A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL.
A spoiled woman, an extremely cross Englishman, who was her husband, and a smiling mandarin, who was their host, sat on the prow of a Chinese junk. They were rather a silent trio. The mandarin knew, or pretended he knew, no English. The Englishman pretended to know considerable Chinese, but, as a matter of fact, knew almost none. The two men were about equally fluent in rather bad French, and were wont to use it as the medium for a good deal of conversation, when they were alone. But to-night, with the spoiled woman sitting between them, neither seemed to have a word to say. Perhaps they both felt embarrassed by what to both of them must have seemed the ridiculousness of the situation.
The junk had left Shanghai a few days before. It was bound for Korea, where the mandarin was going on business—on business for the Emperor of China. The party on the boat, not to mention servants and such, included the mandarin, the mandarin’s wife, the Englishman, the Englishman’s wife, and a young man named John Stewart-Leigh.
As I have said, his excellency the mandarin was going to Korea on business. The spoiled woman was going for pleasure; her husband was going because he thought he ought to, and the mandarin’s wife was going because she had to. Stewart-Leigh would probably have found it very hard to tell even himself just why he was on board. “It’s as good a way of spending my leave as another, since I am too poor to go home just now,” he had said to a brother subaltern in Hong Kong, “and it will be a perfect charity to Q.”
Mr. Q., the spoiled woman’s husband, had been stopped by a friend a few weeks before as he came down the steps of the Shanghai club.
“I say, Q.,” cried the other, “what is this? I hear that you are going to Korea, and in his junk, with Ja Hong Ting. I say, it isn’t true, is it?”
“Of course it’s true,” Q. had replied gloomily. “That mad wife of mine has inveigled the poor old mandarin into inviting her. She insists upon going, and I am going along to chaperon her.”
The Q.’s had been living in China for almost a year. They had known Ja Hong Ting when he had been the Chinese minister at one of the European capitals. Indeed, an uncle of Mrs. Q.’s (she was not unmixedly English) had been the European secretary of the legation of which Ja Hong Ting had been the head. The acquaintance that had begun on the continent of Europe (and which between the then-girl and the Chinaman had been rather a friendly acquaintance) had developed in Pekin, as friendships between Chinese and Europeans don’t often develop. Mr. Q., who alternately laughed and grumbled at his wife’s odd tastes, secretly shared them. He was a grave, quiet man; as a rule, almost taciturn. He was a deal of a philosopher, though no one but his wife ever suspected it, and he had become very much interested in Ja Hong Ting and the glimpses of real China and of real Chinese life which had been afforded him through his acquaintance with the mandarin.
When Ja Hong Ting and the Q.’s had first met in the drawing-room of one of the European Legations at Pekin, Ja Hong Ting had exclaimed, as he bowed over and over Mrs. Q.’s hand, “I am so glad you are here. Now you shall know my wife.” (His wife had not been with him in Europe.) “You shall teach her English, and she shall teach you Chinese. I entreat you and your husband to come to my yamun to-morrow, and there you and she shall be made great friends.”
Ja Hong Ting had not spoken in English, of course.
The Q.’s had gone to the yamun the next day, but Ja Hong Ting’s programme had not been altogether carried out. His wife had been obedient, as most Chinese wives are, but she had taken a dislike to the Englishman, and a most violent dislike to the Englishwoman. She was civil then and afterwards (at least, in the mandarin’s presence), but she never warmed to her husband’s European friends, most especially not to the lady. She taught Mrs. Q. no Chinese, at least not voluntarily; and from Mrs. Q. she learned no English.
Some months after, Ja Hong Ting had called upon the Q.’s in Shanghai. He stayed to dinner, and as they sat down, said to Mrs. Q., “Do you know where Korea is?”
“Of course I know where Korea is,” replied his hostess.
“Yes,” interrupted Q., “so do I. It is one of the few places that my wife has not dragged me to yet.”
“Ah, yes! I forgot,” said the mandarin, turning again to his hostess. “Yes, I remember, you are a great geographer and a traveller. But I do not suppose you will ever go to Korea. I should think it the last place pleasant for you to visit. I have been there a number of times, and I am going next month. The Emperor is sending me with a message to the King of Korea.”
Mrs. Q. pushed her plate of untasted soup from her, and cried, “Oh!” Mr. Q. knitted his brows and sighed. He saw trouble in the distance.
“You pity me,” said the mandarin.
“Pity you!” said the woman. “Ah! don’t you think the Emperor would send me in your place?”
The Chinaman laughed. “I am sure his Majesty would not care to give you so much hard work to do.”
“How do you get there, how are you going?” said Q., trying in a blind, groping way to turn the conversational tide.
“In my junk,” said Ja Hong Ting. “It is one of the biggest junks in China—a comfortable boat, quite like a floating home, as madame here would call it, and I always enjoy my sails over to Korea and back very much more than I enjoy my stay in Korea.”
“Will any of your ladies go with you?” asked Mrs. Q.
The mandarin laughed and shook his head. And then something seemed to occur to him. He put down the spoon that had been almost to his mouth, and after a moment’s pause, said, “I could take one or two of them. There’s room, and there’s comfort in the boat. Would you”—turning to Q.—“like to come and bring your wife?”
Q. groaned, and said hastily, “Thanks awfully, but I shall have to go to Calcutta next month.” But as he spoke he knew that he was like a drowning man catching at a straw. The mandarin’s suggestion was, of all suggestions in the world, the one to fire Mrs. Q.’s easily fired imagination.
And so it came about that a month or more afterwards Ja Hong Ting’s junk had pushed off from Shanghai with “us five in family,” as Mrs. Q. delightedly called the mandarin, his wife, and their three guests.
The West has conquered the East. Christianity has triumphed. Heathenism is mangled, and, let us hope, dying. Across the fair, flower-dimpled back of Asia we have laid the unpicturesque blessing of railroads, and thoroughly well-made, thoroughly well-kept paths for the men who consider life a succession of journeys, and the animals who enable such men to perpetually journey.
Second-sight seems to be, and to have always been, a genuine possession with the Asiatic peoples. We in the West have, I think, never possessed second-sight; but that does not altogether prove that there is no such thing as second-sight. I remember an Æolian harp that used to hang upon one of the crumbling, wild-flower-wreathed walls of the old castle at Heidelberg. I remember the love songs that the wind used to sing to that harp; the love songs with which the harp accepted the wooing of the wind. If a nice new organ, a parlour organ, bought on time-payment, were placed beside that Æolian harp (for I suppose the harp is still where I, in my girlhood, years ago, saw it), the wind would have nothing to say to that organ. If the wind had, the organ would not hear. I do not for a moment rank an Æolian harp above a nice, new parlour organ, but I may, perhaps, prefer the harp to the organ. We all have our secrets.
The Korean mind is, if I at all understand it, an Æolian harp. Compared with the Oriental mind, the Occidental mind—in many instances at least—partakes somewhat of the character of the parlour organ. The peoples of Asia do less than we, but I think that they foresee more. The wind of prophecy, the wind that prophesied the unavoidable future, swept the nerve-strung heart of Asiatic sensibility, swept it very many, many years ago. And Asia, having ears to hear, and, perhaps, eyes to see into the future, realized that her only safety lay in seclusion. It seems to me that the sensitive Asiatic mind, the exquisitely-strung Æolian harp of Oriental existence, sings one eminently, practicable, sensible song into the moon-lit, star-gemmed Asiatic midnight, and the refrain of the song is this: “Asia for the Asians. Mangoes for the Chinese and the Bengalese. Mogree flowers for the nautch-girls; and the Taj Mahal for the wife who was loved with a love exceeding the love of European men.” It has, I think, been an instinct, a second-sight, an inspiration, with the Asiatic peoples to keep our feet from off the flower-made brilliance of their native sod. But we have conquered Asia, as surely as the music pumped by the thick, red fingers of the Board-School-taught girl—pumped from out the well-manufactured depths of the time-payment-bought parlour organ—would drown the indefinable, soft, methodless, nameless music of the Æolian harp. Just so well have we subdued Asia, hushed her music, quenched her light, torn her flowers petal from petal.
I am speaking from the sentimental standpoint, of course. But, in this utilitarian age of ours, isn’t it worth while to look at things sentimentally, once in a way, if only for variety? We have conferred the greatest practical blessings upon Asia; that I admit and maintain. But we have blurred the picture a bit, and I can’t help being sorry. Only one country in Asia has, until lately, entirely escaped the blight and the blessing of our civilizing touch—Korea! Korea has not seemed worth our shot and powder. And many of us have not really known that there was such a place as Korea. But the war that is raging in farther Asia now has quickened our interest in the quaint kingdom of the morning calm.
The following chapters have been largely written from notes that Mrs. Q. made during the pleasant months she spent in Korea, and from her memories of those months. But Chosön is too interesting and, to us, too new a theme to need the fillip of any petty personality; and so, after these few pages of introduction and of explanation, we may excuse Mrs. Q., or at least her personality, from our service, and leave her in her privacy, to congratulate herself upon her good luck in having had the unique experience of seeing Korea, and of seeing it in company with one of the best-informed of Tartars, and one of the most intelligent of Europeans.
I felt impelled to write this explanation of how the material for the book was gathered, and the manner of woman who gathered it. Helen Q. lays as little claim to being profound as do I myself, and this is no volume for those who gloat on statistics, on accurate tables, and insist upon having over-exact information or no information at all. It is a peep at Korea as a very average woman saw it, a woman who enjoyed herself in Korea, and who there jotted down some of her impressions that they might serve her and another for ‘sweet discourses in their time to come’—jotted them down with no dream of future publication. I sometimes think that the half-gossip of such travellers, the honest, unstudied report of their observations, gives, to the generality of readers, a more vivid, concrete picture of a strange land than do the more elaborate, more careful volumes of more accomplished writers, more professional makers of books.
These pages have had the advantage of being revised both by Mr. Q. and Ja Hong Ting, both of whom are acute observers, exact thinkers, and happen to be in Europe now.
The inclusion here of the chapters on China and Japan needs, I think, no apology. The histories of the three countries have been so interknit socially, artistically, and scientifically; the people of Korea are so like the people of Japan, so like the people of China—though so unlike both—that we shall only even partially see Korea, by keeping one of our mental eyes on the rival countries between which she lies.
The island of Quelpaert is barely fifty miles long and only half so wide; but it is big with history, huge with interest, and great with special claim upon European attention.
In 1653 a Dutch boat was wrecked on the shore of Quelpaert. To that shipwreck Europe owed her most vivid, if not her first photograph of Korea; for on the Sparrow-hawk was not only Min Heer Cornelius Lessen, the governor-elect of Tai-wan, but also a man of genius, a sailor who had a great gift for narrative writing. That man’s name was Hendrik Hamel. It is two hundred years and more since he wrote his simple, straightforward, convincing record of the years he perforce spent in Korea. Since then some score of books have been written about Korea and things Korean. None of them are more readable than Hamel’s “Narrative of an Unlucky Voyage,” and only one of them compares, at all to its author’s credit, with the quaint old book, written two centuries ago by the Dutch seaman.
I should like to quote a great deal of Hamel’s own record of the thirteen years he spent in Korea, and it has been done very much at length by several eminent writers. Moreover, it would be an entirely safe thing to do, for the copyright must have long since run out, if the book ever had a copyright. But I will content myself with a very few words about this wonderful man and his stay in Chosön, and a few brief quotations from one of the most interesting books of travel that has ever been written; a book as fresh and readable to-day as if it had just come smoking from the printer’s press.
More than half the souls on board the Sparrow-hawk (that is thirty-six) reached the shore of Korea. They were taken prisoners, and were held so for thirteen years and more. The history of their captivity is the history of varying kindnesses and unkindnesses. But, when we remember the then conditions of Korean life, and when we remember how little the hermit people of the hilly peninsula desired colonists, when we remember how they regarded foreigners, and what cause they had to so regard foreigners, it is more the history of kindness than of unkindness. Certainly the Hollanders had more to be thankful for than to complain of during their first years in Chosön—barring, of course, the facts that there they were and there they had to stay.
Hamel and his fellows were not the first Europeans, not even the first Hollanders to land, or rather be thrown, upon Korea. But, for all that, they were enough of rarities to be regarded by the populace as strangely interesting wild beasts. They were given rice-water to drink. They were fed. When the need came they were clad. They were sheltered. They suffered no indignity, and only comparative hardship; and, little as they dreamed it, the King of Korea was sending to them an interpreter; a man whose blood was their blood, whose tongue was their tongue.
“The first known entrance of any number of Europeans into Korea,” writes Griffis, “was that of Hollanders, belonging to the crew of the Dutch ship Hollandra, which was driven ashore in 1627.... A big, blue-eyed, red-bearded, robust Dutchman, named John Wetteree, whose native town was Rip, in North Holland, volunteered on board the Dutch ship Hollandra in 1626, in order to get to Japan.”
Now one fine day, when the Hollandra was coasting along Korea, Wetteree and two of his mates went ashore for fresh water. The natives caught them, and, as was the custom of the country, detained them. They were treated with respect, with honour even, attained to positions of responsibility and trust, and became great among the great men of Korea. Two of them died in 1635, died fighting for the country of their enforced adoption when she was invaded by the Manchius. But Wetteree lived on, and, twenty-seven years after his own capture, he was sent to interpret between his shipwrecked countrymen and their captors. Alas! his tongue had forgot its mother cunning, and refused to utter the language that he had not used for twenty-seven years. Wetteree remembered but a few words of Dutch. But the mother-tongue, which more than a quarter of a century had not served to make him quite absolutely forget, he regained in a month’s intercourse with his countrymen.
Hamel and his comrades experienced many ups and downs. They were treated with consideration, they were treated with cruelty. They held many offices. They were set many tasks—that of begging amongst them. They plied many trades. They lived in many places. They saw the interior of Korea, the inside of Korean life, as Europeans never saw it before, and, I fancy, as Europeans have never seen it since.
Once an enterprising governor set them to making pottery with a probable view of introducing European improvements into Korea’s own wonderful ceramic art methods. The experiment was a failure. Whether the Dutch fingers were ill-adapted to the pursuit of Korea’s favourite art-industry, or whether, as Griffis remarks, it was “manifestly against the national policy of making no improvements on anything,” history does not authoritatively tell us. I incline to the first opinion. But the bulk of the learned Europeans, who have studied Korea, certainly side with Mr. Griffis. At all events, Hamel and his fellows were not kept long at the moulding of Korean clay. The Governor was deposed and physically punished; and the Dutchmen were put to the pulling of grass from the door-yard of the palace.
Hamel and his comrades did not remain long in Quelpaert. The king sent for them and they were taken to Söul.
Two paragraphs in Hamel’s long account of their stay are indicative of a good deal that is to-day as characteristic of two types of Korean character as it doubtless was two hundred years ago.
“On the 21st, a few days after the shipwreck” (writes Hamel), “the commander made us understand by signs that he wished to see all we had saved from our wreck, and that we were to bring it from our tent and lay it before him. Then he gave orders that it should be sealed up, and it was so sealed in our presence. While this was being done, some people were brought before him who had taken iron, hides, and other things that had drifted ashore from our boat. They were at once punished, and before our eyes, which showed us that the Korean officials did not mean us to be robbed of any of our goods. Each thief had thirty or more blows given him on the soles of his feet with a cudgel thick as a man’s arm and tall as a man. The punishment was so severe that the toes dropped off the feet of more than one thief.”
Hamel and his fellows were under the supervision of more than one governor. They were highly pleased with some, and as highly displeased with others. Here is Hamel’s description of one:—“It seemed to us that he was a very sensible man, and we were afterward sure that we had not been deceived in our first opinion. He was seventy years old, had been born in Söul, and was greatly esteemed at the court. When we left his presence he signed to us that he should write to the king and ask what was to be done with us. It would be some time before the king’s answer could come, because the distance was great. We begged him that we might have flesh sometimes, and other things to eat. This he granted, and he gave us leave that six of us might go abroad every day, to breathe the air, and wash our linen. This satisfied us greatly, for it was hard and weary to be shut up, and to subsist on bread and water. He also sent for us often, and made us write both in Dutch and in Korean. So did we first begin to understand some words of Korean; and he speaking with us sometimes and being pleased to provide a little entertainment or amusement for us, we began to hope that some day we might escape to Japan. He also,” adds Hamel, “took such care of us when we were sick, that we may affirm we were better treated by that idolater than we should have been among Christians.”
Lest the reader should think that Hamel had become a Buddhist or a Confucist, or had adopted some other shameful form of heathenism; lest the reader may think that Hamel was altogether partial to the people among whom he had been thrown, I will add what he wrote of two other governors. After complaining of one in detail, he adds, “But, God be praised, an apopletic fit delivered us from him in September following, which nobody was sorry for, so little was he liked.”
And of another unsatisfactory governor he writes, “He put many more hardships upon us, but God gave us our revenge.”
These last two quotations ought, I think, to establish Hamel as a highly civilized, and by no means gushing, historian.
Hamel’s narrative proves two things most conclusively. It proves that of all the civilized countries the centuries have wrought the least change upon Korea. Indeed, the geological changes in the peninsula have scarcely been slower than the changes in the social customs of the Koreans. It is even more interesting to me that Hamel’s book proves him one of the most truthful men who ever put pen to paper. He wrote with a brilliant, vivid pen, but he dipped it in no false colour. And yet in his own time Hamel was, to put it mildly, called a liar of liars; and until comparatively recent days his statements have been doubted, and “exaggerated” has been the least abusive adjective applied to them. But travellers of our own time, missionaries and statesmen, men whose word is beyond impugnment, testify that Hamel wrote well within the mark, that he created nothing, imagined nothing, distorted nothing. It is much to be regretted that a man who wrote of Korea so simply, so charmingly, so truthfully, and from so splendidly inside a point of view, did not write far more about a country of which the fairly well-informed of us until yesterday knew almost literally nothing; and yet a country a-teem with interest for all who feel keen interest in humanity, in art, and in high civilization, a country which threatens to disappear, if not as a country, why then, as a country apart, and whose magnificent personality may soon be lost amid the neutral generality of modern civilization, and the brotherhood (such brotherhood!) of all nations.
The history of Korea we may have always with us; but Korea—Korea of the lotus ponds and the red-arrow gates—Korea of the big hats and the devil-traps—Korea of the geisha girls and the omnipotent, red-clad king!—that we may not have so long. Civilization and war are on the march, and if ‘smooth success be strewed before their gentle feet,’ why then, the twentieth century in her youth may see the matrons of Chosön walk abroad unveiled, and night on the streets of Söul turned into day by electric light.
SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS.
It is difficult to decide how to attack the study of a people of whom one knows practically nothing, and to whom one cannot have personal access.
There are two classes of travellers—of people who travel for self-gratification, and not on business or of necessity.
The traveller belonging to the first class diligently studies a whole library of guide books and other volumes of more or less tabulated, and more or less reliable information. He learns the country to which he intends journeying as he might learn his catechism or his “twelve times twelve.” He buys a ticket for the land of his destination. He knows where he is going, and he goes there. He sees everything he expected to see, all he intended to see, which is all he wishes to see, and, on my word of honour, he sees no more! I know, for I have travelled with him often, oh, so often! Having worked out his own petty educational salvation, he goes home again almost as wise as when he started for abroad: just a little hazed, perhaps (unless he be a globe-trotter of the ultra rigidly-minded, blind-eyed type), for things as they really are often give in so pronounced a way the lie to things as we have read of them, that the difference between fact and fiction must shock all but the densest of tourists.
The traveller belonging to the second class starts with a not too definite intention of seeing Venezuela. He arrives there; unless en route he stumbles upon the borders of some, to him, even more interesting country, and turns aside like the free man he is. He rambles from town to village, and with a mind not so crammed with information that it has room for no more. He learns his new country on the spot. He sees the people. He eats their food. He drinks their wine. He watches them at work, and at play. He learns their language, and some of the thousand secrets which only language can teach. He looks into their eyes, and perchance he gets some passing glimpse into their souls. He goes home. Then he begins to read his guide books. Then he begins to study the history and the ancient literature of the people among whom he has been. And then, and not till then, is he fit to study that history: for we can only read a history with full intelligence if we are familiar with the people of whose ancestors it is written.
I trust that no one will think that I am decrying the study of history in our school-days, or the life-long study of those places we may not visit. I am not that mad. The study of history is invaluable as a means of mental discipline and of personal culture. But we can only get the utmost of delight, the utmost mental nourishment from history, when we are more or less (and the more the better) en rapport with the race whose past it chronicles.
Let us then go into Korea after the method of the second traveller, the happy-go-lucky, seemingly systemless fellow. Let us look at the Koreans of to-day. Let us peep into their houses, watch their amusements, ponder over the most characteristic of their many curious customs, and study their institutions. Then we may spend an hour or more over Korea’s history, not as a duty, but a treat. Our appetites will be keen, and we shall relish what would, I am thinking, seem to us but a boredom of incomprehensible dumb dates and endless iteration of meaningless facts, were we to, after the approved style, plunge into it now!
The Koreans are, in all probability, the children of Japanese stock, but China has been for centuries their wet nurse, and their schoolmistress. No two Oriental peoples are more essentially unlike than are the Chinese and the Japanese. And the Koreans, a race of Japanese, or kindred blood, living under conditions largely Chinese, and deeply imbued with Chinese ideas, present a picture peculiarly quaint, even in the quaintest part of the world.
They have Japanese faces, Chinese customs, and a manner of their own. But into their Chinese-like customs some little Japanese habit has crept now and again. And the Koreans have even ventured, once in a while, to invent a custom of their own.
Every Korean house has a cellar; not for the storing of wine, but for the storing of heat. The cellar is called a khan—its mouth, through which it is fed, is some distance from the house. On a cold night you will see one or more seemingly white-clad figures cramming the khan’s mouth, as fast as they can, with twigs, branches, and other combustible food. But once well fed, the furnace burns for hours, and keeps the house warm all night. So the attendants of the fire are not kept out in the cold over long; and while they are there, their hands are full of work that suffices to keep their blood at a decided tingle. A Korean house heated at sunset keeps warm all night, because the fire built is invariably huge, because the floors through which the heat permeates are made of oil-paper, and because the furnace itself is largely a mass of wooden and of stone intestines, pipes, and flues that retain and give out heat. With almost no exceptions the houses in Korea are one-storied. So simple a scheme of domestic architecture enables so simple a scheme of house-heating to be thoroughly efficacious.
Europeans sleeping for the first time in a Korean house, usually complain that in the middle of the night the heat is too intense, the atmosphere insupportable, and that toward the chill hours of early morning, when the fire has died, and the pipes at last grown cold, the room is most disagreeably cold. But these are minor matters, and far too trivial to disturb Korean slumber.
Next to the Eskimos, the Koreans are the heartiest eaters in the world. So, naturally enough, they sleep profoundly. They seem to be always eating. And nothing short of a royal edict, or a bursting bomb-shell, will interrupt a Korean feast. I regret to say that the flesh of young dogs is their favourite viand. Japanese beer is their favourite beverage. And for this let me commend them. For never in Milwaukee, never in Vienna, have I drank beer so good as that which is made at the Imperial brewery in Tokio. Like all other Orientals, they devour incredible quantities of fish; herrings for a first choice. The herrings are caught in December, and are not eaten until March. Water-melons are the fruit most plentiful and most perfect in Korea. They are superb.
Potatoes were in disgrace, under the ban of a royal edict, when Ja Hong Ting took Helen to Korea. They had been introduced into the country shortly before the Q’s. themselves. And their general use might have done much to alleviate the horrible famines which visit Korea with a horrible regularity. But their use and their culture were forbidden. Only in the less disciplined outskirts of the peninsula were they to be had. The mandarin used to send many miles for potatoes, and then they ate them in safety, only because of the flag that sheltered their house from the too scorching rays of the Korean sun. And it was so at all the legations.
But about the sign-posts in Korea. They are quaint, if you like! Each sign-post is shaped like an old-fashioned English coffin, and it is topped by a face; a very grotesquely painted, a very Korean, a very grinning, but for all that, a very human face. They used to rather startle Helen at first when she came round the corner of a country road, and found them smirking at her in the gruesome moonlight. But she grew used to them. For they were all alike. They all wore the countenance of Chang Sun, a great Korean soldier. Chang Sun lived one thousand, more or less, years ago. His life was devoted to the opening up of his country to the feet of his countrymen. He intersected the hills of Korea with pathways, and to-day he beams upon every Korean wayfarer from every sign-post. Beneath his beaming face you may (if you are learned enough) read his name. Beneath his name you may read to where the road or roads lead; how far the next settlement, or the next rest-house is, and one or two other items that are presumably of general interest to the Korean travelling public.
There are no inns nor hotels in Korea. But the rest-houses are neither few nor far between. A Korean rest-house is a species of dâk bungalow. It does not fill our jaded European ideas of luxury. But it answers the purpose of the Korean traveller fairly well. He can cook there; he can eat there; he can sleep there; he can buy Japanese beer there. The average Korean is a sensible fellow, and wants nothing more. No, I am wrong; he wants two things more: he wants to compose poetry, and to paint pictures. The Koreans are a nation of poets, and of painters. Every fairly educated Korean writes poems and paints pictures. But there is nothing to prevent him from doing either, or both, inside or outside the Korean rest-house. The majority of well-to-do Koreans are highly educated, as Korean education goes; and in many ways it goes very far indeed.
In Korea, as in China, a man’s social position depends upon the prestige he can establish for himself at competitive examinations. In Korea, as in every other normal quarter of the globe, a woman’s social position depends upon the social position of her husband.
The results of the Korean competitive examinations are said to be bribable and corruptible. Very possibly. Most human institutions are fallible. Even Achilles, you know, had a heel. But certainly Korea has been for centuries and centuries a country where scholarship took precedence of everything but kingship; a country where education was esteemed above common-sense.
All the Korean animals are very strong, but very strange. The peninsula abounds in tigers, bears, cows, horses, swine, deer, dogs, cats, wild boars, alligators, crocodiles, snakes, swans, geese, eagles, pheasants, lapwings, storks, herons, falcons, ducks, pigeons, kites, magpies, woodcocks, and larks. Hens are plentiful, and the eggs are delicious. But the natives do not make half the use one would expect of all this feathered plenty.
Goats may be reared by no one but the king, and are exclusively used for religious sacrificial purposes.
The Koreans are good to their children, and to all animals. Snakes and serpents are, perhaps, treated by them with more veneration and tenderness than any other form of animal life. No Korean ever kills a snake. He feeds it, and does everything else he can to conduce to its comfort. The poorest and hungriest Korean will share his evening meal with the reptiles that sneak and crawl about the rocks that bound his garden.
Ancestral fire is a very important thing in Korea. In every Korean house burns a perpetual fire, which is sacred to the dead ancestors of the household. To tend that fire, to see that it never runs the least risk of going out, is the first, the most important duty of every Korean housewife. In Korea, as in China, ancestor-worship is the real religion. Confucianism is the avowed religion of the country. But, like the Chinese, the Koreans hold dogmatic religions in considerable, good-natured contempt.
Fortune-tellers and astrologers are as many and as prosperous in Korea as in China.
Like the Japanese, the Koreans have found a special and profitable vocation for their blind. In Japan, the needy blind invariably practise shampooing. In Korea, the blind exorcise devils, and, in analogous ways, make themselves generally useful. Their dealings with evil spirits are summary and thorough. The gifted blind man frightens the devil to death by means of noise more diabolical than any Satan ever heard, or catches the devil in a bottle, and carries it in triumph to a place of safety, where devils cease from troubling, and afflicted Koreans are at rest.
The laws of Korea are explicit concerning high treason. They smite it hip and thigh. They exterminate it root and branch. If a Korean is found guilty of high treason he dies, and his entire family dies with him. In this custom the Koreans are again Chinese and not altogether un-Japanese.
The constitution of the Korean Home Office is based upon the Japanese system. The Foreign Office is modelled on the Chinese Foreign Office. At the head of the War Office is the Pan Sö, or decisive signature, an official of very great power. Under him are several lesser officials called Cham Pan, or help to decide. Under these are men called Cham Wi, or help to discuss, and again under these are a number of secretaries. But alas! in the present Oriental imbroglio (although Korea is nominally the causa belli), the Korean War Department is playing a part so insignificant, that we do not even hear of it.
The Korean army, as estimated by the Korean War Office, represents a goodly number of men, and European writers of note have put down the militant force of the country at a million and more. But even, numerically speaking, this statement should be taken with a whole cellar of salt, and martially speaking, exaggeration could not decently go farther. The Korean army is but the shadow of an army, the harmless phantom of a force that once drove the invading Japanese armies from the shores of Chosön, and made the warriors of an American iron-clad pay dearly for their intrusion.
But if the prowess of the Korean soldiery is gone, its picturesqueness remains, and in its very inefficiency it speaks to us of the days—now probably gone for ever—when weapons at which we smile to-day were formidable indeed, the days when warfare which would excite the scorn of our school-boys was warfare grim and earnest. And as we watch that martial mockery—the army of Korea—we may realize that the yesterday of Chosön was midway between the copiously equipped to-day of our modern, European civilization, and that primeval time when there were no implements, the days when women used thorns for needles, and men used thorns for fish-hooks.
Korea deals with crime as rigorously as China does, but her methods of punishment—especially the most cruel ones—have been borrowed from Japan, or borrowed by Japan from Korea. In China, Japan, and Korea we constantly find the same ideas, the same methods of life, with only the slightest local differentiations, but more often than not it is impossible for the most erudite scholar—not to mention the casual European wayfarer—to determine in which of the three countries the common idea or custom was born.