildings of the Japanrae legation. From a flag-staff above it floats the Japanese ensign, the red ball on the white field. Here lives the little Japanese colony, — a true bit of transplanted Japan, — all alone in an alien land. Some of the legation have with them their wives, and many children play about its courtyards. It has its own force of soldiers, kept constantly recruited from home ; its doctors, its policemen, — all that it can need to be sufficient to itself. The minister is as much a governor as a representative at a foreign court. Day and night the soldiers stand before the gateway of the legation bnildings, and change guard as if it were a camp ; and whenever the minister goes abroad, a certain number of tliem accompany him as escort The soldiers are needed. Once before, and once since, that day when I looked down upon it, the legation has had to fight its way from Soul to the sea.
THE WATCH-FIEES ON THE SOUTH MOUNTAIN. 99
Over to the left is the American legation with its flag, — a large compound, with fine old liouses, formerly a noble's palace. Tlie compound of Von MoUendorff, the foreign member of the Foreign OflSce, stands in the centre of tlie panorama, between the two palaces, a little nearer to Nam San than the Foreign OflSce itself. Between us and the American legation rises a skeleton gateway, one of the two " Red Arrow Gates " of Sciul. It foretells what is called " The South Set Apart Palace," now occupied by the resident Chinese commissioner.
These were the salient points, few in number, in the pano- rama, almost virgin to European eyes, that lay at my feet that day, as I gazed upon the capital of the Hermit Land ; and back of all, in majestic grandeur, rose the serrated peaks of the great Cock's-comb.
CHAPTER XL
THE GOTEBmCENT.
FB two reasons it seems fitting to say something here on the subject which has given the title to this chapter. In a land where the GtoTemment is, in one sense, eTerything, it surely deserves mention; and courtesy would also seem to require a word where the same power has played the part of host. I therefore consider myself absolved for what may possibly be thought prosy.
In front of the Audience Hall of the Old Palace of SSuI, — which is, perhaps, the fineet building in Korea, and which, where king is country, may with a certain right be taken for the reception-room of the land, — there stand,