Quaint Korea

QUAINT KOREA

QUAINT KOREA

LOUISE JORDAN MILN
1 1

AUTHOR OK "WHEN WE WERE STROLLING PLAYERS IN THE EAST'

CTNI-V ERSITT

LONDON
OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.

45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1895

[All rights reserved^

I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME

* .
TO MY DEAR CHUM AND SON

CRICHTON

A few of the following pages have appeared in
" The London Times," " The Pall Mall Gazette,"
" The Daily Chronicle," " The Pall Mall
Budget" " The Queen" " The St. James'
Budget," "St. Paul's" "Black and White"
and " The Lady" The Editors of these papers
kindly allow me to include those pages in this
volume.

L.J.M.

London, 1895.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL i

CHAPTER II.
SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS . . . . 20

CHAPTER III.

S6UL FROM THE ClTY WALL 34

CHAPTER IV.
KOREA'S KING 58

CHAPTER V.
KOREAN WOMEN 75

CHAPTER VI.
KOREAN WOMEN (continued) I22

viii CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.

PAGE

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE 161

CHAPTER VIII.

How THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE, AND THE

KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES . . . .189

CHAPTER IX.
A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART 209

CHAPTER X.
KOREA'S IRRELIGION 226

CHAPTER XL
KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL . .245

CHAPTER XII.
THE SCOURGES OF CHINA 266

CHAPTER XIII.
JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. . . . . .278

GLOSSARY 305

QUAINT KOREA.

CHAPTER I.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL.

A SPOILED woman, an extremely cross English-
man, 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. Per-
haps they both felt embarrassed by what to both
of them must have seemed the ridiculousness of
the situation.

B

2 QUAINT KOREA.

• 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.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. 3

" 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 China-
man 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,

B 2

4 QUAINT KOREA.

" 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 man-
darin'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

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. 5

of the few places that my wife has not dragged
me to yet."

" Ah, yes ! I forgot," said the mandarin, turn-
ing 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

6 QUAINT KOREA.

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 drown-
ing 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 imagina-
tion.

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. Chris-
tianity has triumphed. Heathenism is mangled,
and, led us hope, dying. Across the fair, flower-
dimpled back of Asia we have laid the un-

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. 7

picturesque 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 per-
petually 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 al-
together prove that there is no such thing as
second - sight. I remember an ^Eolian 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
yEolian 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 ^Eolian 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
harp. Compared with the Oriental mind,

8 . QUAINT KOREA.

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 pro-
phecy, 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 sensi-
tive Asiatic mind, the exquisitely-strung ^Eolian
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 inde-
finable, soft, methodless, nameless music of the

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. g

^Eolian 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 sentiment-
ally, 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 Choson 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 ex-
planation, 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

io QUAINT KOREA.

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 sta-
tistics, 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.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. n

The inclusion here of the chapters on China
and Japan needs, I think, no apology. The his-
tories 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 HameFs
" Narrative of an Unlucky Voyage," and only one
of them compares, at all to its author's credit, with

12 QUAINT KOREA.

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 Choson, 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 kind-
nesses and unkindnesses. But, when we remem-
ber the then conditions of Korean life, and when
we remember how little the hermit people of the
hilly peninsula desired colonists, when we remem-
ber 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

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. 13

to complain of during their first years in Choson
— 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 Dutch-
man, 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

14 QUAINT KOREA.

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 righting 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 considera-
tion, 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 intro-

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. 15

ducing European improvements into Korea's own
wonderful ceramic art methods. The experiment
was a failure. Whether the Dutch ringers 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 Euro-
peans, 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 Soul.

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 2ist, a few days after the shipwreck "
(writes Hamel), " the commander made us under-
stand 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 *

16 QUAINT KOREA.

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 super-
vision of more than one governor. They were
highly pleased with some, and as highly dis-
pleased 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 Soul,
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

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. 17

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 alto-
gether 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."

c

i8 QUAINT KOREA.

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 con-
clusively. 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 state-
ments 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 impugn-
ment, 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 yester-
day knew almost literally nothing; and yet a

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL. ig

country a-teem with interest for all who feel
keen interest in humanity, in art, and in high
civilization, a country which threatens to dis-
appear, 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 brother-
hood !) 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 Choson walk
abroad unveiled, and night on the streets of Soul
turned into day by electric light.

CHAPTER II.

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 busi-
ness or of necessity.

The traveller belonging to the first class dili-
gently 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

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 21

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 pro-
nounced 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 be-
gins 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

22 QUAINT KOREA.

intelligence if we are familiar with the people of
whose ancestors it is written.

I trust that no one will think that I am decry-
ing 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 in-
valuable 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, seem-
ingly 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 cen-

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 23

turies their wet nurse, and their school-mistress.
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 seem-
ingly 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

24 QUAINT KOREA.

night, because the fire built is invariably huge,
because the floors through which the heat per-
meates 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 in-
supportable, 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 dis-
agreeably 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

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 25

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 alle-
viate 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 pota-
toes, 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

J^

OFT \

TY/

UNIVERSITY

26 QUAINT KOREA.

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 dak 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

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 27

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 examina-
tions 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 pre-
cedence 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, wood-
cocks, and larks. Hens are plentiful, and the

28 QUAINT KOREA.

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 tender-
ness 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 re-
ligion 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.

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 29

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 So, 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

30 QUAINT KOREA.

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 de-
cently 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 Choson, and made the warriors
of an American iron-clad pay dearly for their in-
trusion.

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
Choson was midway between the copiously

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 31

equipped to-day of our modern, European civiliza-
tion, 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.

Some of the customary Korean punishments
would make, I think, too painful reading : this, I
am sure, they would make too painful writing. I
must refer the reader who is curious to Hamel ;
for Hamel details them with considerable gusto,
even the most horrible : the punishment that used
to be meted out to Korean murderers. Happily,
even in Korea, time cures some ills, and of later
years, particularly under the rule of the present
king, a good, wise, and gentle man, the Korean
criminal code, if it has not assimilated some frac-
tion of that quality which " is an attribute to God,
Himself," has at least ceased to be the thing of

32 QUAINT KOREA.

horrid cruelty it was ; and if the laws of Choson
are more pitiless than the laws of Draco, still they
disgrace the humanity of Korea far less than they
did two thousand years ago. I know of no other
respect in which Korea has changed more.

Here are two examples of Korean law — two
laws that for centuries were so rigidly carried
out^ that their enforcement became national cus-
toms.

" If a woman murder her husband she is to be
taken to a highway on which many people pass,
and she shall be buried up to her shoulders.
Beside her an axe shall be laid, and with that
axe all who pass by her, unless they be noble, must
strike her on the head, and this none, save the
noble, must fail to do, until she be dead."

There are no bankruptcy courts in Korea. A
Korean who once contracts a debt can never
escape from it. Here is the law : —

" One who owes money, and at the promised
time fails to pay it, whether the debt be to his
Majesty the King, or to another person or other
persons, shall be beaten two or three times a
month on the shin, and this punishment shall be
continued until the debt is discharged. If a man
die in debt, his relations must pay that debt, or
be beaten two or three times a month on the
shin."

SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS. 33

This old law, slightly modified, still holds in
Korea, I believe. Of course it works both ways.
It makes it very hard for the debtor to escape
payment ; it makes it almost impossible for
the creditor to lose any part of his substance.

CHAPTER III.

SOUL FROM THE CITY WALL.

SEEN from the wall (a most wonderful wall which
describes a circuit of 9975 paces), Soul looks like
a bed of thriving mushrooms, mushrooms planted
between the surrounding high hills, but grown in
many places up on to those hills. Yes ; they look
very much like mushrooms, those low, one-storied
houses, with their sloping, Chinese-like roofs,
some tiled, some turfed, and all neutral tinted.
The houses of Soul are as alike as mushrooms are,
and as thickly planted.

The wall defines the city with a strange out-
line. Now it dips into the tiny valley, now it
pulls itself up on to the top of some high hill.

Korea is a most distressingly hilly country. If
you elect to go for a decent stroll, it is a matter
of climbing a hill, and when you reach the
summit of the hill it is a matter of tumbling down
the other side, to scramble up another hill, and
your path will be just such a succession of ups

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 35

and downs, even though you go north until you
reach the " Ever White Mountain," and, in
reaching it, reach the " River of the Duck's
Green," which, flowing towards the south, divides
Korea from China; reach the Tu Man Rang
which, flowing towards the north-east, divides
Korea from the territory of the Tsar. Up and
down it will be, even though you push east until
you reach the purple " Sea of Japan." Still up
and down you will find it, although you go as far
south, or as far west, as Korea goes, and find
yourself on the shores of China's " Yellow Sea."
Korea looks like a stage storm-at-sea. Its hills
are so many that they lose their grandeur, as
individuality is lost in multitude.

But we must get back on to the wall, the wall
of Soul.

The wall, which is purely Chinese in character,
is punctuated by eight gates. All of them have
significant names. Several of them are strictly re-
served for very special purposes. The south gate
is called " The Gate of Everlasting Ceremony."
The west gate is "The Gate of Amiability." The
east gate is "The Gate of Elevated Humanity." The
south-west gate is " The Gate of the Criminals."
The majority of Korean criminals, who are con-
demned to death, are beheaded. But this may
not be within the city walls. The procession of
D 2

36 QUAINT KOREA.

the man about to die passes through the
" Criminals' Gate." And that gate is never
opened save on the occasions of such gruesome
functions. The south-east gate is " The Gate of
the Dead." No corpse is interred within the city
walls. And no corpse, save only the corpse of a
king, may pass through any other gate than the
" Gate of the Dead." Any corpse (but the
monarch's) would defile the gates through which
Soul's humanity is wont to ebb and flow. The
" Gate of the Dead " has another name. It is
often called " The Gate of Drainage," for by its side
the River Hanyang flows out to the Yellow Sea.
The northern gate stands high upon the summit
of a peculiarly shaped hill, which the French
missionaries aptly named " Cock's Comb." This
gate is never opened save to facilitate the flight of
a Korean king.

The gates differ greatly in size, which adds to
the unusual picturesqueness of the wall.

The Cock's Comb, up to whose highest ridge
the wall of Soul runs, is at once the most distinct
and the most interesting bit of Soul's background.
It is, among the mountains of the world, so
uniquely shaped that no one who has ever seen it
can ever forget it. And it is the altar of the most
sacred of Korea's national ceremonies.

Although a large portion of this hill is enclosed

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 37

within Soul's wall, Soul itself, climbing city though
it is, has not climbed far up the hill. The summit
of the Cock's Comb is an uninhabited, high suburb
of Soul.

When the night has well fallen, when the
" white " clad masses in Soul's market-place can
no longer see the outlines of the hill, four great
lights break out upon that hill's crest. To all in
Soul those lights cry out, " All's well. In all
Korea, all's well." Each light represents two of
the eight provinces into which Korea is divided.
If in any Korean province or county there is war,
or threatening of war, a supplementary light burns
near the light that indicates that province. If
the war-light is placed on the left, war or invasion
threatens one province, if the war light is placed
on the right, war or worse threatens another
province.

The bonfire signal service of the Korean War
Office is complicated and elaborated. One extra
fire means that an enemy has been sighted off
some part of the sandy Korean coast. Two lights
mean that the enemy have landed ; three mean
the enemy are moving inland ; four mean they are
pushing toward the capital ; five — ! Well, when
five such fires flare up, the citizens of Soul can
only pray — or run and drown themselves in the*
rapid rushing river that leaves Soul as the con-

38 QUAINT KOREA.

demned leave it — because those five bonfires mean
that the enemy draw near the city's gate.

Telegraphy — as Edison knows it — is unknown in
Korea. But the Koreans have a weird but vivid
telegraphy of their own.

At short intervals upon their rocky, sandy coast
huge cranes are built. Each crane is tended by
a trusted official of the Korean king. When dusk
begins to fall, the attendant of the crane lights in
it a great bonfire, if all is well. That bonfire's
light is seen by the attendant of a fire some miles
more inland — some miles nearer Soul — and so
from every pace of Korea's boundary, the faithful
servants of Korea's king flash to Korea's capital
the message, " All is well." A hundred lines of
message-light meet upon that queer hill, the
"Cock's Comb "of Soul.

Many a night of late, unless the wires have lied
to us, there must have been a great confusion
among those signal fires, and vast confusion in
poor frightened Soul.

A certain light will mean " China has pounced
upon us." Another light will mean " Japan has
stabbed us." And a score of other lights will
mean a score of dire facts which only the heads
of the Korean War Department could translate
for us, if they would.

Curfew shall not ring to-night. "Ah! how

S6UL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 39

often," said Helen, when this Chino-Japanese
war was first declared, " I have seen those four
placid bonfires tell the gentle Koreans that no
Lion of England nor of India had roared, that no
Eagle of Russia (not to needlessly mention Austria
or America) had swooped, no dragon of China or
Japan had belched destroying fire ! To-night, if
those fires burn, they flash a message of dire dis-
tress to Soul's shrinking, blue-robed men, and
hidden, unseen women, unless happily they are
unconscious what an excuse for war their isolated
peninsula has become."

Poor Korea ! what has she done ? Nothing
unwomanly. But womanlike she has been un-
fortunately situated.

China has just suffered a plague.

Japan has just suffered an earthquake. For
very many years China and Japan have thought
it expedient to soothe national heart-ache (result-
ant upon national disaster) with the potent
mustard plaster of war.

The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Japanese
hate the Chinese. The Koreans hate the
Japanese and the Chinese, and are hated by both.
An Oriental imbroglio is not hard of conception.

The worst of it is that Korea seems doomed.
And Korea, with all her faults, is one of the few,
remaining widows of the dead (but not childless)

40 QUAINT KOREA.

old world. And she, good purdah-woman that
she is, is lying down with considerable wifely
dignity upon the funeral pile, which civilization
has lit to cremate the false, old notions of the
past.

One who has lived in Korea can but think it
rather a pity that Korea should cease to be, or be
too much remodelled, whoever's in the wrong —
Japan or China.

Nature has found Korea so nearly perfect, that
it seems almost profane for man (or those com-
binations of men called nations) to find fault with
her. In Korea there are snows that never melt.
In Korea there are flowers that never cease to
bloom.

The land of the morning calm ! Poor little
peninsula (only twice and a half the size of Scot-
land), the soft, rosy Oriental haze is going to
be ripped off of you, and in the cold, clear,
brilliant light of Westernized day you are going
to fade away into nothing ! But before you quite
fade away let us have a peep at you. You are
superior in many ways to our land. For one
thing, you begin your year more sensibly. You
ring the new year in with the birth of the year's
first flowers.

The Korean new year is a month later than ours.
The snow is still upon the ground there in

fcSg

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL/ 41

February. But even so, the fruitless plum-trees
open their myriad buds, and long before the cold
snow has melted from their feet, their heads are
covered with a warm, tinted, perfumed snow of
bloom. A few weeks later, and the cherry trees
are white with a magnificence of blossom that no-
where in this world cherry-trees can excel, not
even in Japan. Before the cherry blossoms fall
the wisteria breaks into ten thousand clusters
of purple loveliness. Then the peonies flaunt in
every fertile and half fertile spot, and mock, like
the impudents they are, the splendour of the sun.
But their proud heads fall ere long, and all Korea
is lovely with the iris.

Autumn is the most delightful of the Korean
seasons. It is matchless. Not even on the banks
of the Hudson does summer die so splendid a
death as she dies in Korea. The Korean summer,
superb and perfumed as she is, is very like that
false Cawdor of whom Malcolm said to Duncan :

" Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it."

Winter in Korea is unqualifiedly cold. The
hills are white with snow, and the rivers are grey
with ice. The people huddle into their over-
heated houses. And I believe that the entire
nation does not own a pair of skates. The only
sleds, or sleighs, belong to the fishermen who

42 QUAINT KOREA.

crack through the ice to catch their finny prey.
The fisherman sits upon the sled as he plies his
noiseless industry, and when his day's work is
done he piles his scaly plunder upon the sled, and
so drags it to the market-place.

But it was summer when Helen first stood upon
the wall of Soul. A parapet crenulates the outer
edge of that old wall. It is broken with loop-
holes, and notched with embrasures. And every
few yards its broken outline is broken again by
the overhanging branches of flower-heavy trees,
or by the bright blossoms of some vine that has
found root in one of the old wall's mossy
niches.

And within this picturesque wall huddles super-
latively picturesque Soul.

The royal palaces are noticeable for their
gardens and their size. Big as they are, and they
are very big, they are none too big for the vast
harem that forms a most important part of their
household.

Far from the houses of the king stands " The
South set Apart Palace." The resident Chinese
Commissioner lived there. In front of this build-
ing stands one of Soul's two remarkable " Red
Arrow. Gates." Near is the United States lega-
tion.

One of the most interesting features of Soul is

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 43

its little Japanese colony. The following descrip-
tion of it was written a few years ago by a talented
American, who was for some months the guest of
the king of Korea : —

" With its back up against the South Mountain
stands the building of the Japanese legation. From
a flagstaff 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 alive in an alien land. Some of the legation
have with them their wives, and many children
play about the courtyard.

" It has its own force of soldiers, kept constantly
recruited from home ; its doctors, its policeman —
all it can need to be sufficient to itself. The
minister is as much a governor as a represen-
tative at a foreign court. Day and night the
soldiers stand before the gateway of the legation
building and change guard as if it were a camp ;
and whenever the minister goes abroad a certain
number of them accompany him as escort. The
soldiers are needed. Twice the legation has had
to fight its way from Soul to the sea."

In Korea when one dynasty gives way to an-
other (and that is a fairly frequent occurrence) the
newly-throned dynasty abandons the capital of
the old dynasty and establishes for itself, and its
heirs for ever, a new capital. So was Soul estab-

44 QUAINT KOREA.

lished five hundred years ago by the first crowned
ancestor of Korea's present king.

The city wall was thrown about a very con-
siderable area. And according to rigid Korean
custom, that wall must for ever mark the city's
limits. But the actual city, the city of the people,
has surged far beyond that wall.

One class of Soul's inhabitants — a most impor-
tant class — lives almost in its entirety outside the
city's gates. The fishermen of Soul live in the
river suburbs. There they ply their trade winter
and summer ; and, I might almost add, day and
night. They live upon the banks of the river from
which they draw their livelihood. Their quaint
low houses fringe the edge of the land, and their
boats fringe the edge of the water.

Fish and rice are the staple foods of the
Koreans, save in the north of the peninsula, where
rice will not grow. There fish and millet are the
general food. Fish is the great staple through-
out the country. And no class of men, perhaps,
are so important to Soul's general welfare as
the fishermen who live just beyond the walls,
and daily come into her market-places to sell
their slippery spoil. Meat is scarcely eaten in
Korea. Korea is a land of fearful famines.
The rice fails. The millet fails. Everything
fails except the fish. Yes ; I think that I

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 45

may unqualifiedly say, that to Korea no class is
so important as the fishermen — to the very life of
the Koreans no class so necessary, so indispen-
sable.

The women of position are carried through the
streets in the closest of closed palanquins. A
woman of the middle class, if obliged to walk
abroad, invariably wraps an ordinary dress about
her head and shoulders. And very far from
seductive does she look. The long loose sleeves
of the dress hang from her head like great, un-
gainly, shapeless ears. And the folds of the un-
graceful garment are held tightly in front of her
face by one determined hand — a hand that never
does, and for nothing in the world would, relax its
hold. The women of the very poorest class, the
hewers of wood and drawers of water, are indeed
compelled to, with uncovered heads and unveiled
faces, go about the streets. But they move
rapidly. They look neither to the right nor to
the left. And they slink by men with downcast
eyes. And men never look at them. Indeed a
Korean gentleman will not, by one single glance,
betray that he is aware of the presence in public
of any woman ; unless indeed she belong to the
geisha, or " accomplished class." The geisha
girls go about the streets frankly, and un-
hiddenly enough. But they are a class aside.

46 QUAINT KOREA.

In Korean wifehood, in Korean motherhood, they
have no part.

The Koreans take a great deal of medicine
— those that can afford it — and it never seems to
do them any harm. For the rich, pills of incre-
dible size are richly gilded and placed in elaborate
boxes. The poor take smaller pills ungilded, and
omit the boxes altogether. Very many Koreans take
medicine at regular intervals without the slightest
reference to their then state of health. These
systematic persons do not take medicine when
they are ill, unless the illness has the good taste
to fall upon their duly appointed medicine-day.
This is how an old Korean explained to Helen the
philosophy of the medicine-regularly-taken theory.
" On every seventh day you rest whether you are
tired or not. And on all the other days you work,
whether you are tired or not. So do we take our
medicine, once in so many weeks, because it is
well to observe system : to be regular." The old
man's eye twinkled finely as he spoke, as who
should say, " What are you answered now ? "
And Helen rather felt that he had her on the hip.

Mr. Percival Lowell says : "In Korea, medi-
cine is an heirloom from hoary antiquity. An
apothecary's shop there needs not to adorn itself
with external and irrelevant charms, like the
beautiful purple jar that so deceived poor little

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 47

Rosamond. Upon eminent respectability alone
it bases its claim to custom ; and its traditions
are certainly convincing. Painted upon suitable
spots along the front of the building runs the
legend, "Sin Nong Yu Op"— that is, "the pro-
fession left behind by Sin Nong." This eminent
person was a " spiritual agriculturist," the dis-
coverer of both agriculture and medicine ; and the
pills sold in the shops to-day are supposed to
be the counterparts of those invented by him.
Worthily to render the legend, we ought to trans-
late it, "Jones, successor to ^Esculapius."

There are two distinct Koreas, distinct though
having much in common : the Korea of the upper
classes, and the Korea of the populace. We have
of late been hearing quite a good deal about the
history of Korea, about the topography of Korea,
about the King of Korea, and about the Korea of
the upper classes. But about the lower classes
we have heard comparatively little. The
literature at our disposal concerning Korea is
more than meagre. Very little of this literature
deals with the people — the common people of
Korea.

The streets of Soul — the streets upon whose
edges the people of Soul live, the streets through
which the people of Soul surge — are very wide.
Most of them have, however, the appearance of

48 QUAINT KOREA.

being very narrow. Wide streets seem to the
Korean mind unnecessary luxuries. The people
of Soul utilize the streets of their city by erecting
temporary booths outside their houses, and beyond
the booths they spread their trays and mats of
merchandise. Inch by inch the street disappears
beneath the extemporized shops of the people,
until at last just enough room is left for the in-
terminable procession of humanity to squeeze
through. This encroachment is taken good-
naturedly enough by everyone. The people
positively pick their slow way between trays of
nuts and mats of grain, booths of hats and sleds
of fish. When the king wishes to take a pro-
menade or ride through any of the streets of
Soul, all the booths are taken from those streets,
and with the trays and mats are tucked out of
sight. The streets are swept arid garnished.
The next day, or, if it is not too late, when his
Majesty has returned to his palace, the booths are
re-erected, the mats and trays are re-arranged,
and the every-day life of Soul goes placidly on
until the sovereign elects to take another airing.

It is a common blunder to speak of the people
of Soul as wearing white garments ; a blunder,
or rather a laziness to which I must plead guilty.
Korean garments are invariably of a peculiar,
delicate blue, unless the wearer be a person of

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 49

much importance : then, indeed, may his garments
brighten into deeper blue, flush into soft and lovely
pink, or, if they chance to be the vestments of
the King, blush into proudest scarlet. Seen from
a distance an ordinary Korean appears to be
clad in white, the blue of his dress is so pale ; and
so, many careless writers — I among them — have
made the mistake of saying that white is the hue
of the dress of the Korean populace.

The Koreans have a passion for rugged scenery
— but then, indeed, they have a passion for every
manner of scenery. They call the rocks the
earth's bones. They call the soil the earth's
flesh. The flowers and the trees they call her
hair. There is no more rugged bit of scenery
near Soul than the Valley of Clothes ; and in it
stands a picturesque little temple, which was built,
so the Koreans say, to commemorate a battle,
that they once won. It is a very beautiful
specimen of Korean architecture. Indeed, I
know no lovelier example of what the architecture
of older Korea has become under the influence
of Chinese thought and Chinese art.

Through the Valley of Clothes runs a long,
clear stream, on whose banks are innumerable
large, smooth-topped rocks. Altogether it is an
admirable place for Oriental washing. In the
winter every Korean garment is ripped into all its

E

50 QUAINT KOREA.

component parts before it is washed. In summer
the garments are washed each in its entirety.
This ripping up of the clothes before washing
them is one of the comparatively few customs
which the Koreans have borrowed from the
Japanese. In Japan, however, all clothes about to
be washed are taken to pieces, whether it be
winter or summer.

Nothing could well be simpler than the modus
operandi of the Korean washermen and washer-
women. The clothes are well soaked in the
stream. Then they are well beaten with smooth,
heavy, edgeless sticks. Then they are spread upon
the ground or on the rocks, as much in the sun as
possible, and left to dry indefinitely. No one ever
steals them ! Think of it ! And even the gentle
winds of the Asiatic heavens scorn to blow them
away. If there seems the slightest chance of such
a catastrophe, a few smooth pebbles are laid upon
the garments' edges.

The qualities which the upper classes of Korea
have most in common are — love of art and litera-
ture, reverence for law, kindness of disposition, and
love of nature. The point upon which they most
differ is religion. Korea is really a country with-
out religion. The upper classes are intellectual
to a degree, but their intellectuality is invariably
of the agnostic order. Rationalism and agnosticism

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 51

are the only recognized religions in upper Korean
circles.

The Korean populace also profess agnosticism,
but do not practise it ; at least they do not prac-
tise rationalism ; for if they believe in no gods,
most of them believe in countless devils.

The sacred devil-trees are supposed to be (after
the blind) most efficacious in ridding the land
of the spirits of evil. A writer — one of the best
writers on Korea — thus describes a devil-tree upon
which he came one bleak autumn day : — " An
ancient tree, around whose base lies piled a heap of
stones. The tree is sacred ; superstition has pre-
served it, where most of its fellows have gone to
feed the subterranean ovens. It is not usually
very large, nor does it look extremely venerable,
so that it is at least open to suspicion that its
sanctity is an honour which is passed along from
oak to acorn or from pine to seed : however, it
is usually a fair specimen of a tree, and, where there
are few others to vie with it, comes out finely by
comparison : otherwise there is nothing distinc-
tive about the tree, except that it exists, — that it
is not cut down and borne off to the city on the
back of some bull, there to vanish in the smoke.
On its branches hang, commonly, a few old rags,
evidently once of brilliantly-coloured cloth ; they
look to be shreds of the garments of such unwary
E 2

52 QUAINT KOREA.

travellers as approached too close ; but a nearer
inspection shows them to be tied on designedly.
The heap of small stones piled around the base of
the tree gives one the impression at first that the
road is about to undergo repairs, which it sadly
needs, and that the stones have been collected for
the purpose. This, however, is a fallacy : no
Korean road ever is repaired.

The spot is called Son Wang Don, or " The
Home of the King of the Fairies." The stones
help to form what was once a fairy temple, now a
devil-jail ; and the strips of cloth are pieces of
garments from those who believed themselves
possessed of devils, or feared lest they might be-
come so. A man caught by an evil spirit exiles a
part of his clothing to the branches of one of these
trees, so as to delude the demon into attaching
there."

We have tried to peep at Soul — the Soul of the
people. But not all Soul is plebeian. It has a
most decided aristocracy, both architectural and
human.

Soul has no temples. None may be built with-
in her walls. Of all civilized countries, Korea is
the one country without a religion. Religion or
its analogous superstitions are there, of course;
but that religion is in Korea, not part of Korea.
In Korea, religion is under a ban of official dis-

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 53

countenance, or national discredence. Such
temples as do exist in Korea dwell (like archi-
tectural lepers) without the city's walls. But
Soul has her official buildings, and the dwellings
of her rich. Above all, she has her palaces.

But hold ! there is one temple within the walls
of Soul ; but it is there on sufferance, there against
the law. And it is just inside the walls. It is on
a high, lonely mountain place, and far remote
from the actual city — the throbbing, breathing,
human city.

And Soul has also what was once a temple.
It is as interesting as anything in Soul. In the
first place it is the only pagoda in Soul — almost,
if not quite, the only pagoda in Korea. In the
second place, it is extremely beautiful. In the
third place, it, more than any building I know,
accents the decay of all things human, even of
(those perhaps greatest of all human things) great
thought-systems.

Yesterday — the yesterday of five hundred years
ago — this, Soul's one pagoda, was a Buddhist
temple. To-day it is a neglected, unconsidered,
tolerated, rather than admired, ornament, in a
middle-class Korean's back yard.

The pagoda of Soul owes its solitary, but not
honoured, old age to the fact that unlike most
pagodas of its period and kind, it was built of

54 QUAINT KOREA.

stone. It has eight stories (representative of eight
stages or degrees of the Buddhist heaven) ; but it
is entirely composed of two pieces of stone. In
idea it is Chinese ; but its form is a modifica-
tion or a local adaptation of its idea ; and it is
peculiarly rich in most exquisite Korean carvings.
After the pagoda — perhaps before the pagoda —
there are in Soul three buildings, more than
any others indicative of the difference between
Soul the old and conservative, and Soul the new
and iconoclastic — I mean the Foreign Office, the
War Office, and the Home Office. They are all
of recent date, all concessions to a cosmopoli-
tanism, with which Korea, the old, had no sym-
pathy, and into which (though ever so little)
Korea, the new, has been forced by that most
brutal of all forces — the force of circumstances —
forced by the irresistible might of the gigantic
disproportion, to her own, of alien numbers. A
few years ago Korea had never had a Foreign
Office, because Korea had never deigned to be
cognizant of the existence of any foreign power.
True she has, for many years, paid a lazy tribute
to China, and plied a lazier trade with Japan ;
but until a short time ago she has been essenti-
ally, and indeed, a hermit nation. Yes, it was
verily the land of the morning calm. No reveil
broke its early morning slumber ; no drum woke

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 55

its night to alarm. It was a heaven of earthly
peace, a heaven in which there was neither fight-
ing nor dying in battle.

But that is changed. So far as outside turmoil
can ripple the placid waters, upon which the lotus-
flower blooms and bends, in a luxury of perfumed
sleep, as it does nowhere else — the lakes and
ponds of Korea !

Korea admitted, gracefully, if enforcedly,
foreigners to her shores — admitted them for
purposes of commerce and of peace. Alas, she
has had to recognize them as ambassadors of
war, introducers of bloodshed.

Korea's army has for many years been very
purely artistic, ornamentally belligerent — nothing
more. It has been found impossible to evolve it
into anything more brutal, nineteenth-centuryish,
effective, and up-to-date.

Korea's War Office is an unhappy, if seemingly
necessary, farce. It has existed for centuries.
But only the conjunction, or rather the juxta-
position, of Korea with other nations has made it
ridiculous.

Korea's Home Office sprang up — as it must
have done in any self-respecting soil — as soon as
a Foreign Office became a regrettable fail
accompli. Until Korea had a Foreign Office,
Korea's War Office was by no means the sad

56 QUAINT KOREA.

burlesque that it is now. Until Korea had a
Foreign Office, she had not the filmiest need of a
Home Office. Korea was all in all to Korea.
Every effort of her being was undivertedly
directed to the welfare of herself and her own.
She had no need of, no excuse for, a Home
Office, because all was home, everything for home.
But when she was physically forced to admit
the existence of other peoples, she was morally
forced to insistently emphasize the existence of
her own people.

Soul is rich in palaces ; very rich in their quality,
if not in their quantity. Each palace is, like every
considerable Korean dwelling, a collection of
houses. And every Korean palace — like every
Korean dwelling of any distinction — is more
remarkable, more admirable because of its sur-
roundings— its garden — than because of itself.

There are four nations pre-eminent for land-
scape gardening — pre-eminent in this order: —
the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the
Italians.

Korea is, by her climate, held behind Japan in
landscape gardening. Most of the flowers that
in Japan bloom all the year round, can in Korea
only bloom for a few months.

But in one phase of landscape gardening — (the
art of bringing Nature into a garden, and there

SOUL FROM THE ClTY WALL. 57

ornamenting her, without insulting her) — the
Koreans quite equal the Japanese.

Water, in the form of miniature lakes, is the
crown — the centre of every far-eastern garden.
Nowhere in the world are artificial lakes or ponds
so perfected, so ablush with bloom, so aquiver
with perfume, as they are in Korea. Sometimes
they dot great green swards. Sometimes they
softly ripple against the very foundations of a
palace ; oftenest they are the one blessed detail
of a middle-class man's dwelling. But they are
almost always emerald with lotus-leaves, and in
season, brilliant with the bloom, and fragrant
with the breath of the lotus-flowers. Marble
bridges span them, if they are in the king's
gardens ; a unique island centres them wherever
they are — a wee island that is shaded by its one
drooping tree. There the master of the garden
spends the long summer days, basking in the
surrounding beauty, smoking, drinking tea, and
fishing.

^V^x

CFTHF A

UNIVERSITY)

CAL|FORNlA>X^

CHAPTER IV.

KOREA'S KING.

IT has been with genuine indignation that I have
recently read that the King of Korea is weak of
mind and weak of character.

Statements could scarcely have less foundation.
Journalism is indeed an exacting profession, and
the pressman who would wield an up-to-date pen
must, once in a way, write glibly upon a subject
of which he knows nothing, or less than nothing.
But surely, if one chooses for one's theme a per-
son whom one has never seen, and of whom one
knows nothing authentically, the least one can,
in common decency, do is to speak good, not evil
of that person. If it is necessary to clothe per-
sons of momentary interest with attributes that
are wholly a fabric of guess-work, it seems to me
that the most reckless scribbler is in honour bound
to clothe the involuntary human lay-figure with
whole, clean, garments of praise, and not with
grimy rags of fantastic criticism.

KOREA'S KING. 59

As a matter of simple fact, Li-Hsi, the King of
Korea, is an admirable man. He has most of the
good qualities, and very few undesirable ones.

He has an exceptionally sweet nature. He has
a heart of gold. He is patient, forgiving, per-
severing and hard-working. He is a man of
decided mental strength, and of most considerable
learning. The welfare of his people has been his
unintermittent aim ; and to-day he is staunchly
enthroned in the hearts of those people.

It has been said that his Korean Majesty is a
man of contemptible personal habits. And, worst
of all, it has been said that he is entirely under
his wife's thumb. There is in all Christendom
no monarch more sober, more unselfish than Li-
Hsi. As for the last accusation, it is the one in
which there is, I fear, a grain of truth. But what
of it ? The same thing was said of Frederick the
Good. Was he weak-minded, morally corrupt ?
The same thing is said to-day (and not without
some show of truth) of the Emperor of Germany,
the King of Italy, and was said of the late Tsar of
Russia. They are rather a wholesome, brainy,
manly trio, aren't they ?

Unquestionably the Queen of Korea has great
influence over the King. But surely even a king
might commit a graver crime than that of being;
fond of his wife. For instance, he might be fond

60 QUAINT KOREA.

of someone else's wife. Now that strikes me as
rather worse form than the other. And certainly
it is the more apt to lead to deeply dire results.
On the whole, I think the King of Korea might
almost be forgiven his one weakness — a weakness
for his own wife.

Of civilized sovereigns, the King of Korea is
rather uniquely placed. No monarch could have
more absolute power in his own kingdom, no
monarch could well have less influence abroad.
Indeed even the King's power at home seems
rather tottery just now. But it has been shaken
by the rough hands of alien invaders, not by the
disloyal hands of his own subjects. To-day, when
in Korea all is confusion and dismay, Li-Hsi is as
absolutely king over the Koreans as he was when
he ascended the throne thirty years ago.

His Majesty is rather under the average of
Korean height, and is about forty years of age.
The Queen, contrary to the usual custom in Korea,
is much younger.

He wears a dress somewhat resembling the
ordinary Korean court dress ; but his dress is of
brilliant scarlet. The dresses of his nobles are of
pale .blue or pink. The King wears the usual
white Korean collar, and a plastron, and shoulder
pieces (or epaulettes) of gold and jewels.

All Korean hats are wonderful. A Korean

KOREA'S KING. 61

court hat is simply marvellous. It is most notice-
able for its wings or ears, which project sharply
out from either side. They typify human ears,
and signify that the wearer has his ears wide
spread to catch the most whispered command of
his Majesty. Even Li-Hsi wears a court hat. But
his ears (I mean his hat's ears) stand erect, or are
at the tips caught together at the top of the hat.
This is because the Emperor of China is too far
away for his actual voice to be heard by the Korean
King, and no other human being but the Chinese
Emperor may speak to Li-Hsi with anything even
approaching insistent emphasis. To no other voice
need the King of Korea listen, unless he like. So
at least it was until a few months ago.

The King of Korea has a gracious but dignified
bearing. His face is fine and beautiful, and his
smile is peculiarly sweet and winning.

There are two great palaces in Soul : the Old
Palace and the New Palace. The New Palace is
four hundred years old and more. The old palace
is as old as Soul. The present King of Korea
lives in the New Palace. His Majesty deserted
the Old Palace, or, to be more exact, upon his
accession to the throne, declined to adopt it as his
residence, because it was full of, to him, painful
family reminiscences.

The Old Palace is one of the few Architectural

62 QUAINT KOREA.

wonders of Soul. It is deserted now, and in
parts decaying. It is surrounded by an admir-
able wall. ' Its principal gate is guarded by two
gigantic stone monsters. The Koreans call them
Chinese Lions, and the Japanese call them Korean
dogs. They look as much like one as the other.
They are of Chinese descent. The Koreans
copied them from the Chinese. In Korea they
caught the quick Japanese fancy. From that day
they have played a conspicuous part in Japanese
art, and have even become familiar to European
eyes, because they grin at us from so many thou-
sands of the cheaper (so called) Satsuma vases.

The Old Palace is a vast collection of buildings,
of court-yards, of landscape gardens, of parks and
of lotus-ponds. In its centre stands the famous
Audience Hall, which I am almost tempted to call
one of the architectural wonders of the world. I
may safely call it one of the architectural and
artistic wonders of Korea. Many steps lead up to
the entrance of the Audience Hall. This alone is
in Korea a great distinction. Save the King only,
no Korean may build or own a building outside
of which there are more than three steps. Four
steps would be high treason, and would cost their
owner a traitor's death.

In the background of the Old Palace is Nam San,
the mountain upon which signal-fires burn every
nightfall, telling the inhabitants of Soul that all

KOREA'S KING. 63

goes well throughout the kingdom. Or if, as
now, aught goes ill, the fires tell that — tell it with
considerable detail. It is a curious signal-code,
as complicated as ingenious ; but it is beautifully
vivid and altogether effective.

The New Palace is in a collection of palaces.
Like Soul its grounds are surrounded by an elabo-
rate wall. Those grounds cover over a hundred
acres, every rod of which is beautiful. They are
carefully laid out, but not with foolish elaborate-
ness. Nature is accented in those palace grounds,
but never interfered with. Wherever an excep-
tionally pretty bit of view is to be seen, there is a
quaint Korean summer-house. And as the pretty
bits tread upon each other's heels, the grounds are
rather thick with odd summer-houses, and still
odder pavilions. The Koreans are intensely fond
of Nature ; but they are not fond of exercise.
They like to sit, even when they look upon the
trees, the flowers, the hills, the sky, the lotus-
ponds that they so love. Therefore the grounds
of a king's house would be most incomplete,
were not rest and shelter available at every few
yards.

A summer-house in the grounds of the New
Palace is a favourite haunt of the present king.
On a drowsy summer afternoon his Majesty sits,
there for hours, sipping tea and watching the
changeless loveliness of the view.

64 QUAINT KOREA.

The Koreans drink tea almost as perpetually as
the Siamese do, and, like the Siamese, they are
greatly addicted to drinking it out of doors. But
this must be with them a comparatively new
fashion, for Hamel and many other old historians
tell us that tea is seldom drunk in Korea.

To one versed in Korean architecture, it is a
simple thing to distinguish the house of a king
from that of a subject. The columns of the
monarchs' houses are round, and their rafters are
square. Only a king may use the round column
or the square rafter. Only a king might, until
recent years, paint his house. Only a king
may wear a coat of brilliant red. Of all men,
only the king may look upon the faces of the
Queen's hundreds of attendant ladies. On occa-
sions of ceremony when the King is present, only
he may face the south.

The Korean soldiers are clad in dark blue re-
lieved with crimson, and fantastically decorated
with ribbons. The Chinese character which
signifies valour is elaborately embroidered over
their hearts. They're rather fine-looking fellows,
but their manners are mild, and they impress the
impartial European observer as staunch lovers of
peace. They wear no helmets, but their head-
gear is most distinguished.

There is no other inanimate thing so important

KOREA'S KING. 65

to the Korean mind as are hats. The hat of the
King is his crown. The hat of the soldier is his
helmet. And no Korean owns any other chattel
so valuable, so indicative of his station, state,
and worth, so indispensable, so cherished as his
hat ; no, not even his children, never to mention
his wife.

Black is the Korean hat colour. But even
Korean rules have their exceptions. The hats of
the Korean army officers are vivid of hue, and
heavy with feathers and ribbons ; and the hats of
the private soldiers have at least a band or border
of red to show that the wearers are men of blood-
shed and fearless.

In Soul there are military hat stores galore ;
and naturally enough, for his hat is the most
important item of the Korean soldier's uniform.
As for his accoutrements, they are so com-
pletely overshadowed by the brim of his mighty
hat that they shrink into unconsidered insignifi-
cance.

But in years gone by Korea's army was far less
a force of straw and of plumage. The Korean
eagle could shriek once — now she seems to have
become metamorphosed into a military owl ; blind
at day, timid at night.

The military force of Korea was at an early
period divided into three distinct branches : the

F

66 QUAINT KOREA.

navy, the secular army, and the armed or military
monks.

The armed monks garrisoned castles and
fortresses which were usually inaccessibly placed,
or, as we should say to-day, built on command-
ing positions. They, as a rule, hung frowningly
on the rough side of some steep mountain, or
punctuated menacingly some narrow and difficult
or treacherous pathway.

These religious warriors did not go far upon the
war-path. They defended the strongholds, which
were also their monasteries, and they engaged
valiantly enough in local warfare. These were
the most efficient and most esteemed of old
Korea's soldiers. Each town furnished a required
number of these holy militaries. They were
officered by men of their own order. When they
reached the age of sixty they retired from active
service, and their sons filled up their vacant places ;
for they were not celibates, these warrior priests
of old Choson.

Each Korean province is under arms one year
out of seven. The selected soldiers of the province
(in Korea, warriorship is a matter of the king's se-
lection, not of the soldier's election) are equipped,
robed, drilled, paraded, and made generally pre-
sentable upon the picturesque, flower-dotted, and
bloodless battle-fields of Korea's martial pageantries.

KOREA'S KING. 67

They take their turns in going up to Soul, these
impromptu, but for all that, well-rehearsed righting
men. When they get to Soul they there invari-
ably act well their parts. The beginning and the
end of their duty are included in ceremonial func-
tions ; and the breath of ceremony is the only air
that can fully inflate the lungs of any self-respect-
ing Asian. " No man is a hero to his own valet,"
we say lightly. But the peoples of the Orient
take the great truth of this adage very seri-
ously, almost grimly. They realize that the only
divinity that can really hedge a king from the
degrading familiarity of his subjects is the divinity
of purple and fine linen, the blare of trumpets.
In brief, the people (in Asia or in Europe) love a
show, and the king who would sit staunchly en-
throned upon the hearts, not to mention the
intellects, of his people, must be followed by a
train of supers as long, and as splendidly clad, as
well-trained — and perhaps as meaningless — as
those who make the pit of a London theatre
appreciate the more clearly the regal glory of
Henry the Eighth, of Arthur the deceived, and of
that other Henry with whom Becket quarrelled.

But in Korea's martial comedy there are actors

who are never out of the bill. Over each province

a general presides, who has under him from three

to six colonels ; each colonel is the military

F 2

68 QUAINT KOREA.

master of several captains ; each captain is the
Mars of a city, a castle, a town, or some other
fortified place. Even the Korean villages are pro-
tected (Japan and China, save the mark!) by a
corporal. Under the corporal are petty officers ;
under the petty officers are soldiers, so-called.

There is one admirable thing about the Korean
army. Its books are well kept, and the King of
Korea can always tell to the moment how many
fighting men are at his disposal. If only they
could fight ! Or, if only they had no need to
fight!

Bows and arrows are conspicuous among the
implements of the Korean army. They make
little or no impression upon the cannon of civili-
zation, but they serve to remind us of the days
when man needed to contend but against nature,
to slaughter only birds and four-footed mam-
mals.

The Korean infantry and the Korean cavalry
are very similarly equipped. They wear brilliant,
if vulnerable, breast-plates. They carry swords
nice of shape, if dull of edge, and they used, in
battles of great moment, to replace their crimson-
decked hats with head-pieces of cotton-batting and
tinsel.

There is a unique branch of the king's imme-
diate servitors. We should bluntly call them

KOREA'S KING. 69

spies. The Koreans picturesquely call them
" messengers on the dark path." The King of
Korea does not hang about the doorways, nor prowl
into the back-yards of his subjects, but in every
Korean city he has several, and in every Korean
village at least one appointed listener. European
history tells us that more than one European
monarch has disguised himself at night, and held
up his thirsty ears to the nectar or the gall of his
subjects' candid opinions of himself. Whether
eaves-dropping is more admirable when performed
in person or when deputed to the hireling, is a
nice question for those who would judge between
East and West. It seems to me that the King of
Korea does a dirty thing with rather more dignity
than did Napoleon or Nero. At all events, the
plebeian spies of Korea are an acknowledged
branch of Korean officialism, and every Korean
knows that his house, and all it contains, is very
possibly under the espionnage of the million eyes
of the king.

Korea is as netted day and night with the spies
of the king as she is at night netted with signal
fires. Just such a system of official espionnage
used to exist in Japan. Did Japan copy Korea ?
Did Korea copy Japan ? Again we ask the
question, and again Asia declines to answer.

The spies of Li-Hsi are the father confessors of

70 QUAINT KOREA.

the Koreans, and the custom is so old, so authentic,
so much a matter of course in Korea, that the
Korean caught in the utterance of treason, or
relating some petty offence, cries " mea culpa "
rather devoutly.

Not very many years ago there were in Asia
three absolute monarchs with comparatively small
kingdoms. Those kingdoms were Burmah, Siam,
and Korea. Theebaw, the master of many
wooden cannon, the monarch of Mandalay, the
master of Burmah, has accepted his defeat with
a good deal of dignity, and Burmah the old,
Burmah the real, is fast passing off of the face of
our earth.

Siam, when Sir Harry Parkes first went there,
was possibly the most picturesque kingdom in
Asia ; but the King of Siam is a man so wise in
his generation, that we may almost venture to call
him a monarch up-to-date. ' Since he cannot
die. at the head of his elephant-cavalried army ;
since he cannot see that army victorious in the
land of its birth and its training, he lays bits of
his sword (in the form of goodly scraps of his
kingdom) at the feet of French democracy, I mean
republicanism.'

Theebaw is banished, and Chulalongkorn com-
promises. And what of Li-Hsi ? This, at least,
he has made the longest and most hopeless fight

KOREA'S KING. 71

of them all against the inroads of Western civiliza-
tion.

There is no high office in Korea, civil or mili-
tary, that can be bestowed without the king's
sanction, or that cannot be revoked at the king's
pleasure.

Unfortunately, Li-Hsi has to take the word of
the men whom he trusts, as to the efficiency of the
majority of the men whom he appoints to posi-
tions of power. Were Korean officials fewer in
number, then might Li-Hsi know each and all
personally ; and then might his servants, civil and
military, be less complete nonentities on the one
hand, and more invariably worthy on the other, in
the great pageant of Asia's Western civilization-
ship.

The Chinese call their Emperor " The Son of
Heaven." The Japanese used to regard their
Mikado with as much veneration, and even now
speak of him with no less reverence. The Koreans
seem to have caught, from China or Japan, the
convenient idea of mediation. According to the
religious law of Korea, which is seldom marked,
and less often respected, only the king is fit to
worship the gods. The subjects of the king must
content themselves with worshipping him. To
venture to pray to the king is as near heaven as
an orthodox Korean may dare to come. And the

72 QUAINT KOREA.

king, if he be in gracious mood, will pass the
prayer on to the god who is no more above him
than he is above his people.

It seems a Jacob's ladder sort of religion — the
religion to which the Koreans pretend (for, as a
matter of fact, as I shall try to prove later, they
have no religion at all). The peasant throws his
paper prayer at the feet of his king ; the king, if
to him it so seems fit, throws that paper prayer
at the feet of the god ; and perhaps none of the
kingly prerogatives more clearly define the high
position of the king than the fact that of all
Koreans, he alone is fit to speak to the Korean god.

The royal house of Korea emphatically believes
that it is descended from divine and royal spirits.
If Li-Hsi cannot prove his descent from the
denizens of the Korean heaven, we certainly
cannot disprove it ; and he has the courage of his
convictions, for neither he nor any prince of his
blood will wed with a maiden who cannot claim as
exceptional, as divine, and as ethereal an ancestry.
This keeps the royal family of Korea almost as
narrowly blooded as the royal family of Siam.

Tinsel has not yet gone off the market even in
Europe. Newsboys and Eton boys jostle each
other on the curb-stones of Northumberland
Avenue in their boyish desire to see a modern
Lord Mayor's Show. In the Orient tinsel is

KOREA'S KING. 73

almost as common a commodity, as necessary an
adjunct of daily life as is rice itself. When the
King of Korea goes forth from his palace grounds
he is followed by, preceded by, a glittering
throng. Nobles, soldiers, secretaries, and servants
arrayed in barbaric splendour, and carrying a
hundred symbols of Asiatic majesty, attend upon
him ; and over him is carried a canopy rich with
gold and jewels. Music, unless the king forbid,
sounds his approach. But no other sound is
heard. No one may speak. The procession
moves slowly, silently. The very horses step
softly, and would sooner think of cantering back-
wards than of neighing. The horsemen are
followed by footmen. Both carry banners and
insignia.

Immediately before the king walks a secretary
of state. He carries an elaborate box. I have
heard Koreans speak of it as " the mercy-box,"
The king's ear is open to the meanest of his
subjects, in theory at least. When the king goes
forth his route is probably strewn with papers,
papers are thrown from over walls, papers hang by
strings from windows and roofs, sticks are placed
along the roadside, and in their notched or forked
ends are more papers. All these papers are
scrupulously gathered up and put into the " mercy-
box." Each paper contains a petition or the

74 QUAINT KOREA.

story of a wrong for which the sufferer beseeches
the king's redress. These papers are opened by
the king in person, after he has returned to the
palace. He and he alone decides which of the
petitions shall be granted and how ; which shall
be refused. Often only he ever knows by whom
they have been written.

Such is the outing of a Korean king, or rather
such it was until a very few years ago. Within
six or seven years the ceremonial has been slightly
altered. Until then it had remained almost un-
changed for centuries. Whether Li-Hsi will ever
again go forth in like state I question. It's more
likely that, if he lives and reigns, he will be sending
to London or Calcutta for a brougham. But of
this I feel sure : while he continues to sit in power
upon Korea's throne, his ears will be keen to hear
the cries of his people, and his heart hot to serve
them.

CHAPTER V.

KOREAN WOMEN.

IT has been very often said that the position of
woman is more deplorable in Korea than in any
other civilized or semi-civilized country. And I
have comparatively little to urge against the state-
ment. Certainly woman's life seems narrower in
Korea than in either China or Japan, or in
Burmah, or Siam, or in India. Socially and
politically, in Korea, woman simply does not
exist. She has not even a name. After marriage
she is called by her husband's name with the
prefix of Mrs. Before marriage she has not even
this pretence to a name. There is one exception,
and, I think, one only to this rule. The geisha
girls have names of their own, but then the geisha
girls have individuality ; live lives, if not moral,
why still, not colourless, and mix with men, if
not on an equality, at least with a good deal of
familiarity ; and it would be rather awkward if
the men who are dependent upon them for female

76 QUAINT KOREA.

society in anything approaching a Western sense,
had no name by which to call them. The
" Fragrant Iris " was the name of a geisha girl
whose acquaintance Mr. Lowell tells us he made
in Korea, and four of her companions were called
" Peach Blossom," " Plum Flower," " Rose," and
" Moonbeam."

Korean girls, long before they reach a marriage-
able age, live in the seclusion of the women's
quarters. After her betrothal a girl belongs not
to her father but to her mother-in-law. Upon
marriage she becomes the property of her
husband, and is, in most cases, immediately
taken to his dwelling. As in China, married sons
live with their fathers. Sometimes three or four
generations of one family occupy one home.
But, unlike Chinese wives, each Korean wife has
a room or rooms of her own. The only man
who (in most families) ever enters them is her
husband. Unlike the wives of China, she may
not, as a rule, be visited by her husband's father,
her husband's brother, or her husband's grand-
father. But should his father or his grandfather
fall ill, it is not only her privilege, but her duty,
to leave the women's quarters, and, going to his
bedside, nurse him until he dies or recovers.

There are one or two advantages in being a
woman in Korea. There are very few crimes for

KOREAN WOMEN. 77

which a Korean woman can be punished. Her
husband is answerable for her conduct, and must
suffer in her stead if she breaks any ordinary
law.

Korean women are not uneducated, though they
never go to schools ; and books and materials
for writing and painting are freely at their dis-
posal.

The dress of Korean women is very much more
like the dress of European women than is that
of the women of almost any other Oriental race.
They wear petticoats made very much in Western
fashion, but stiffly starched into crinoline-like un-
gracefulness. The women of the poorer classes
wear these skirts above their ankles. The
women of wealth or of rank wear skirts touching
the ground. They wear a jacket or belt shaped
very much like, and answering the purpose of, a
corset, and a shorter jacket which is at best but
an inadequate neckerchief And under their
petticoat they wear three pairs of wide trousers.
Except among the very poorest class, respectable
Korean women muffle themselves in a garment
like a dress or great-coat whenever they go
abroad. Boys and girls are dressed alike until
they are five years old.

Among the poor all the household work is done
by women, but among the rich the women have

78 QUAINT KOREA.

no domestic duties except those of nursing and
sewing. All the garments of a Korean family
are made by the women of the family. The pur-
chase of a ready-made garment, or to hire it
made, would be considered a disgrace to the
family, and a deeper disgrace to its women
Korean ladies sew as exquisitely as French nuns,
and embroider as deftly as those Japanese men
whose profession embroidery is.

Korean girls are usually married between the
ages of seventeen and twenty-two ; and if married
to a bachelor, he is almost invariably three or
five, and often even eight, years their junior.
But when a widower marries, or a man takes a
second, or third, or fourth wife, he invariably
selects a woman younger than himself.

Among the mandarin classes polygamy is a
duty, and every mandarin is expected to keep at
least several concubines or second-class wives in
his yamun.

In Soul, and in one other large city, children
are commonly betrothed when the boy is seven or
eight, but it is not so in the other parts of Korea.
Korean widows must remain unmarried, or marry
men who are the social inferiors of their dead
husbands. And in Korea, as in China, a widow
who re-marries is disgraced, and becomes more
or less of a social outcast.

KOREAN WOMEN. 79

The customs preliminary to marriage are in
Korea very like those same customs in China and
in Japan. The father of a marriageable daughter
or a marriageable son looks about for a suitable
parti. If a husband is desired, then the girl's
father usually interviews a number of eligible
youths, widowers, or married men until he finds
what he wants. Then a middle-man is sent to
discover whether an offer of marriage would be
favourably received, and on what terms. If the
bridegroom selected is unmarried he has, unless
he is an orphan and the head of his family, no
voice whatever in the matter, the only people
really consulted being the respective fathers. If
a father is on the look-out for a daughter-in-law,
he sends his wife to interview and report upon
the girl whom he has been told is suitable in age,
dower, etc. Now comes in another of the few
advantages of being a woman in Korea. She has
very largely the selection of her own daughters-
in-law, and if the daughter-in-law proves unsatis-
factory she has only herself to blame. When the
middle-man has ascertained that the proposal of
marriage will be acceptable, the father who has
negotiated the proceedings writes an elaborate
letter to the other father, and makes a formal
proposal for the hand of his son or daughter.
But this letter is not binding upon the writer

8o QUAINT KOREA.

until he receives one in return accepting the
proposal.

After that there is no drawing back, and should
the betrothed man die before the marriage day the
girl is regarded as a widow, and must remain un-
married all her life, or else marry an inferior and
with disgrace. The man, on the other hand —
should she die — is entirely free to marry, and at
once.

When a lucky day has been selected for the
wedding, the bridegroom sends to the bride
presents in the Japanese fashion. Female cloth-
ing, bits of stuff, and sweets are the most impor-
tant items among these presents. When they
have been sent and received, the marriage
ceremony has been half performed. Then the
bridegroom is allowed to knot up his hair in manly
fashion, but not until the day of marriage is he
allowed to assume the garb of a man — be dressed
as a man. A Korean bachelor of seventy is re-
garded as a child, treated as a child, and dressed
as a child.

A prospective bridegroom pays visits of respect
not to the relations of his bride, but to the kins-
folk of his own father. The kinsfolk of his mother
do not count ; indeed, a Korean wife is supposed
to have no kindred but the kindred of her hus-
band. The bridegroom's father gives a great

KOREAN WOMEN. 81

feast upon the night of the day on which the
presents are sent. The feast lasts all night, and
the quantity of food eaten, and the quantity of
wine drunk, would sound almost incredible to
European ears.

Korea is the country of bachelors. There are
two reasons for this. The majority of the people
are very poor and cannot afford the expense of
daughters-in-law. Then, too, polygamy is so ex-
tensively practised among the rich that the supply
of girls in the marriage market is never equal to
the demand, and the average Korean would far
rather see his daughter become the second, or
the seventh, or the eighth wife, or concubine of
a rich or powerful man, than the one wife of a
labourer or low-class man. Marriage usually
takes place three days after the presents are sent.
These three days are very busy ones to the Korean
bride, for out of one of the pieces of stuff sent her
by the bridegroom, she must herself, and without
assistance, fashion the elaborate robe which he
assumes on the marriage night, and which is his
first garment made after adult fashion. Thus the
three days before marriage are spent by a Korean
girl in performing her first duty as a wife. And
the sending of the garment signifies that she, with
the assistance of whatever wives he may after-
wards marry, will, so long as they both live, make

G

82 QUAINT KOREA.

all the clothing required by him, his children, and
his women.

When the marriage day arrives the lucky hour
is chosen, and the bridegroom departs for the house
of the bride. The bridegroom's procession is as
long and as splendid as his purse, or the purse
of his father, can possibly permit. Everyone in
that procession rides on horseback, and in single
file. First comes a servant-man on a horse richly
caparisoned ; this servant carries a life-sized
image of a wild goose. It is covered by a red
scarf, and the servant must hold it with both
hands — a circumstance which makes his horse-
back riding interesting, if not perilous. After him
comes the bridegroom, splendidly arrayed, and
followed by a groom and all his other servants.
After them rides the bridegroom's father, and he,
too, is followed by all the servants he possesses or
has been able to borrow. Relatives and friends
in great quantity of persons and great quality of
garments bring up the splendid rear.

In a marriage procession, or at a marriage, the
poorest and lowliest man in Korea is allowed to
wear robes and hats as rich as those ordinarily
worn by the highest dignitary in the land, if he
can manage to get them, and of the same distinc-
tive style and shape.

When the girl's house is reached, the servant

KOREAN WOMEN. 83

who has carried the goose dismounts, the others
remain on horseback. He goes into the house
and lays the goose upon a bowl of rice that is
standing in a convenient place. Then, without
speaking, he leaves the house. The bridegroom's
father dismounts next, then the bridegroom, then
all the others. Before entering the house they
take off their boots and their hats, and their outer
robes. The bride's father now comes out of his
house, bids them welcome, and leads them in.
He is immediately followed by the bridegroom,
and then by the bridegroom's father and the
others. They all sit solemnly down, and then
ensues a scene not to be beaten for noise, no, not
even in all Asia, which, I assure you, is saying a
good deal.

The bridegroom has been accompanied, as far
as practicable, by all the youths or men who are, or
were, his fellow-students, or who belonged to the
same literary degree as himself. These seize
upon him with shrieking, and laughter, and sing-
ing, carrying him off to some distant part of the
house or compound, and refuse, under any circum-
stances, to give him up, or to allow the marriage
to proceed. The girl's father, after some time,
offers them a present of money to depart, and
leave the chief actor in the proposed function free
to play his part. After a good deal of haggling,

G 2

84 QUAINT KOREA.

and when the bribe has reached as high a point
as the rollickers think it probably will, they accept
the money and depart with it, to spend it in a day
and a night of roystering and banqueting.

A feast elaborate, and to European notions
tedious, is then offered to the bridegroom, his
father and their attendants. After the feast the
bridegroom's father and all the servants depart.
The bride's father leads the bridegroom to the
room in which the ancestral tablets of the family
are enshrined ; for ancestral worship is as universal
and as sincere in Korea as in China. Before
these tablets the prospective husband must pay
homage long and earnest.

Late in the evening the bridegroom is taken
into the room of the bride, whom he has not as
yet seen. The room is empty, and he is imme-
diately left there alone ; but the room is fragrant
with iris, or sweet with great bowls and branches
of cherry-blossom, and splendid with wisteria or
magnificent bunches of the Korean peony. Two
great bowls are there heaped with rice, and in
the centre of each bowl stands a brilliantly
yellow candlestick, holding a taper that is per-
fumed and lit. After a time, the bride comes
into the room, led by her mother, and surrounded
by all her kinswomen. No one speaks ; the
mother and the relatives go out, as soon as they

KOREAN WOMEN. 85

have fairly come in. The door is closed, and the
bride lifts her veil. On the following day, the
young wife divides into two the hair which
hitherto hung down her back in one long plait.
She twists one part of it on to the left side of her
head, and one on to the right, and so she wears
her hair for the rest of her life, taking it down
only to dress it or have it dressed, or to dishevel
it about her shoulders as a sign of mourning, on
the death of her husband, or one of his relatives.
On the third day after the marriage the young
couple repair to the house of the bridegroom or
the bridegroom's father. They may, however,
elect to remain a little longer in the home of the
bride's people, but unless they leave on the third
day they are compelled to remain where they are
for an entire year.

Thirty years before Christ it was customary
for a bridegroom to dwell under the roof of his
father-in-law until the first son had been born, and
attained to years of manhood. This is still the
custom in some parts of Korea, and among some
Korean families. Whether the husband and wife go
to the home of his family three days, one year, or
many years after marriage, they must, upon entering
the door, at once go to the tablets of his ancestors,
bend before them innumerable times, and repeat
to them innumerable prayers and benedictions:

86 QUAINT KOREA.

Korean marriage certificates are rather quaint.
They are on red paper, of course, for red is the
colour of happiness, and is used throughout China
and Korea for the records of births, marriages,
for calling cards, and all such things. These
marriage certificates are inscribed with the usual
Chinese characters, but what makes them pecu-
liarly interesting is the fact that during the
marriage ceremony they are equally divided, one
half is given to the husband, and one to the wife.
It is the only instance I know of a country in
which it is thought necessary to provide the
bridegroom with a certificate of the marriage.
But in Korea marriage is even of more import-
ance to men than to women. Marriage makes
all the difference possible in the life of a Korean
man — it does not alter so very much the life of a
Korean woman. He passes from boyhood to
manhood in the twinkling of an eye ; he takes
precedence of all bachelors whatever their age ;
can insult them or jostle them in the streets with
perfect impunity. Marriage alters the daily life
of the woman very little. It opens to her all the
possibilities of maternity, and secures her the
occasional society of her husband, and, as I have
said, it puts up her hair. But I can think of no
other material way in which it affects her. She
passes from one Korean house to another Korean

KOREAN WOMEN. 87

house, and the two are probably identical in their
interior arrangements, furnishings, and decora-
tions, at least, so far as the women's premises are
concerned. She eats the same food that she ate
with her own mother and sisters. She reads the
same books, does the same needlework. If her
husband be poor, she performs the same drudgery.
She hears the same talk, thinks the same thoughts,
and has, or lacks, the same amusements that she
has all her life. To be sure she sees about her the
faces of, for a time, strange women, but their lives
and their minds are so similar to those of the
women she has always lived with, that their com-
panionship cannot possibly make any violent
difference in her or in her existence.

There is one very important reason why his
half of the marriage certificate should be, and is,
zealously preserved by the husband : without it
he cannot procure another wife should his first
die, or be divorced, or prove inadequate. Her
half of the brilliant paper is no such talisman to
the wife. Divorced, she can never re-marry ;
widowed, she can only re-wed with degradation.

The marriage ceremony differs somewhat in
different parts of Korea, among different classes of
people, and among different families. Often the
noisy students take no part in the function, and
the bride is present at the marriage feast. The

88 QUAINT KOREA.

bride in this case remains veiled, eats nothing and
says nothing, until the repast is over. Indeed, in
many parts of Korea the bride must not speak
during her wedding day. At the end of the feast
the bride and groom bow to each other three times,
and then the bride throws back her veil, and they
are man and wife.

In an antique paper or essay on the moral and
domestic condition of Korea, a paper written by
one of the old French missionaries who penetrated
into Korea long before European commerce,
or European politics, had dared to do so, or at
least, succeeded in doing so, I found a description
of a wedding ceremony differing somewhat from
either of the above. And yet so the marriage
ceremony often is even to-day in parts of Korea.
The translation is very free : —

' On the nuptial day both bride and groom cease
to wear their hair as children wear it. Her hair
is arranged by some maiden of her kindred — his
arranged by some bachelor of his blood. These
two amateur hair-dressers are called " hands of
honour," and after the bride and groom, and their
respective fathers, are the most important person-
ages at a Korean marriage.

* The bridegroom, accompanied by all his male
relatives and all his male friends, on the morning
of the marriage day, goes to the bride's house.

KOREAN WOMEN. 89

There she is given to him, and he carries her off
to his house, or to the house of his father. In the
best room of that house a platform or marriage
altar has been arranged. It is very rich with
embroidered cloths, carved pieces, vessels of metal,
jewelled ornaments, and as many of the wonder-
ful Korean flowers as are in season. Platters of
rice and fruits, and of sweetmeats and nuts, are
usually there too, and incense-sticks ; and candles
must by no means be absent. The bride and the
bridegroom step up on to the platform from
opposite sides ; both are elaborately dressed, per-
fumed, and be-jewelled, and the bride is heavily
painted. She wears a veil and innumerable odd
ornaments at her throat, about her neck, at her
girdle, on her breast, and on her back. The bride-
groom wears a marriage hat, for in this strange
peninsula, not only every rank, and every age, and
every season, but almost every event calls for a
hat of special shape and material. The couple
bow to each other profoundly a number of times,
and then leave the platform — she going to the
home of her new seclusion, the women's quarters
of her husband's house, and he going to his own
rooms or to those of his father. All the women
present follow her ; all the men follow him. For
a week or longer, if the father of the groom or
the groom be a man of wealth, a great feast is held

9R4fly>\

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JTIVERSITY,

CALIFORNIA*

go QUAINT KOREA.

both in the women's quarters and in the reception
rooms of the men. Often the guests remain
throughout this period, or if they go home occa-
sionally to sleep, they are sure to return in a very
few hours for more to eat, and more to drink.
During the ceremony, and during the week of re-
joicing, the bridesmaids are busy filling " the cup
of mutual joy " with nuptial wine. From this cup
the bride and the bridegroom drink together during
the ceremony, but afterwards it is sent from the
apartments of the one to the apartments of the
other, and vice versa. At the marriage feast there
must be a goose, a dried pheasant, emblems of
braided or twisted straw, arrack, and gourds, and
other fruits tied with tinselled and crimson rib-
bons : for these are the Korean symbols of marital
felicity.'

Often the girl of eight who is betrothed to a boy
of five, or a girl of twelve who is betrothed to a
boy of eight, goes at once to her father-in-law's
house, and is then and there lost to her own
family. So entirely does a Korean woman become
a member of her husband's family, that after
marriage she wears mourning for him and his
relatives only, and gives no sign of grief at the
death of her own relatives, should she chance to
be informed of it. During the period of betrothal
the bride and bridegroom must each mourn for

KOREAN WOMEN. 91

the death of any of their kindred, and the marriage
cannot take place while either of the parties are
in mourning. Korean mourning is as long, or
longer than Chinese mourning. Parents are
mourned for three years or more, and other
relatives for shorter, but not short periods. It
will be readily seen that a goodly number of
deaths in both families delay a marriage far
beyond the limits of all human patience, save that
which characterizes the Far East. It is not
unusual for a marriage to be delayed for ten years
in such a way, and betrothed couples have been
kept waiting thirty, and even thirty-five years,
before one or the other, or both of them, could lay
aside the robes of mourning for the brilliant vest-
ments of marriage. This is the reason, I believe
the chief reason, why for hundreds of years the
population of Korea has not increased. Other
reasons are the fearful infant mortality, and the
horrible and periodical recurrence of epidemics.

Next to being a woman, perhaps the most un-
fortunate thing that can happen to anyone in
Korea is to be poor. But if there are several
advantages in being a woman even there, there is,
at least, one in being poor. Among the poor it is
often the custom for the bride and bridegroom to
meet a month or more before the marriage, and if

92 QUAINT KOREA.

either of them is dissatisfied they cannot be forced
to fulfil the engagement.

Korean wives have one rather desirable preroga-
tive— a prerogative which the wives of China do not
share with them, nor I fancy, do the wives of Japan.
A Korean man cannot house his concubines or
second-class wives under the roof that shelters
his true or first wife, without her permission.
Strangely enough, the first wife very rarely objects
to living in rather close companionship with the
other women of her husband's household. Per-
haps the longing for human companionship is
stronger than jealousy in woman's breast. And
perhaps it is because the companionship of men
is forbidden her, that a Korean wife comes to not
only tolerate, but to enjoy the companionship of
the women who share with her her husband's
affection, attention, and support.

Korean women have not always lived in the
strict seclusion in which they live now. Some of
the older historians, Chinese and others, describe
the appearance of the women and their manners
without any hint that seeing them and knowing
of them was anything unusual. And Hamel
boasts that his blonde beard and that of his
fellows, and their blue eyes, found great favour
with the women of Quelpaert. In the days of
Hamel, as now, the inhabitants of Quelpaert were

KOREAN WOMEN. 93

purely Korean. Almost ever since Korea obtained
Quelpaert from Japan, the island has been used
as a sort of penal settlement ; a place of confine-
ment for foreigners who are unfortunate or un-
wise enough to land upon the shores of the
peninsula, and for grave Korean miscreants who
escape the death penalty. But it has also had
always a goodly number of inhabitants, of the
freemen and the official classes, and all of these,
as well as the great bulk of prisoners, have been
unmixedly Korean. And the freedom and publicity
enjoyed by the women of the island, in Hamel's
time, was doubtless also enjoyed by the women
of the peninsula. On the other hand, Hamel
may have written only of the women of the
labouring class. But even so his testimony — and
when has Hamel been proved untruthful ? — proves
that during the last two hundred years times
have greatly changed for Korean women. To-day
no Korean woman, however lowly, would look up
at a strange man long enough to like him ; much
less " look to like, if looking liking move."

In every Korean house of any pretension the
women's apartments are in the most secluded
part of the building. They open on to a garden,
and never on to a street. The compound is
walled, and no two families ever live upon the
same compound. And no Korean may go upon

94 QUAINT KOREA.

the roof of his own house without legal permis-
sion, and without giving due notice to all his
neighbours. The roof may leak, and the roof
may crack in the middle, but before the owner of
the house or any mechanic in his employ may go
up to see what the matter is, and to remedy it,
the occupiers of every house, the garden of which
can be seen from his roof, must be notified, and
ample time given for the ladies of those various
establishments to leave the gardens. So a
Korean woman is as hidden from the world, in
her husband's garden or summer-house, as is a
nun in her cell.

The wives and daughters of well-to-do Koreans
spend a great deal of time in their gardens,
sharing naturally enough the intense love of their
menkind for nature, and probably finding their
peculiar lives more endurable among the trees
and the birds and the lotus ponds, than they do
in their queer little rooms, through the paper
windows of which they cannot look unless they
poke a hole with their fingers first — rooms in
which there is little space and less furniture.

After the curfew rings it is illegal for a Korean
man to leave his own house, unless under circum-
stances which I have stated in a previous chapter ;
then it becomes legal for Korean women to slip
out and take the air and gossip freely. But both

KOREAN WOMEN. 95

the law and the privilege have fallen somewhat
into abeyance, especially in Soul. There are now
so many foreigners in Soul, members of lega-
tions, and servants connected with legations, that
it has been found impossible to keep the streets
of Soul free from men after curfew, and so the
women of Soul have very greatly lost that which
was, a few years ago, one of their few, and one of
their most dearly prized privileges.

If the dramatis persona in Korean society are
all men, not so the dramatis persona in Korea's
history. As in China, and as in Japan, important
parts have been played by women in the great
historical drama of Korea — a drama that began
centuries and centuries ago, and that is not ended
yet, or only now ending. Korea has had many
remarkable women who have left their as yet inde-
lible stamp upon the customs and the laws of their
country, and upon the thought of their country-
men. Korea has had at least three great queens.
Korea has had her Boadicea. The present King
of Korea owes his kingship, in large part at least,
to his great-grandmother, Dowager Queen Cho,
who adopted him, and in 1864 was largely instru-
mental in securing for him the throne to which
the royal consul had elected him.

The most powerful women of whom we can
read in the history of India, from the time of the

96 QUAINT KOREA.

Rock Temples to the time of the Indian Mutiny,
were purdah-women ; and the woman who has
perhaps had more influence and more power
over her own husband than ever other woman
had over other husband — the woman who was
perhaps at her death the most sincerely mourned,
and the woman who was entombed as no other
woman has ever yet been entombed, and probably
as no other woman will ever be entombed — the
beautiful Arjamand Banu — lived in the strictest
purdah. And until the breaking out of the
Chino-Japanese war, the most powerful person
in Korea was, and for twenty years had been, a
woman, the king's wife. Queen Min, for even
she has no name, and is known only by the name
of the race from which she has sprung, comes of
one of the two great intellectual families of
Korea; and the great family of Min has pro-
duced no cleverer woman or man than the wife
of Li-Hsi.

A very large proportion of the literature at our
disposal, which treats in any dignified way of
Korea, has been written by missionaries. This is
inevitably so of any Asiatic country whose first
Western invaders have been soldiers of the Cross.
Fortunately for J:he interested student of Korea,
the missionaries who have gone to Korea seem
almost from the first to have been mentally,

KOREAN WOMEN. 97

socially, and in culture, equipped above the
missionary average in other parts of heathendom.
Whether they have had a corresponding moral
superiority it would be interesting to know, but I
am the last person in the world competent to
judge the moral status of a missionary. This of
the European missionaries in Korea — from the
Jesuit fathers old France sent there to the
Presbyterian brethren recently sent from the
United States — a surprising number of them had
the gift not of writing (for scribbling seems to
come as naturally to the average missionary as to
the average nineteenth-century woman), but of
writing well, and with great discretion. If we
would learn the history of Korea, we must learn it
very largely from the writings of European mission-
aries, unless, indeed, we are able to read Chinese,
and have access to the fuller, more ably written,
and probably more authentic histories of Korea,
written by Chinese litterateurs. It is a matter of
course that the Chinese, who are akin to the
Koreans, and who may almost be said to have
brought them up, should make fewer blunders in
writing of Choson than men of utterly dissimilar
race and thought habits. Then, too, the writing
of the Chinese histories of Korea has been largely
contemporaneous with the enactment of that
history. And no man can write with entire'

H

98 QUAINT KOREA.

breadth of a people to whose religion he is
bitterly antagonistic.

One blunder is conspicuous in most of the
valuable books written by Europeans — written
on Korea. They state almost to a volume that
the women are uneducated and never pretty.

Educated after European methods they cer-
tainly are not. But why should they be ? And
that they are not — does that prove that they are
not educated at all? There are more systems
of education than one.

Let us take the poor women of Soul, and com-
pare them with the poor women of Liverpool or
of London, and with the women of many tongues,
who flock into New York through the portals of
Castle Garden. The Korean women can read and
write, the large majority of them. They cook well,
cleanly, and economically. Out of a few simple
ingredients (which her Western sister would
scorn), and with a few simple implements (that
that sister would not understand) — often almost
without implements and with little fire — fire that
must be coaxed and humoured, and humoured and
coaxed, the poorest Korean woman will prepare a
meal which no hungry European, prince or peasant,
need scorn to eat. It will be savoury, whole-
some, clean to daintiness, and pleasantly served.
They can sew, make all that they, their husbands,

KOREAN WOMEN. gg

and their children wear, can these poor, ignorant,
heathen women. They are expert washerwomen.
Most of them can make pictures with sharp sticks,
or with brush, and almost all of them are more
or less skilled in midwifery, in the care of the
sick, in sick-room cookery, and in the care of
children. They know how to keep their tempers,
hold their tongues, control their appetites, to
make much of little, and to enjoy to the full and
with thanksgiving any small pleasure that falls to
their scantily pleasured lot. Now let us turn to
the Seven Dials, or to the Five Points — No, on
second thought let us not !

As for Korean gentlewomen, they are skilled in
Korean music, in Chinese and Korean literature.
They are unsurpassed mistresses of the needle,
more than able with the brush, and thoroughly
acquainted with every detail of the complicated
Korean etiquette. They are deft in the nice
ceremonies of the toilet. They know the histories
of Korea, of China, and perhaps of Japan. They
are familiar with their own folk-lore, and can
repeat it glibly and picturesquely. They are
nurses and mothers and wives by nature, and
wives, mothers, nurses, and accoucheuses by
training. Above all, they are taught (and they
learn) to be amiable. They are instructed in
the art of charming, and in the grace of being

H 2

ioo QUAINT KOREA.

gentle, as soon as they are taught to walk. I
have known advanced women in Europe who
could scarcely boast of being more highly
educated. And the happiest women I have
known have not always been the most learned.
I think that we are apt to underrate the education
of women in the East because it differs so essen-
tially from ours : but then so do their physique
and the country in which they live ; its flora, its
climate, and its sociology. A Korean once told
me (he was a kinsman of Queen Min, a traveller,
a linguist, and a man of — cosmopolitanly speak-
ing— most considerable attainments) that his wife
was more widely and more throughly versed in
Chinese literature, modern and classic, than he.
And Chinese literature is indisputably the greatest
literature that Asia has ever produced.

The Queen of Korea is, with the possible ex-
ception of the Dowager Empress of China, as
well educated as any royal lady in Asia.

As to the national lack of beauty among the
women of Korea — why, it is neither more nor less
than nonsense, ignorant, and rather stupid non-
sense. I know no race in which the women who
earn their individual slice, and a goodly share of
the family loaf, in the sweat of their brows retain
their beauty long. The women seen on the
streets of Soul and in the fields, and on the

KOREAN WOMEN. 101

mountain slopes of Korea, belong — if I may for
the sake of emphasis repeat myself— belong to the
hardest-worked, the most weather-beaten, burden-
bent, and ill-fed class in Korea. Their personal
appearance is no indication of the real type of
Korean womanhood. They are painted by the
sun and the wind, disfigured with trouble and
back-ache, and their once pretty faces have been
profaned by many tears, and they are hideous.
But the women of the Korean leisure class are, as
a rule (a rule with only just enough exceptions
to prove it), undeniably pretty — pretty with a
prettiness that is closely akin to the prettiness of
the women of Japan and Burmah. The Queen
of Korea is quaintly pretty, and among the three
hundred women who are, nominally at least, the
concubines of the king, and among the very
many female attendants of their two Majesties,
there is scarcely a plain face. Of course many
Europeans who have been resident in Korea, and
have written of their residence, have not had ac-
cess to the court, much less to the Queen and her
ladies. But surely any wide-eyed man who has
spent some time in Korea has seen and seen again
the geisha girls. Who that has lived in Korea
denies their beauty ? And would it not occur to
an observer of somewhat less than abnormal
reasoning power that since the only female

102 QUAINT KOREA.

members he had ever seen of the Korean leisure
class were beautiful, that it was fairly presumable
that the Korean women who worked even less,
and lived in greater luxury, and under more
healthy conditions, were at least as beautiful ?

Korean women (those of them who have not
been scarred by over-toil, nor deformed by priva-
tion) have remarkably small, and remarkably
pretty hands and feet, and of nothing are they
prouder than of their dimpled fingers, and their
shapely, delicate feet. But the feet of a Korean
woman are small by nature, never by art. They
have lovely eyes — these women — musical voices,
and are graceful of motion.

The Queen is pale and delicate-looking. She
has a remarkable forehead, low but strong, and a
mouth charming in its colouring, in its outlines,
in its femininity, in the pearls it discloses, and sweet
with the music that slips through it when she
speaks. She dresses plainly as a rule, and in
dark but rich materials. In this she resembles
the high-born matrons of Japan. And in cut her
garments are more Japanese than those of other
Korean women : she wears her hair parted in the
middle, and drawn softly into a simple knot or
coil of braid. She wears diamonds most often ;
not many, but of much price. They are her
favourite gems. In this one particular she is

KOREAN WOMEN. 103

almost alone among the women of the East ; for
pearls are the beloved jewels of almost every
woman and girl-child that is born in the Orient.

Queen Min has been as assiduous as she has
been powerful in advancing the interests of her
family — the family of her birth I mean, for her
marriage — unlike the marriages of other Korean
women — has no whit divorced her from the people
of her blood. All the desirable offices in Korea
were held for years by her kinsmen.

Queen Min has not only been the power behind
the Korean throne, but she has been, even more
than the King, the all-seeing eye of Korea. Her
spies have been everywhere, seen everything,
reported everything.

Two things that are true of the Queen are
peculiarly significant of the grip that Oriental
customs have upon the most autocratic of Oriental
minds. She — the most powerful Korean in Korea
— is content to be nameless ; a sovereign with
almost unlimited power, but without a nominal
individuality ; and to be called merely by the
family name of her forefathers, and to be desig-
nated only as the daughter of her fathers, the wife
of her husband, and the mother of her son.

It strikes an Occidental as even more strange
that a woman so supremely powerful with her
husband and king should be so graciously tolerant

104 QUAINT KOREA.

of the women of his harem. She not only tolerates
them, she seems to like them, to take pride in
them, and she is on the friendliest terms with Li-
Hsi's eldest son, who is also the son of a concubine.
True her own son is the crown prince, but it is
probable that his elder brother and not he will be
Korea's next king, if the present dynasty be
destined to have another king. Li Hsia — Queen
Min's son — is not the imbecile he has been
reported, but he has not the greatest mental
strength, and less strength of body.

Queen Min is admirable and affable in her home
circle. She is a woman of no great physical
strength. But she has considerable courage,
moral and physical, and both have been well
tried.

Queen Min has always advocated the opening
of Korea to foreigners, and the establishing of
relations with foreign Powers. Whether this
shows her wisdom or her folly it is too soon to
say : but it certainly proves her — woman of the
Far East that she is — to have a mind of her own,
even though she lacks a personal name.

No one man or woman who wishes to have a
part in the solving of the great and complicated
woman-question should fail to make an, as far as
possible, exhaustive study of the women of Asia.
The women of the East differ from the women of

UNIVERSITY

OF

:TY)
>^

KOREAN WOMEN. 105

the West, chiefly in being more secluded from
public places, public duties, and public influence ;
in being more confined to, and more absorbed in
their own firesides ; in being less on a nominal
equality with man, and in being more definitely,
if less happily and less highly placed in the State
and in the family. They differ from the women
of the West in the manner of their education, and
in the aims of their education.

Before we consider whether these differences
are to the advantage or disadvantage of Eastern
women, it is only fair that we (we Western women
who are interested in working out, not only our
own salvation, but the salvation of mankind)
should consider very carefully how the position of
woman in the East has affected man in the East,
and the Eastern races in their entireties. Does
the absence of woman from the general daily life
of a race render that daily life less refined, and
more brutal ? One might, at first thought, have
concluded so. We may assume for a premise that
women are more refined, more gentle of heart,
and more graceful of manner than men, and it is,
I believe, commonly thought among the great mass
of people in the West, who are almost altogether
uninformed and altogether ill-informed about the
East, that the men of the East are brawlers, half-
savage, and uncouth. No grosser mistake couid

106 QUAINT KOREA.

be made. Probably the two most brutalizing
passions are envy and jealousy. There have been
in the history of the world, I think, no two other
causes of so much bloodshed, so much brutality,
so much infinite cruelty, and so much horrible
vulgarity. The wrangling over women, the
rivalry for women, and the suspicions and the
enormous heartburns occasioned by these rivalries
have, in the lands where the women mingled
freely with the men, more than counterbalanced
the refining effect produced by the fact that the
men of these countries have wished to appear at
their best before the women, and have been on
the whole inspired to civility and gentle behaviour
in the presence of women. Because an Oriental's
wife is his property, unquestionably so, she is
the cause of no bloodshed, no jealousy, and her
refining influence is more proved in the breach
than in the observance. The Korean gentleman,
the Chinese mandarin, or the husband of a high-
caste Hindoo woman who goes to a dinner-party,
has the soothing consciousness that his wife is
safe at home. Under lock and key, perhaps :
certainly debarred, by the strong prejudices of
centuries, from going abroad, or showing her face
to men. He can devote himself with placid heart
and undiverted mind to the meat and drink set
before him and the men sitting about him. No

KOREAN WOMEN. 107

torturing wonder as to which of his wife's platonic
friends has dropped in to have an after-dinner
cup of coffee with her can come to destroy his
appreciation of the fine flavour of his soup. He
can glance around that dinner table with eyes
fearless and proud, for they will not encounter his
wife flirting, ever so harmlessly, with someone
else's husband : a sight calculated to make any
man whose heart is not made of dough, and his
brain of pulp, choke over his cutlets, and end his
dinner miserably in a fit of ill-humour and indiges-
tion. True, on the other hand, he is not able
to flirt with his neighbour's wife. The social
arrangements are such, in the East, that no fairly
well-to-do man need lack ample female society
both at home and abroad. But the female society
which is open to him outside of his own house is
not the society of wives, mothers, nor of maidens.
And moreover, the majority of men enjoy a good
stag-dinner very much more than they do an
equally good feast which is shared with them by
a number of women. When a party of gentlemen
dine together, in the East, or in the West, I very
much fear that their table-talk is far more intel-
lectual, entertaining, and altogether worth while
than the table-talk of women who dine with each
other, or of men and women who dine together.
And I am sure that it is quite as refined, free from

io8 QUAINT KOREA.

undesirable insinuations, coarse witticisms, and
imbecile pleasantries. I am not speaking, of
course, of dinners tete-a-tete, nor would anything
I have said apply to them. I have been an un-
seen spectator of many stag-dinners in the East,
and I was once an unseen, but all-seeing, guest at
a stag-dinner in the West. And in my salad days
I have often broken bread with women, women,
only women. It is my conclusion that the Euro-
pean men who dine at their clubs, and the Asiatic
men who dine with their fellows, gain almost as
much as they lose, and I can partly understand
man's preference for the table companionship of
men. I believe that good digestion waits on
appetite more often in dinner parties of the East
than in dinner parties of the Occident.

The Eastern man rarely or never commits the
sin of coveting his neighbour's wife, because he
rarely or never sees her, and so, at least, we can-
not say that the unrighteous laws governing the
relative positions of the sexes in the Orient, lead
the men of the Orient into the worst of all
temptations. Among the very poorest classes in
Korea the men invariably see more or less of the
women ; but those men are too poor, too hard
worked, too absorbed, body, brain, and heart, in a
struggle for existence to covet other men's wives,
or, often indeed, to have wives of their own.

KOREAN WOMEN. 109

Oriental polygamy seems so delicate a subject,
such thin conversational ice to the average
Western mind, that the best informed writers are
rather in the habit of skating about its edges and
of speaking loosely and indefinitely, and with the
greatest confusion about the wives and the con-
cubines of the East. I have spoken of the well-
to-do Korean as having a plurality of wives.
This is not so. And that such a mis-statement
has been made by writers of eminence, and
ordinarily of great exactness, is no excuse for
me. A Korean can have but one wife, one true
and absolute wife, but (and here comes in the
fact which is hard, very hard, of comprehension
even to intelligent Europeans, who have not lived
in the Orient) he may have as many concubines
as he can afford, and their position, though not
so high of rank, is as honourable, and as respect-
able as that of his wife. The word concubine,
in the sense given it by our English dictionaries,
can no more justly be applied to the women of a
Korean's seraglio than it can be applied to
Hagar. I use the word, because it is the word
used by all European scholars to indicate the
women of whom I am writing, and is also the
word used to designate them in the countries of
the East. As I have said, they are not on a social
equality with the wife, but they are, to the best

no QUAINT KOREA.

of my belief, on a moral equality with her, both
in the eyes of Oriental law and in the eyes
of morality itself. I see no difference ethically
between the woman who consents to marry (as
every well-born Korean woman does consent to
marry) a man who she knows has, or will have, a
well filled harem — I see no difference between her
and the woman who consents to make that harem
her home.

A Korean's concubines are almost as absolutely
the handmaidens of his wife as of himself. They
must serve her and do her bidding, and can only
escape from this in the rare instance when one
rises in the man's eyes to higher favour than the
wife.

The children of a concubine do not as a rule
rank with the children of a wife, but they are
neither despised nor shamed. They are born to
a slightly lower rank, it is true, but that signifies
little, for in Korea every man must carve out his
own niche in the social rock, and they, the chil-
dren of the handmaidens, have as fair a start in
life, and as clean a name, as the children of the
wife. In this, at least, Korean civilization puts
us to the blush.

I am not advocating polygamy. It seems to
me an evil only less than the evil which makes
innocent children nameless, and unfortunate

KOREAN WOMEN. in

women homeless and hopeless. It is an evil, I
am convinced, that can never work in the West,
never be endured by the women of the West. But
it does work in the East — works fairly well. And
I think it just possible that with the Orientals,
with their quickly developed bodies, and their
slowly developed minds, it is, under existing cir-
cumstances, the lesser of two evils, one of which
would be inevitable. In Utah I have known a
great many Mormons. I knew Brigham Young
when I was a child, and I have since known
several of his wives, and many of his children.
With the exception of Brigham Young himself
and one woman, who was, in the most brazen
sense of the word, an adventuress, I have never
known a Mormon of even average intellect. Yet,
even so, I never knew the wives of a Mormon man
to live in peace together. The men were degraded
and brainless ; the women degraded, almost
imbecile and discontented. But it is not so in
the Orient ; high caste or high class men are
refined, gentlemanly, clean of person, and keen of
intellect, and the women in their lesser and
feminine way are very fit mates of those men.
The women of a Korean household are, as an
almost invariable rule, happy together. There is
less differentiation between the personalities of an
Eastern race than between those of a Western,

ii2 QUAINT KOREA.

and this is especially true of the women, I think.
The wife and all the concubines of a Korean have
tastes in common, habits in common, likes and
dislikes and accomplishments in common. It is
a matter of course to them to live under the same
roof, and at the disposal of the same man, and it
never occurs to them to question either its fitness
or its desirability. All must yield unquestioning
obedience to the husband, and, in his absence, all
the concubines must yield and do yield as implicit
obedience to the wife. She in return is very apt
to make them her playfellows and her bosom
friends. The Sarahs of the East are far more just,
far more kind to the Hagars of the East than
Sarah of old was to the mother of Ishmael.
Would that the women of the West, who are
secure in their sole wifehood — secure at least in
the sole legality of their position, had more
humanity for the less fortunately placed women
of the West. Whatever the social conditions of
the West, the women of the West are, in part
at least, responsible for them ; not the outcast
women, not the women who have made a public
failure of life, but the women of assured positions,
of intellect, and of moral weight. Whatever the
position of woman is in Korea, however low the
standard of morality in Korea, the women of
Korea, to-day at least, are in no way responsible

KOREAN WOMEN. 113

for it, in no way — in no direct way at least — able
to alter it, and I think it greatly to the credit of
Korean wives that they treat with no pharisaical
contempt, with no feminine injustice, and with no
inhumanity, the women who like themselves are,
comparatively speaking, moral and social puppets
in the hands of a social system in the regulating
of which they have no direct voice.

I think I have said repeatedly, and I am going
to again say in a succeeding chapter, that Korea
has no religion. Whether the facts I shall be able
to give will prove my statement to the majority of
readers, I am not quite prepared to say. At all
events, there is certainly no civilized country, not
excepting China, in which religion counts for so
little, and in which the professors of religion are
under so positive a social ban as they are in
Korea. Yet, strangely enough, in Korea there are
not only monks and monasteries, but nuns and
nunneries. Both monasteries and nunneries seem
to have existed almost as long as Korea has
existed in anything like its present social condi-
tion. Hamel speaks of two nunneries in Soul,
and says that the nuns in one were exclusively
women of high birth ; that the nuns in the other
were maids born of the common people. Their
hair was shorn as was the hair of monks, and they
performed the same duties, obeyed the same rules

i

ii4 QUAINT KOREA.

as did the monks. There were then, and have been
since, a number of other nunneries scattered
throughout Korea. But it is certainly several
hundred years since any body of nuns defended
their house from an invading army, or took any
part in Korean warfare, local or otherwise, and I
very much doubt if they ever did so. But it is
probable that in every other way their lives re-
sembled, as indeed they now resemble, the lives
of the religious men. In the days of Hamel the
nunneries were maintained by the bounty of the
king and some of his principal subjects. The
king who was reigning in Korea a little over two
hundred years ago (the same of whom Hamel
speaks), gave the nuns of Soul permission to
marry. There are now no nunneries in Soul, but
there are still several in Korea. Besides the nun
who is shaven and shorn, there is a female devotee
called Po-sal, who does not cut her hair, and whose
vows are less binding than those of other nuns.

I merely mention the fact that there are nuns
in Korea, while on the subject of Korean women,
because it is a curious item of what I have been
able to learn about the women of Choson, and is
uniquely in contrast to almost all the other items
that I have been able to gather.

And now almost last, a few words more about
the dress of Choson's women-folk. As I have

KOREAN WOMEN. 115

said, it is less Oriental-looking than the dress of
the women of any other Eastern race, and this is
remarkable, if not surprising, because the women
of Korea to-day dress exactly as the women of
China dressed before the present Chinese dynasty
came into power, and the race from which it
sprang conquered China. In dress, at least, in-
deed in many other ways, the Koreans have
strictly maintained the habits and the fashions
that they adopted from, or that were forced upon
them by old China. This is why the men wear
no queues and the women do not pinch their feet.
In dress and in toilet habits the Koreans of to-day
are probably an exact replica of the inhabitants of
China, before China became dominated by the
Tartars.

The women of Korea's poor almost invariably
wear the same colour as do the men of the same
class : a blue so pale, so indefinite, and, from a
short distance, so imperceptible, that it has gene-
rally been called white. Even so exact an
observer and so careful a chronicler as Mr. Curzon
speaks of " the white-clad Koreans." Mr. Curzon
may, by-the-bye, have made several mistakes in
writing of the East ; but, with the best intentions
in the world, I have not been able to discover
another of his making. One may differ occasion,
ally from his opinions ; one may not always share
I 2

n6 QUAINT KOREA.

his likes or his dislikes ; but I assure the student
of things Eastern that he can depend absolutely
upon the truth of Mr. Curzon's statements of
facts, and their exactness.

Korean women of position wear almost every
conceivable colour. In China, pink and green are
set aside for women, and are sacred to their wear-
ing. I do not think that the women of Korea
have the sole right to wear any colour, but they
certainly have the right to wear, and the habit of
wearing, almost every conceivable colour. Pur-
ples and greens are their high favourites, and
green is almost invariably the hue — and a bright,
deep green at that — of the generously-sleeved
dress which the middle-class Korean woman (or
on rare occasions, a lady) throws about her head
and shoulders when she walks abroad. This
green dress, which is used as a cloak, is almost ex-
clusively the garment of the women of the middle
class — the women who are not so poor that they
are obliged to draw water, or to engage in any
other forms of hard labour which would make the
covering of their faces impossible — but who, at
the same time, are occasionally obliged to go
abroad on some matter of household business.
Wives and concubines and daughters of mandarins
and of men of wealth do not often leave their own
(by courtesy) house and gardens. When they do,

KOREAN WOMEN. 117

they go in palanquins. They enter the palan-
quin in their own court-yard ; the blinds or
curtains are tightly closed. The chair is borne
away on the shoulders of coolies, and is usually
followed by one or more female servants or wait-
ing women, who run closely behind it, looking on
the ground, and carrying a fan, which indicates the
rank of the palanquined mistress.

In some parts of Korea, among some classes of
the poor, the women wear a very short white
jacket which barely covers the upper part of the
bosom. This jacket looks like an exaggerated
caricature of the pretty white jacket worn by the
Singalese women.

The dress of a Korean lady is as elaborate as
the dress of a Korean working-woman is plain.
The example of simplicity set by Queen Min is
followed by almost none of the Korean women
who can afford to do otherwise. The wardrobe
of a Korean lady contains garments of silk,
surprising in quantity, and covetable in quality,
but satins are unknown, and the glimmer and
glitter, which is so dear to the eye of every Oriental,
must be made alone by the lustre of silk, and
enhanced by as much tinsel, as many jewels and
ornaments as the wearer can possibly afford.

I have spoken of the brown interspace which is
often seen between the jacket and the skirt of a

n8 QUAINT KOREA.

Korean woman, but it is only seen among the
very poorest, and I believe is a lack of material,
and a matter of indifference, rather than an
intentional exposure of person. I have never
seen a Korean lady — I have never seen a gentle-
woman of any Eastern race — decollete, except
Japanese ladies in European dress. It seems
strange, at first thought, that races, whose
standards of sexual morality seem to us so far
beneath our own, should be so universally modest
in their covering of their persons. I am inclined
to think that it is not modesty at all, but rather a
peculiar phase of Oriental dignity which causes
the people of the East to drape themselves as
entirely as possible. Mr. Lowell, whose in-
imitable bo<jk on Korea must be a source of
almost endless enjoyment to anyone who has
known and delighted in the quaint peninsula,
says so exactly what I think we ought to under-
stand about the standpoint from which the
Orientals regard dress, and how they have
come to so regard it, that I take the liberty of
borrowing a page from his volume ; one of those
books which constantly tempt one to quote them
from cover to cover. In discussing the manner
in which dress in Eastern Asia has been in-
fluenced by woman, Mr. Lowell writes : —
" Her absence has been as potent a force there

KOREAN WOMEN. rig

as her presence has been elsewhere ; for I think
we must admit that to her indirectly is due the
following singular feature of Asiatic thought.

" The way in which the far Oriental regards
dress is somewhat peculiar. I can think of no
simile so descriptive as the connection we tacitly
assume between spirit and body. We hardly, in
ordinary life, think of the one as devoid of the
other, and we regard the latter as at least the
sense-impression to us of the person within. So
do they with dress. To their eyes it forms an
essential part of their conception of the man.
Somewhat in like manner we are ourselves
impressed by dress, in the customary take-at-
what-we-see estimate of our fellows. They differ
from us in carrying the real into the ideal.

" This is very strikingly seen in the matter of
painting. Perhaps one of the most notable
features about far Eastern paintings is its utter
ignoring of the human figure. There is a com-
plete void in that branch which among Europeans
has always claimed attention — the study of the
nude. To them artistically man is nothing but a
bundle of habits in the sartorial sense. The
practice is not due to an excess of what we call
modesty. We may, perhaps, define modesty as
the veiling from public gaze of all of ourselves, in
person or in mind, except so much as is sane-

120 QUAINT KOREA.

tioned to exposure by conventionality. Substitute
' necessity ' for ' conventionality,' and you have
the far Eastern definition. Convenience, not
convention, is the touchstone of propriety. They
have not the smallest objection to being seen in a
state of nature where occasion demands it ; and,
on the other hand, nothing would induce them
to exhibit any portion of their persons for the
purpose of display. To them to be clothed or
naked is a matter of indifference ; it is merely a
question of temporary comfort. The reason
why they disregard the body is other than this.
It is simply that they have never been led to
regard the body as beautiful. That this is so, is
due to the low position of woman. She has
never risen high enough in their estimation to
attain even to that poor level of admiration — that
of being an object of beauty. All that should
be her birthright they heap as a dowry upon
Nature.

" The study of drapery has benefited at the
expense of what it encases, and plays a certain
part even in the expression of the emotions."

I must pause right here, much as I admire his
work, and much as I owe him, to quarrel with
Mr. Lowell, who says that the people of the East,
of the Far East at least, have never been, led to
regard the body as beautiful.

KOREAN WOMEN. 121

Is it possible that Mr. Lowell is unfamiliar
with, or unappreciative of, the literature of Hin-
dostan, the dramas of China, and the poems of
Japan ?

CHAPTER VI.
KOREAN WOMEN — (continued).

SLIGHT as is the visible part played by woman
in Korea, yet there are an almost endless number
of facts concerning her which are either signi-
ficant or in themselves interesting. To me at
least, woman, and the conditions of her life,
together form the most interesting branch of the
study of Korea. And even to those who take no
deep interest in burning social questions, and
whose interest in far-away lands scarcely exceeds
an intelligent curiosity, any facts about Korean
women must be especially interesting, I fancy,
because those facts are less generally known,
less easily known than almost any other facts
connected with this wonderful peninsula, and its
wonderful people. So I do not hesitate to devote
another of my very limited number of chapters
to the women of Korea.

Cosmetics are not, it is gratifying to say, a
product of our Western civilization. They are

KOREAN WOMEN. 123

greatly used all over the Orient. But in two
particulars there is less to be said against the face-
painting of Eastern women than there is to be
said against the face-painting of the women of
the West. In Asia, hair-oil, rouge, powder, khol
for the eyes and eyebrows, and brilliant pigments
for the lips, are put on frankly, and are as
avowedly, and as sincerely, a seemly and decent
adornment, and as much an item of being
" dressed up," as is a silken petticoat or a
jewelled necklet. Ladies of Asia "make up"
more brazenly than the ladies of Europe, and
their ugly, painted imitation is still less like the
loveliness of nature than is the painted ugliness
of ourselves when we do not feel that we have
sufficient beauty of face to leave it unadorned.
But the Eastern woman who " makes up " her
face has no thought of deceiving anyone, or of
obtaining masculine admiration or feminine envy
under false pretences. Her painting is as much
a matter of convention as is the Chinaman's
wearing of his queue ; and she lays on the thick
layers of brilliant red and ghastly white as
devoutly and as dutifully as she says her prayers.
The other good word I have to say for the
cosmetics of the Orient is this— they are infinitely
less harmful than the cosmetics we are wont to

124 QUAINT KOREA.

use in Europe. I know that. For, on the stage
I have tried both very thoroughly.

A well-to-do Korean woman usually has a
very interesting collection of hair-pins. They are
long, heavily ornamented, made of silver, of gold,
or of copper; more usually of silver. Some of
them are very beautiful, and some that I have
seen reminded me very much of the long silver
pins that are thrust through the braids of Italian
peasant women.

The well-to-do women, especially in the capital,
now very generally wear European under-cloth-
ing. They invariably wear a pouch which is
fastened by cords to their girdle. This is their
pocket, the only pocket they have, except their
sleeves, and in it they carry a tiger's claw for
luck, a small cushion of sachet, or a bottle of
thick, rich perfume, some of their favourite pieces
of jewellery, scissors usually, or a knife, two or
three of their most frequently used toilet imple-
ments, and almost invariably a small Korean
chess-board and chess-men. The board and the
pieces are often made of silver or even of gold.
Chess is, perhaps, the most popular of all Korea's
many games, and the Korean women of the
leisure class play it incessantly. The pocket also
contains, more likely than not, the official book
of female politeness ; a book which every Korean

KOREAN WOMEN. 125

lady studies assiduously. But whatever this
pocket contains or does not contain, it must by
no means be without several charms, charms for
good luck, charms for health, charms for wealth,
and for any or every other good desirable under
the Korean sun. Of its charms the most valuable
is the tiger's claw. Mr. Griffis says, " Nor can
the hardy mountaineer put into the hand of his
bride a more eloquent proof of his valour than
one of those weapons of a man-eater. It means
even more than the edelweiss of other mountain
lands." The tiger is probably the most dreaded
foe of the Koreans. They fear it more than they
fear China ; hate it more than they hate Japan.
The Chinese have a saying which so vividly
pictures the tiger-Korean situation that I must
quote it, though it has, I believe, already been
quoted by every other European and the
majority of Orientals who have ever written on
Korea. It is this : " The Korean spends one half
of the year hunting the tiger, and the other half
in being hunted by him."

The hands of a Korean lady are always
exquisitely kept, and usually loaded with rings,
often with rings of very great value.

Among some classes of Korean women the
dressing of their hair is the most important item
of their toilet, and one skilled in ways Korean,,

126 QUAINT KOREA.

and in signs of Korean rank, can very readily
determine, from a glance at her coiffure, who and
what a Korean woman is. The ladies of the
court wear their hair in different prescribed ways.
The geisha girls have an artistic fashion of their
own, and a Korean woman servant, one part of
whose duty is to fetch and to carry, makes out of
the braids of her own hair an enormous cushion
upon which she can carry with the greatest
security a huge bundle, or a vast dish of food.

The men of no other race are so amply dowered
with hats as are the men of Korea. Probably
the women of no other civilized country are so
badly off for head-gear as are the women of
Choson, and this is not, though we might easily
fancy it to be, because those women are not
supposed to walk or ride abroad. For innumer-
able years Korea has taken her fashions from
China, changing them with the change of dynasty
at Pekin. But for five hundred years the Koreans
have failed to change the fashion of their hats,
and they remain true to the style of head-gear
which was in vogue when the present Korean
dynasty came into power. When the present
fashion in hats was imported from Pekin, just
about five hundred years ago, the Koreans
neglected to learn, or were unable to learn, what
the women of China were wearing on their heads,

KOREAN WOMEN. 127

or else the women of China were going bare-
headed. The result was that Korean women,
having discarded their previous head coverings,
and receiving no authority from Pekin for the
fashion of new ones, became hatless, and have
been hatless ever since. The only hat the Korean
women wear now is the folded dress which I have
described before. There is indeed a jaunty, little
embroidered cap not unlike a modified Turkish
fez, or the glorious capote of a French vivandtere,
which is supposed to be at the disposal of any
Korean woman who cares to assume it, but it has
been adopted by the geisha girls, and so, of
course, discarded by Korean ladies. Korean
women used to wear a huge hat not unlike a
small, flat, Chinese parasol. It was perched well
up on and well to the back of their heads, and
was surrounded by a rather fascinating silk fringe,
through which they could see and be seen — a
fringe that was, perhaps, as becoming to them as
our white spotted veils are to us.

A few words here about divorce in Korea, for
divorce is always a matter of more importance to
a woman than to her husband. This is so in
every country, because as yet in every country
woman is more confined to her home, more
dependent upon her home, and less free to go
abroad at all seasons and under all circumstances

128 QUAINT KOREA.

than man is, and therefore less able to escape
the daily torment of married unhappiness. In the
United States, and in most European countries
whose laws I have at all studied, the divorce laws
are very much more in favour of woman than
of man. In Korea the direct opposite is true.
There is little or nothing for which a Korean
woman can obtain a divorce, and there is little or
nothing for which a Korean man cannot. Whether
it is more to the credit of Korean woman or to the
credit of Korean man far be it for me to say ; but
it is a very rare occurrence for a Korean husband
to put aside his wife. The sanctity of the home
circle, the inviolate maintenance of that home
circle is more than a religion, more than an
instinct with nine-tenths of the people of Asia.
Their idea of a home circle may be more elastic
than ours, but, as a rule, they abide by it
almost with the courage of martyrs. The women
must, and the men do. In one respect the
divorce laws of Korea are more radical than the
divorce laws of the West. Incompatibility of
temper justifies divorce in Korea, and is the
cause of most Korean divorces. Truly nothing
could be more sensible, more humane — provided
one has no religious scruples — for even children
lose more than they gain by living in an unhappy
home. Incompatibility of temper may not be a

KOREAN WOMEN. 129

sin, but it is the one difficulty in the path of
married happiness, in Asia or in Europe, which
can never be smoothed away. It is insurmount-
able, nor can you go around it. It seems to me
that the only decent thing to do when you come
upon it, again provided your conscience will let
you, is to turn round and go back. A harsh word,
a quick gesture, and many things that are many
times worse can be forgiven readily enough, and
almost forgotten, by people who have the common
justice to judge not lest they be judged. But
incompatibility of temper, that strange something
which makes it impossible for me to teach my
pet cat to eat or drink with my pet dog, ah !
that is the marital thorn, the marriage plague,
" past cure, past help, past hope." And I con-
gratulate the law makers of Korea for recognizing
it for what it is, and dealing with it as it should
be dealt with. To be sure, if a Korean man and
wife fail to get along, perpetually fail, the woman
has no direct voice in the matter ; but if she and
her husband agree together to untie the mis-
takenly-tied knot, he can very easily do so. And
even in Korea a woman of average wit does not
probably find it too difficult a task to make herself
so very disagreeable that the husband may be
brought to propose the separation which she
secretly desires.

K

130

QUAINT KOREA.

But where the Korean law seems to me very
inconsistent is in not punishing, when the mar-
riage is a failure, the geomancer who selected
the wedding day. The method of this sage is
so simple that it ought to be infallible. He
adds the age of the bride to the age of the
groom, and after determining which star rules
the destiny of their united ages, he decrees that
the wedding shall take place upon the day sacred
to that star. How a day so chosen can ever fail
to be auspicious, and to be the beginning of many
days of uninterrupted happiness it is hard for a
simple Western mind to understand. To do the
geomancer justice, it is perhaps because of his
occult wisdom that divorce plays so minor a part
in Korean life.

One Korean law concerning women seems to me
uniquely cruel. A woman may not die in the
arms of a man, nor may a woman hold in her
arms a man who is dying. Husbands and wives
love each other sometimes — even in Korea.
Mothers love their sons, the wide world over, and
sons their mothers. Korean fathers yearn over
their daughters, and are loved tenderly by those
daughters in return. What a barbarous law ! how
infamous ; how unworthy of the East or of the
West ! what a reflection upon humanity ; what a
stain upon Korea ! That inferiority of sex (sex —

KOREAN WOMEN. 131

that unexplained accident of our physical exist-
ence), inferiority, real or imagined, should separate
man from wife, father from daughter, son from
mother, even by a hair's breadth, at the moment
when Death, the merciless, the relentless, pro-
nounces the great, and perhaps eternal separa-
tion !

Though a Korean woman nominally counts for
nothing in the ruling of her own household, and,
as far as the workings of the State go, does not
exist, she is invariably treated with the man-
ner of respect ; she is always addressed in what
is called " honorific language ; " to her the
phraseology is used which is used to superiors,
people of age, or of literary eminence. A Korean
nobleman will step aside to let a Korean peasant
woman pass him on the street. The rooms of a
Korean woman are as sacred to her as a shrine
is to its image. Indeed, the rooms of his wife or of
his mother are the sanctuary of any Korean man
who breaks the law. Unless for treason or for
one other crime, he cannot be forced to leave those
rooms, and so long as he remains under the pro-
tection of his wife, and his wife's apartments, he
is secure from the officers of the law, and from the
penalties of his own misdemeanours.

It is often said that the men of the East regard
women not only as their inferiors, but as burdens,

K 2

132 QUAINT KOREA.

as superfluous, useless, and despicable. This is a
mistake, as large a mistake in speaking of Koreans
as of any other Oriental race. The potence of
sex, the impotence of either sex alone, is the great
underlying thought of all Eastern philosophy, I
had almost said, of all Oriental ethics. Which of
the great Eastern religions ignores it, or passes it
by lightly ? Study the symbols in the old caves
of India : read Confucius. Every educated
Oriental believes that without women life would
not only be impossible but worthless. They
regard her sphere of usefulness as important
as their own. An Oriental mother is almost an
Oriental deity. This is as true in Korea as in
China, in Japan, in Persia, in Hindostan, and in
Burmah. The thinkers of Asia differ from us in
what they regard as the most appropriate and the
most essential spheres of women's usefulness, but
they never ignore, nor do I think they underrate,
the importance of woman's work. Mr. Griffis,
who is not over partial to the Koreans (perhaps
if he had ever lived among them he might have
liked them better), himself says : —

" With the ethics of the Chinese came their
philosophy, which is based on the dual system of
the universe, and of which in Korean, yum-yang
(positive and negative, active and passive, or male
and female) is the expression. All things in

KOREAN WOMEN. 133

heaven, earth, and man are the result of the inter-
action of the yum (male or active principle), and
iheyang (female or passive principle). Even the
metals and minerals in the earth are believed
to be produced through the yum-yang, and to
grow like plants or animals."

Even so clear, so cool, so sympathetic, so cul-
tured, and best of all, so unbigoted an observer, a
thinker, and a writer as Percival Lowell, seems
to me to have blundered a little in his summing
up of the position of woman in the East. He
says : —

" The lower man's place in the scale of nations,
the lower, relatively to his own, has always been
that of woman. Woman, being physically less
strong, naturally suffers where physical strength
is made the basis of esteem. But as men have
advanced in civilization, gradually a chivalrous
regard has been paid the weaker, but fairer sex.
Now, though the countries of the Far East have
had their age of feudalism, in a general parallelism
to those of the West, loyalty took the place of
chivalry as one of its attendant feelings. At the
point where woman elsewhere made her dtbut
upon the social stage, here she failed to appear ;
and she has not done so since. The history of
these races has been a history of man apart from
any help from woman. To all social intents a*nd

134 QUAINT KOREA.

purposes, woman has remained as she was when
she followed as a slave in her Lord's wanderings.
She is better fed now, better clothed, cleaner and
more comfortable than she was ; but, relatively
to the position of the people, no higher. She
counts for nothing in the life of the race at the
present time, as she has counted for nothing in
it from the beginning."

That the history of the races of the Far East has
been a history of man apart from any help of
woman, I cannot understand Mr. Lowell's saying.
He is evidently a man of very wide education, and
he has lived in the Far East. Undoubtedly he
has read the history of the Far East, and I cannot
imagine the author of " Choson, the Land of the
Morning Calm," reading anything unintelligently.
" That woman counts for nothing in the life of the
race at the present time, as she has counted as
nothing in it from the beginning ! " Ah ! yes, Mr.
Lowell. She counts for a great deal. The tally
of her influence may not be kept in the market-
place, nor her power blazoned on the house-tops,
but influence and power are there. She counts
for a hundred things, and will count in every part
of the globe, civilized or uncivilized, until Nature
adopts a very different modus operandi from her
present one. And in Korea, in China and Japan,
woman counts above all for motherhood, and for

KOREAN WOMEN. 135

the perpetuation of the race. And that she so
counts must give her really great power among any
race of men whose one eradicable religion is the
worship of their ancestors, whose universal and
insatiable ambition is to beget sons who may in
turn worship them, and secure them a prosperous
and a happy eternity.

There is much, very much that I deplore in
the condition of woman in Korea. But once in a
while woman gets the whip hand, and once in a
very great while she has the wit to use it — and
the nerve — even in Korea.

If it must be a canon of European literary good
form to say very little, and to say it gingerly about
Oriental polygamy, it has been a more than
general custom among European writers to say
nothing, nothing at least of any significance about
the large class of Oriental women who stand out-
side the pale even of polygamy. There are some
things that I think ought to be said about them ;
said now, when we are so very earnestly trying to
understand the East, and, I hope, honestly striv-
ing to help the East. These things would come
with more convention I know from the pen of a
man, but I think they would come more appropri-
ately from the pen of a woman, and I take upon
myself the saying of them, in so far as I am able.
I feel impelled to explain, as well as I can, -the

136 QUAINT KOREA.

exact social position, and the exact personally
mental attitude of the yoshiwara women of Japan,
the flower girls of China, and the geisha girls of
Korea. These three are sisters. They are
cousins, more or less close of kin, to the nautch
girls of India, and the posture girls of Burmah
and of Siam. But these three were born of one
father, and of one mother, and are the result of
one bringing up. What shall I call them ? I
have no wish to use a harsh word that would offend
select European ears, nor will I use a harsh word
that would wrong and mis-describe them. I might
almost call them the understudies of the happier
women of the East ; for in Asia's social life they
take the parts which ought, perhaps, to be played
by the harem-hidden wives and mothers of the
Orient. Those women, whose profession is pub-
licity, are an important part of the social structure
of every Asiatic race I have known, except only
the Parsi race. To ignore their existence, when
travelling through Asia in person, or with pen, is
stupid. To slink by the strong position that they
hold in the East, the big significance of their firm
placement in the East, and the several lessons
they will not fail to teach us, if we do not fear to
learn, is prudish. To pass them by with a cry of
horror, and to condemn them as being what they
are not, is un-Christian and unjust.

KOREAN WOMEN. 137

For the men that mocked His agony and spat
upon Him, Jesus claimed forgiveness, because
" they knew not what they did." And certainly
the professionally unfortunate women of the East
have as little consciousness of degradation and of
sin as they have of shame. There are many
reasons why this is so, and I will try to state them.
I am only less sorry for the homeless, nameless
women of Asia, than I am for the homeless, name-
less women of Europe. Perhaps this is the best
place for me to say that I am making no plea for
the profession of which I am writing. For the
women who through folly, through ignorance, or
who beneath the lash of that hardest of all task-
masters, circumstance, follow this nameless pro-
fession, I could easily find it in my heart to plead,
and to plead, and to plead ; but not now nor here.
What I wish to do now is to write frankly, freely,
and truthfully of the women who make the seclu-
sion and the sanctity of gentlewomen possible in
the Far East.

After all's said and done, the social scales must
balance or break, weight them as you will. And
as the women of the Korean gentry are more
secluded than those of any other Oriental gentry,
so are the geisha girls of Choson more interesting,
more fascinating even than the yoshiwara women
of Japan, and infinitely more so than the flower

138 QUAINT KOREA.

girls of China. Men living in the Far East,
superior as they find the society of men to the
society of men and women, tire of the perpetual
society of men, and long to let down its intellec-
tual average a bit by the introduction into it of
women. Now the men of the East cannot pos-
sibly, from their point of view, bring their wives
and daughters out from the safe shelter of home
seclusion. But still they long for the mental,
not to speak of the moral relaxation of woman's
companionship, and so in the East a class of
women has sprung up which is only very slightly
analogous to the class of Western women from
whom respectable Western women draw their
skirts aside as they pass them in the Western
streets.

Women seem to be an indispensable element of
society after all. Social enjoyment without them
is more or less a failure, at least in any very pro-
longed form. And in those countries where wives
and mothers must veil their faces, a class has
sprung into existence — a class whose exact social
position is almost, if not quite, outside the pale of
modern European comprehension.

The geisha of Korea, like the yoshiwara women
of Japan, are sweetly pretty, soft-voiced, and
charmingly mannered. And, like their sisters of
Japan, they seem almost happy and quite dignified.

KOREAN WOMEN. 139

Perhaps indeed, they feel that they fulfil a national
want — perform a national duty.

Companionship is the first and the chief thing
required by an Oriental man from the women he
pays to share some of the hours that he spends
away from home. If the Hindoo, or Chinaman,
or the Japanese, or the Korean man be poor, he
has no leisure hours, and certainly cannot afford
the illicit companionship which comes dear, and
becomes dearer in the long run, all the world over.
If he be well-to-do, the chances are that he has a
bungalow or yamun running over with wives.
Therefore, it is not for a common bestial satis-
faction, but altogether for natural human com-
panionship, that the men of the Far East so largely
employ and so generously pay those Eastern
women who have broken through the closed
curtains and out of the sure safety of Oriental
home-life, into the turmoil and the promiscuous-
ness of society. Here, I must emphatically say,
and it should be most emphatically remembered
by anyone who is trying to understand the
East : the nameless women of the East sin, but
sin is neither their sole nor their chief occupation.
To please, to amuse, to understand, and to com-
panion men, mentally and socially, is their chief
duty, their chief occupation, and their most earnest
study. Sin follows, as sin has the grievous habit

140 QUAINT KOREA.

of following wherever people are human. But sin
is neither the beginning nor the end, and I who
can see no difference between a Korean wife and
a Korean concubine, can see little or none between
a Korean concubine and a Korean geisha. I am
speaking of their morals, of course. The geisha
girl is, as a rule, rather better educated than the
concubine, better educated, quite possibly, than the
wife ; for the geisha must make her way, and hold
any position she gains, solely by personal talent,
personal attractiveness, and personal attainments.
Not for her to lay at the man's feet a son who may
worship him into the most desirable corner of the
Korean heaven ; only for her to please him while
she is with him, to touch for him odd instruments
and sing to them soft, weird songs, to shake the
soft perfume of her hair across his cheek and
the perfume of the flowers she wears upon the
bowl of food, or of fish, or fruit she humbly
places before him ; only for her to laugh at his
humour, flat howsoever it may be ; only for her
to applaud his ambitions, urge on his hopes,
charm away his fears ; only for her to please ;
never for her, save by accident, to be pleased.
And that is the state of their sad fate in Europe,
in Asia, in America, or in Africa : the women who
give an everlasting all for a momentary nothing.
Feminine unchastity is less degrading in the East

KOREAN WOMEN. 141

than in the West, and the unfortunate women of
the East are far less degraded than the unfortu-
nate women of the West. There are three reasons
why this is so. In the Orient no woman is born
to immorality. In the Orient professional un-
chastity is not considered altogether immoral.
And immorality is not the only accomplishment
necessary for the professional success of an Asiatic
unfortunate.

In the Orient no woman is born to immorality.
The ranks of the immoral profession are recruited
from homes and from family circles that are
quite up to the Asiatic average, and an immoral
method of life is usually adopted by an Eastern
girl not from impulse, not from caprice, but from
a conviction that it is the surest and the most
sensible way for her to earn her living, and assist
in earning the living of her family. Her parents,
in all probability, share this conviction with her,
and nine times out of ten she makes her debut in
the profession of sin after the elders of her family
have consulted earnestly together, and sifted, as
best they can, the probabilities and the possi-
bilities of her future. So she starts into her
sad pilgrimage from a clean home, from clean
associations, and her instincts and herself are
clean and normal. She adopts sin gravely and
as a business ; nor does it ever occur to her to

142 QUAINT KOREA.

regard it as a self-indulgence ; rather is it a
penance, or an act of filial self-sacrifice.

In the East the life of a young girl is seldom
wrecked by the misfortune which overtakes so
many of our own girls. The social arrangements
in the East prevent that, prevent it very effectu-
ally. When an Eastern girl takes upon herself
a long martyrdom of public service she is at
least of normal mind and whole of heart. Her
nature, mental and moral, however it may be
debased by her future life, is as yet unvitiated
by any accumulation of ancestral wrong-doing.
She may adopt sin for reasons that seem good and
sufficient to herself and her parents, but she has no
appetite for sin, no appetite inherited from her
mother at least, so she has a fairer start than have
the majority of unfortunate women in the Occident.

In the Orient professional unchastity is not
considered altogether immoral. " There is no-
thing good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
This may not be altogether true, but certainly
there is a good deal of truth in it. The unfortunate
women of the East have vastly more self-respect
than have the unfortunate women of the West.
They are not despised, and therefore they do not
despise themselves ; nor are they driven by the
merciless scourges of public opinion to lower and
coarser methods of life than those unavoidably

KOREAN WOMEN. 143

entailed by the profession they follow. Their
profession is not considered an honourable, an
elevating, nor an enviable one ; but it is con-
sidered, by the people among whom they live,
as a useful and necessary and, within certain loose
limits, an honest one. This makes it possible
for them to lead lives of comparative respect-
ability, and to enjoy frankly, fearlessly, and purely
some of the best things of life. The flowers that
grow about their houses, and the wonderful skies
that canopy their countries, convey to them no word
of reproach. They gather the blossoms as inno-
cently, and they smile back at the smiling heavens
as unshamedly as does any maiden in the East.

If one gives a dog a sufficiently bad name it
becomes almost righteous to hang him. The
peoples of the Orient spare their unfortunate
women unnecessary contumely. And this is the
second reason why those women are better, less
deplorable, individually and collectively, than are
such women in Europe or America. This seems
to me another instance of Asiatic justice and
good sense. Why such women, and such women
alone, should be blamed for an existing state of
general immorality I cannot imagine. They are
not responsible for it, though, of course, they
help to perpetuate it. They take to life's sad
market-place wares for which they know there

144 QUAINT KOREA.

is a demand. They supply the demand ; but they
do not create it.

Immorality is not the only accomplishment
necessary for the professional success of an
Asiatic unfortunate. As I have said, companion-
ship is the chief return an Eastern man expects
and exacts for the coin that he throws into the
lap of a light woman. The loose women of the
East must be educated, and that they are
educated makes it possible for them to spend
many hours of each day in wholesome, refining
occupations — occupations which are closed to
the great mass of European unfortunates.

To recapitulate, the women of whom I am
writing are of a better grade than are such
women in the West, because in the East those
women come from respectable homes and have
memories of innocent and happy childhoods.
Secondly, because they are so regarded in the
East that they need not altogether part with
self-respect ; and lastly, because education and
refinement are not only possible to them, but
necessary to them, and because the majority of
their professional hours are passed in conversa-
tion or with music, and are altogether free from
coarseness.

I have spoken of these women as being out of
the pale of matrimony. This is true, I believe,

KOREAN WOMEN. 145

in China and in Korea, and in most other Oriental
countries ; but it is not at all true in Japan. It
used to be in Japan an ordinary occurrence, and
even now it is not, I think, unusual for a girl to
sell herself for a stated period of time into the
horrible slavery of a tea-house, or become for
some definite number of years the mistress of a
well-to-do man. This is often done to earn
enough money to pay some debt of family honour,
to redeem the pledged word of a father or of a
brother. The girl who does it is considered any-
thing and everything rather than a bad woman.
She returns to her native village, or to her father's
house, when the time of her servitude has expired,
and she is received with every possible sign of
honourable welcome, and is pointed out then and
thereafter as an example of daughterly perfection,
and of virtuous womanhood. She marries as
readily and as well as any of her girl friends, and
her past is not regarded as to her detriment either
by her husband or his family. This practice is
more common among the poor than among the
rich. But there are women of very high position
in Japan who have had this terrible experience,
and who have survived it, mentally and morally.

There is, of course, in Japan a large number of
women who adopt immorality when they are very
young, and who never put it aside. They are

L

146 QUAINT KOREA.

called yoshiwara women. In the old times they
lived apart, not only in quarters of the town set
aside for them, but in quarters that were enwalled,
and through the gateways of which they could not
pass without permission — permission that was
not too readily granted. Even now there are
streets set apart in almost every Oriental city —
set apart for the occupancy of unfortunate women.
The roads and the byways of Japan are sprinkled
with tea-houses, and in almost every tea-house
there are two or more yoshiwara women. These
tea-houses are models of cleanliness, are usually
pretty in situation, and always artistically fur-
nished. The tea, cakes, and sweets sold in them
are almost invariably delicious. The girls who
are supposed to be the chief attraction of the tea-
houses are rather brazen as a rule, far more so
than the flower-girls of China, or the geisha girls
of Korea, but it is a very butterfly sort of brazen-
ness. Their manners are so pretty, their move-
ments so bird-like, and their voices so tinkling
and silvery, that it seems rather unfair to criticize
them for being somewhat over-emphatic in what
they say and do, and in how they say and do it.

I remember one warm afternoon in Kobe, I was
in my jinrickshaw and several miles from home.
I was tired, very thirsty, and my four-year-old boy,
who was with me, assured me that he could not

KOREAN WOMEN. 147

live much longer unless he had something to eat.
I stopped at a tea-house — a pretty, carved,
lantern-hung place that was perched on the hill-
side, not very far from the marvellous waterfall.
I had not been very long in Japan, and had no
idea that I was making a social blunder, but I
noticed that my jinrickskaw coolie looked dis-
turbed and dubious. Two Japanese girls sat on
the verandah ; one was smoking a long silver pipe,
and the other was picking whispered music from
a diminutive white guitar. One girl wore a
kimono of pale green crepe, brocaded with pink
apple-blossoms ; the other girl's kimono was of
dark, bright blue, but it was almost covered with
huge yellow roses. Both girls wore the ordinary
Japanese sash, had their hair elaborately dressed,
and were rather loaded with jewellery. Through
the openings of their kimonos peeped the edges of
sundry other garments, all of crepe or of silk, and
all brilliantly coloured. They laughed and nodded
as I came up the steps, and when I said that my
boy and I were hungry and thirsty, one of them
rose and led me into the house. We passed
through a fair-sized room in which half a dozen
European men, one of whom I happened to know,
and as many Japanese girls were feasting rather
merrily. The girls looked at me with consider-
able good-natured amusement ; the European

L 2

148 QUAINT KOREA.

men looked at me in most considerable surprise.
Baby and I were taken into a dainty little room
which really was not big enough for more than
two, and there were given quite a delightful
luncheon. The girl who had showed us in waited
upon us gravely and most attentively, and with
admirable patience, for we were both hungry, very
hungry, and thirsty, very thirsty. I found out
afterwards that it was the first time she had
poured afternoon tea for one of her own sex, and
that I had made a most unfortunate mistake in
going into the tea-house at all. But the girl who
served us treated me and herself with perfect
respect.

Respectable Japanese women wear the quietest
of colours, in public at least. Bright flowers,
glittering jewellery, and gaudy garments are the
avowed livery of the yoshiwara women. They are
pretty as a rule — these women — prettier even than
the run of Japanese women ; for in Japan personal
beauty is considered one of the indispensable attri-
butes of women who would lead a life of remunera-
tive idleness.

The flower-girls of China are in most ways
more to be pitied than the yoshiwara women of
Japan. They are not as a rule so well educated,
nor so comfortably housed, and though treated
with a good deal of allowance, and collectively

KOREAN WOMEN. 149

taken, as a matter of course, their position is
neither so assured, nor the circumstances of their
lives so endurable as are those of the Japanese
girls. The breaking of the seventh command-
ment may be as common in China as it is in
Korea or Japan, but it is not so lightly regarded,
and the flower-girls are almost without excep-
tion the children of extreme poverty. And a
Chinese woman who has once lived in a house of
ill-fame can never go back to even apparent re-
spectability. This is not so in the Straits Settle-
ments, where there are very many Chinamen and
very few Chinese women. In Singapore and in
Penang Chinese girls who have been sent from
China for immoral purposes very frequently marry
well, and pass the rest of their lives in security
and comfort. But in China I fancy that this
never happens.

The Chinaman is the most domesticated of the
men of the East, and the least fond of general
society. He does not go to the houses of the
flower-girls for society, for companionship, not at
least in any quiet and unobjectionable sense, nor
so commonly as do Korean and Japanese men.
The Chinese flower-girl, except the very lowest
type, is taught to sing, to play on several instru-
ments, to heat wine and to spice it, to prepare
delicacies and table dainties, and to serve a feast.

150 QUAINT KOREA.

She is taught to keep herself as good-looking from
a Chinese standpoint as possible. But this is
usually the list of her accomplishments, the limit
of her education, and she is vastly ignorant com-
pared to the women who dwell in the house of
the man who patronizes her. Many of these
Chinese women live outside the gates of Chinese
cities. Thousands of them live in little boats
that are called "flower-boats" and off of which
they seldom go. The " flower-boats " of Canton
are a most distinctive feature of that most dis-
tinctly quaint place. Shortly before the declara-
tion of war between China and Japan, the following
telegram was sent from Hong Kong : —

" A terrible fire has occurred on the Canton
river among the flower-boats which crowd the
surface and form the permanent dwelling of a
large number of the population. Hundreds of
the flower-boats were destroyed, and fully one
thousand natives must have perished.

"The boats were moored stem and stern in
rows, and the flames spread with such rapidity
that many of the craft were fully alight and their
occupants overcome before they could cut the
boats from their moorings and push them out
into the open water."

As if poor China were not in trouble enough
just then, with a terrible plague still in rather

KOREAN WOMEN. 151

full swing, and with war and with rumours of war,
but must needs go and set herself on fire !

I don't in the least doubt that there was a
terrible fire on the Canton river, and that over a
thousand human creatures perished in the flames.
Such a catastrophe is by no means unprecedented
in China, and most especially in Canton. But I
do doubt that the fire broke out among the
flower-boats. In the first place the flower-boats
do not crowd the surface of the Canton river.
In the second place they do not form the per-
manent dwelling of a large number of the popula-
tion. I think that the sender of the dispatch, or
one of the operators through whose hands it
passed, must have confused flower-boats, sampans
and Chinese cargo-boats.

The flower-boats are not in a crowded part of
the river. They are moored quite by themselves
at the wide mouth of the river and some little
distance from the city. They are together, but
not painfully near. No families dwell upon them.
They are occupied solely by the flower-girls and
their servants, and at night their decks and
cabins swarm with rich and dissipated Chinamen.
Then their windows are brilliant with light, their
decks are bright with fanciful lanterns, and they
are noisy with laughter and the tinkling of strange
stringed instruments, and they smell of hot

OF THE

ER

O., .^.KllJkli ^S

152 QUAINT KOREA.

samshu. Not the sort of place in which one
would expect flowers to thrive ! Alas ! the
flowers on those boats are human flowers. They
are painted with brilliant colours, but not by the
hand of nature.

The girls who live there are not vendors of buds
and blossoms. " Flower-girl " 'is the name by
which the over chivalrous Chinamen designate a
woman who is professionally unchaste.

On the opposite side of the river's mouth, but
still farther from the city, are moored the miser-
able boats of the lepers. The saddest of sins and
the saddest of diseases are within sight of each
other. Both are outside the pale of Chinese
society. Both are excluded from Cantonese
citizenship.

Because of their isolation, I doubt that the
recent fire occurred among the flower-boats. But
among the small cargo-boats, among the thickly
huddled sampans ! Yes ; likely enough there.

Surely it is horrible enough to live all one's life
in a Chinese sampan or in a small junk, without
being burnt to death into the bargain. Drowning,
now, is a very common occurrence on a Chinese
river. No one takes much notice of that in
Canton. To be sure the mothers put crude,
home-made life preservers on their babies, or tie
a long rope about their little yellow waists,

KOREAN WOMEN. 153

fastening the other end firmly to the boat. So if
a Chinese baby falls overboard (as it usually does
two or three times a day), it has a very fair chance
of floating or being hauled back. But the adults
must take their chances, and extraordinary num-
bers of them manage to tumble into a watery
grave. Hundreds of Chinese are born in sampans,
live in sampans, die in sampans. Yet almost none
of them can swim.

For one thing the canals and rivers are too
crowded. There is no room for them to swim in.
For another thing they have no time to learn how
to swim. It's all work and no play to most of
the sampan dwellers.

Think of a family of ten or twelve, or even
more, who live in a one-roomed boat, a boat not
many times the size of a big row-boat. Think
what their family life must be. And they are
only one of myriad families. They live in a
quarter denser than the densest of the crowded
city streets. Think of the stench ! Think of the
din ! Small wonder that they take drowning
almost tranquilly. But to be burnt to death !
That's another matter. Even stolid Chinese
philosophy may be expected to shrink from that.
Think of being burned to death in a boat, on a
river, and yet not being able to drown one's
death agony in the cooling water, because every

154 QUAINT KOREA.

inch of the water's surface was covered with
hundreds of other burning humans !

Such things happen not infrequently in China,
and yet hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
Chinese continue to live in the sampans and in
the cargo-boats. They must live there. There
is no place else for them to live ; unless they
leave China, and few of them have the wish to do
that : none of them have the means. Their dire
poverty drives them into the wretched boats and
imprisons them there, and there they must remain
until they die of old age, of overwork, of starva-
tion, or die by drowning or fire, as the case may
be. And the children born and bred on those
boats ! No wonder that when the boys are grown
to manhood many of them are only fit to hide
themselves within the leper-boats ; that when the
girls are grown to womanhood very many elect to
have the comparative luxury of the flower-boats !

The Korean geisha probably gets more enjoy-
ment out of life and is less conscious of wrong-
doing than is the woman of any other race who
follows the same profession. It follows naturally
enough that the race whose standard of sexual
morality is lowest, regards women of unchaste
lives more leniently than does any other race.
Then, too, the seclusion of Korean ladies is more
rigid than the seclusion of the gentlewomen of any

KOREAN WOMEN. 155

other Asiatic country. This makes the men of
Korea entirely dependent upon the geisha girls
for any outside female companionship, and the
Korean man is very sociable, very fond of good
times, and if he can afford it, apt to make not
only a plaything, but rather a friend out of the
girl whose profession it is to be amusing, enter-
taining and cheerful, at so much an hour.

The word geisha is a Japanese word, and it
signifies " accomplished person." The Korean
word for the class of women of whom I am
writing is ki-saing ; but they are generally called
geisha. The Japanese yoshiwara women are
called geisha, as often as anything else.

In proportion to the populations of the two
countries there are far fewer geisha in Korea than
in Japan, but this is solely, I think, because Korea
is so much poorer than Japan ; for nowhere are
women of their profession more appreciated, more
esteemed, and treated by men more on an equality
than they are in Choson. The Korean geisha is
systematically and carefully trained for her in-
tended profession. Several years are occupied by
her education, and not until she is proficient in
singing, in dancing, in reciting, in the playing of
many instruments, in repartee, in the pouring of
wine, in the filling and lighting of pipes, in making
herself generally useful at feasts and festivals, and

156 QUAINT KOREA.

above all, in being good-natured, is she allowed to
ply her trade. In or near every large Korean city
are picturesque little buildings called " pleasure-
houses." They are very like the tea-houses of
Japan. They are usually built in some secluded
spot, and are surrounded by the brilliance of
flowers, and half hidden beneath the shadow of
trees. They are scantily but artistically furnished,
and are running over with tea and sweetmeats
and girls.

The geisha of the King are, of course, the flower
of the profession, and are dressed even more
elaborately than the ordinary geisha, which is quite
superfluous. They remind one very much, both
in manner and in habit, of the posture girls of
Burmah, and the European who was a looker-on
at a festival in Li Hsi's palace might easily fancy
that when Thebaw was dethroned, his posture
girls, whose occupation was of course then gone,
had fled en masse to the court at Soul. Most
Asiatic dances are slow. Probably the slowest of
them all is the dance of the Korean geisha. Like
all the dances of the Far East, with which I am at
all familiar, it is absolutely free from vulgarity, or
from suggested coarseness. The geisha herself is
covered and covered from throat to ankle. It
would be imprudent to say how many dresses she
usually wears at once. She dresses in silk and in

KOREAN WOMEN. 157

glimmering tissues. Before dancing she usually
takes off two or three of her gowns, and tucks up
the trains of the robes she still wears, but even so
she is very much dressed, and a thoroughly well-
clad person. In winter she wears bands of costly
fur on her jaunty little cap, and an edge of the
same fur about her delightful little jacket of fine
cashmere, or of silk. She wears most brilliant
colours, and all her garments are perfumed and
exquisitely clean. Indeed, cleanliness must be
her ideal of godliness. At least, it is the only
godliness she knows, and, save the virtue of amia-
bility, the only virtue she would be ashamed to
lack. Her parents are poor, always very poor,
and she is pretty, always very pretty. It is this
prettiness which causes her almost from her baby-
hood to be destined for the amusement profession.
It makes her suitable for that profession, and
ensures her probable success in it. Her parents
gladly set her aside from the toilers of the family,
and she is given every possible advantage of mind
and person. So she is insured a life of ease, and
even of comparative luxury. She is a blooming,
gladsome thing, with gleaming eyes, and laughing
lips, and happy dancing feet. She looks like some
marvellous human flower when you meet her in
the streets of Soul, and forms an indescribable
contrast to the draggled crowds that draw apart

158 QUAINT KOREA.

to let her pass as she goes on her laughing way to
her well-paid work.

The geisha girls are greatly in demand for
picnics, and in the summer often spend days in
the cool, fragrant woods, playing for, reciting to,
and feasting with some merry party of pleasure-
makers. If their services are required at a Korean
feast they usually slip in one by one when the
meal is more than half done. The host and his
guests make room for them, and each girl seats
herself near to a man whose attendant she thus
becomes for the entire evening. They pour wine
for the men, and see that all their wants and
creature comforts are well looked after. They do
not eat unless the men voluntarily feed them. To
feed them is to give them a great mark of favour,
and it would be the worst of bad form for them
to refuse any morsel so offered. After the feast
they sing and dance in turn and together. They
recite love stories and ballads, and strum indus-
triously away upon funny Korean instruments.
Their singing is very plaintive : as sad as any
earthly music, but it is not sweet nor pleasing to
European ears. The geisha are often employed
to perform before private families, and not unfre-
quently before the harems of rich men or
mandarins. To introduce them for an evening
into the most respectable family circle is regarded

KOREAN WOMEN. 159

as the best of good taste. Some of these girls live
together, many of them live, nominally at least,
in the homes of their own childhood. They form
strange contrasts to their sisters of approximately
the same age, whose lives have been lives of virtue
and incessant work.

The geisha never by any chance become familiar
with, or are treated familiarly by the women of the
harems into which they are occasionally intro-
duced, and yet some of them are not unchaste in
their personal lives. This, however, is of course
very exceptional. Occasionally the geisha be-
comes the concubine of a man of position, or the
personal attendant of a man of wealth. When
old age, that dread foe of woman the wide world
over, creeps upon them, they become the teachers
of the girls who are ambitious to become geisha.

No geisha girl expects to be entertained. It is her
business to entertain. The moment she enters the
presence of her employer or employers, she takes
unobtrusively the thorough charge of the social
side of the function. She makes herself useful and
amusing, and agreeable in every possible way, and
apparently has no thought of self. Often a large
party of Korean gentlemen will go for a stay of
some days to one of the monasteries that still dot
the Korean hillsides. They usually take with
them an incredible train of servants, and a number

160 QUAINT KOREA.

of geisha. Rare times they have on these excur-
sions, and rare welcome do the monks give them.
The monks and the servants and the geisha devote
themselves to the lords of the situation. And the
Korean man who goes picnicking to a Korean
monastery probably has as good a time as any
reveller in the East.

Such are the Magdalenes of the far Orient ! To
be pitied, to be deeply pitied, but to be less pitied
than the Magdalenes of the West, for they are
better housed, better treated, and less conscious
of their misfortune. There is, I think, a good
deal worth pondering over in the way the peoples
of Asia deal with the great social sin — a sin from
which our human race can scarcely hope for
redemption, unless indeed, —

" Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, Hold, hold ! "

CHAPTER VII.

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE.

WHAT her dress is to woman, his dwelling is to
man. I am speaking, of course, of average man
and of average woman. What she wears indicates
what she is, and is the most natural, the most un-
conscious, and the most common expression of
her individuality, and of her character. She, her
very self, peeps from beneath the laces at her
neck. The house in which he lives shelters his
women and his young; the buildings which he
erects, or helps to erect, indicate who and what
he is, and are the most natural, the most un-
conscious, and the most common expression of
his individuality, and of his character; and we
may see him as he really is, in his roof, his door-
step, and, in brief, in the exterior and the interior
of his home.

It is this, its revelation of mankind, which
makes architecture so intensely interesting a
study, the most interesting, I often think, o'f all

U

162 QUAINT KOREA.

the studies of the inanimate. Not for their grace
of outline, not for their beauty of colour, not for
their artistic consistency, not for their happy
placement, are the great buildings of this world
supremely interesting to us ; but for the glimpses
they give us into the souls, the lives of the men
who have reared them.

Of more recent years records have been made
and preserved of the doings of most of the civil-
ized peoples, but, beyond a doubt, many such
records made in olden times have been irretriev-
ably lost, and many a page of history— a page
clear and convincing to us to-day — would have
been lost to us for ever were it not for the silent
but indisputable testimony of old buildings : ruined
houses, scraps of temples, broken bridges, crumb-
ling towers, and grotesque caves.

It is impossible to speak of Korean architecture
without speaking of Chinese architecture, and of
Japanese architecture. And it is so impossible to
separate the architecture of Korea from either the
architecture of China, or the architecture of Japan,
that one has a very convenient excuse for writing
of the architecture of Korea as it visibly is, and
for writing little or nothing of what it means.
Korean architecture, in all its best phases, is purely
Tartar. Chinese architecture is largely Tartar.
But China, in architecture, as in ethics, and as

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 163

in sociology, is at heart more or less Mongolian.
China has been ridden under, not exterminated,
by Tartar supremacy. Japanese architecture is
Tartar, but it is very many other things, and
the charitable mantle of Japanese art is so all-
covering, and her artists have graciously adopted
the art-methods of so many different peoples, that
it is quite impossible to say whether Tartar in-
fluence is the parent or the powerful adopted child
of Japanese art.

For convenience, I will divide Korean architec-
ture into the architecture of the poor and the
architecture of the rich. Korean hovels are like
most other hovels. Extreme poverty goes rather
naked the wide world over, and the Korean poor
live in houses of mud, roofed with leaves ; and if
the leaves and the mud give out they have holes
in their roofs instead of chimneys.

Korean hovels, Korean houses, and Korean
palaces have many characteristics in common,
characteristics which are climatic and racial. Let
us peep first at the homes of the Korean poor.
The home of a poor Korean, dwell he in a Korean
city, dwell he in a Korean village, or dwell he
desperately perched upon the rocky side of a
Korean mountain, is a house of one story — that
is, of one story in which people live. Above as a
thin sort of attic in which grains and other pro-

M 2

164 QUAINT KOREA.

visions are stored, and beneath is a fairly thick
sort of basement in which heat is bred, from
which heat is generated. Like all other Korean
houses the interior of this house is lined with
paper. It has a paper roof, paper floor, or floor-
cloth, and paper walls. The walls slide back or
lift up, or are in one of several other ways got rid
of, in the summer ; but they are walls for all that,
no less walls because they are also windows and
doors. Paper is the chief feature of every ordinary
Korean house ; and to say that is to say a great
deal for paper : because the cold of a Korean
winter is excessive, is far beyond the cold of the
winter in which I write. In every Korean house,
be it the house of prince or of pauper, there is
what seems to be at first sight, to European eyes,
a paucity of furniture. There is nothing more
significant of the difference between the simple
artisticness of the East and the elaborate inart-
isticness of the West than the way in which
Western rooms are crowded with inanimate
unnecessaries, and the way in which Eastern
rooms are sparsely supplemented with inanimate
necessaries.

I had afternoon tea yesterday with a friend
who loves me so well, and whom I so well love,
that I am sure she will forgive me for drawing, to
her disadvantage, a comparison between her

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 165

drawing-room and the drawing-room of a Korean
man, or the boudoir of a Korean woman. I
never go into my friend's drawing-room without
feeling a thrill of admiration for the nice way in
which her butler avoids knocking over one of a
pair of priceless vases, which were stolen from
Pekin about the time that Sir Harry Parkes and
Sir Henry Loch were rather inconveniently
imprisoned there. I creep in, as gracefully as I
can, between the butler and the two priceless
blue things. I cross a bit to the left, to avoid a
malachite table crowded with silver pigs (some of
them so little that they would look lost on a
threepenny-bit, some of them a foot or more long) ;
then I cross to the right, to avoid a wonderful
teak-wood cabinet of no particular style, that
looks very staggery beneath a multitude of tea-
pots— tea-pots most of which are not interesting
in themselves, and none of which are interesting
in their common conglomeration. Then I almost
trip over the wool of a slaughtered Persian lamb,
and I just save myself from tumbling into a
Louis Quinze chair, and so I work my way
through the ages — through the races, until I
reach my hostess, who, like myself and everyone
else there, is in nice, new, nineteenth-century,
ugly raiment. There may be space in « this
London drawing-room for her, for me, and for all

166 QUAINT KOREA.

the other ordinary folk which are gathered
together, because we are very much alike, but
there is not room for all the chairs, and the
tables, and half the other pieces of furniture,
because no two of them are alike. We humans
are used to fashionable crushes, but I think
it is a shame not to give the furniture room to
breathe.

Let us peep into a Korean drawing-room. A
long cool place. There is a padded quilt,
probably covered with silk, in one corner. The
host sits on that, and any guests that come to
him. If the weather be cold, and the host be
rich, a brazier of charcoal usually stands in
another corner. There is a small table, or
perhaps there are two, with writing and painting
materials. Unless the house be one of dire
poverty there is, at one end of the room, a chest of
drawers or a buffet, or a sideboard, or something
of that sort : a huge piece of furniture made out
of more or less costly woods, fitted with drawers
and doors, and embellished with metal handles.
The handles, or the clasps, or the locks are made
in the shape of butterflies, for the butterfly is a
very favourite expression of Korean artistic
outline. When it is time to eat, a table is
brought in for the host and one for each of his
guests — a table a foot or two high, and just about

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 167

as square as high. Upon this, small dishes of
food are placed, and small but often-filled cups of
drink. When the meal is over, the tables and
the dishes and the remnants of meat and of
liquor (but there are not often many of either) are
taken away.

In an ordinary Korean house there is little or no
other furniture. A screen perhaps, precious for
its decorations, and for the carvings of its frame,
and three or four pictures — pictures distinctly
Korean, but I assure you by no means inartistic.
I can think of nothing else that ordinarily
furnishes a Korean room, except the quaintly
clad people, and the sunshine that comes in
almost iridescently — it shines through windows
of so many different colours : windows of
paper. The colour of the light depends
entirely upon the colour and the texture of the
paper through which it comes. A Korean bed-
room is very like a Korean sitting-room. The
quilt upon which a Korean sits through the day
is the same as, or very like, the quilt upon which
he sleeps at night. Tiger skins are also greatly
used for floor rugs and bed coverings.

To stray a moment from the exact subject of
architecture. The Koreans wear, I believe, very
much the same clothes in day as in night.
Indeed, I believe that the Korean changes his or

i68 QUAINT KOREA.

her garments for five reasons only : to eat, to
put on new clothes when the old ones are worn
out, to have the clothes she or he is wearing
washed, to put on his or her best clothes in
celebration of some festival or other ceremonial,
and to go into mourning. Firstly and foremost,
a Korean undresses to eat. They are not civilized
enough, the people of Choson, to array them-
selves for feeding time. They do not deny their
relationship with other hungry mammals. When
they are hungry they eat. When they are thirsty
they drink, and to be truthful, their hunger and
their thirst is usually enormous, and of long endur-
ance. They are neither ashamed of their hunger
nor of their thirst, for they appease neither before
going to a feast. Indeed, to gorge oneself is
considered the acme of Korean elegance, and it is
the one elegance in which all Koreans, rich and
poor, young and old, male and female, prince and
peasant, indulge themselves on every possible
or semi-possible occasion. And that they may
eat the utmost possible morsel, they loosen their
garments before they sit down to the feast.

But I was speaking of the houses of the Korean
poor. Perhaps it is rather inappropriate to speak
of banquets in connection with them ; yet, except
among the most abjectly poverty-stricken, ban-
quets are held sometimes (at marriages, on

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 169

birthdays, on feast-days, and on lucky-days, if
possible) in every Korean home.

Only Koreans of certain position are allowed to
cover their roofs with tiles. A peasant's roof is
almost invariably thatched with straw or grass.
Every Korean house contains but one room,
or, to state it differently, every Korean room, ex-
cepting for a door opening into another house
or room, is in itself a complete house. It has
a roof of its own, and four walls of its own, and
is in every way independent of any other rooms
or houses, which may form other parts of its
owner's dwelling. When inside a Korean dwell-
ing one may fancy oneself in a suite of apart-
ments opening into each other, that is, of course,
if a certain number of the paper walls are
opened. From the outside of a Korean dwelling,
one seems to be looking at a collection of more
or less closely built, but entirely independent
houses. The position of woman being what it
is, even the poorest Korean house has, or ought
to have, more than one room. This peculiarity ;
this similarity between exteriors and interiors,
makes Korean architecture uniquely picturesque,
and public buildings and the dwellings of the rich
supremely so. Indeed, the better class of houses
often have not only a roof to each room, but -two
or three roofs to each room. Now a Korean roof,

170 QUAINT KOREA.

to my mind, is the most beautiful roof in the
world. It is Chinese in general character, and
slopes from the ridge pole in graceful concave
curves. Except in the houses of the poor it is
tiled. The tiles overlap each other, are unevenly
curved, and rest upon a foundation of earth. In
the course of a few seasons a Korean roof breaks
into bud, and into blossom. Perhaps a great
patch of odd blue flowers covers one-half of the
roof, perfuming the air for many yards. Perhaps
quaint crimson tulips lift their happy heads be-
tween every few tiles. Wild pinks, forget-
me-nots, and orchids mingle on one roof, and
another roof glitters in the sunshine like gold
because it is the bed of a thousand yellow sun-
lilies.

Imagine an old Korean monastery which is
backgrounded by hills, some of them covered
with verdure, and some of them naked rocks,
rocks that are broken here and there by patches
and cracks of hardy flowers. In the distance, we
hear the melodious drip of some gentle waterfall.
Nearer we hear the full-throated soprano of the
larks. And a dozen other birds, green and blue,
and purple, and grey with breasts of yellow, fly
from their nests in the teak-wood trees, to drink
the sweet blood of the blooming iris. The mon-
astery has a score or more of houses, each
rambling from some other. The monastery is

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 171

low and porticoed, and the doors, which are also
its windows and its walls, are slid back in the
grooves, and our view of each of the many in-
teriors is only obstructed by the eight square
posts which are the only permanent walls of a
Korean building. Inside we catch a glimmer of
metallic Buddhas, and hear the careless Sanskrit
sing-song of the monks. In the courtyard stands
a great brass Korean bell or gong, and the stick
with which it is struck lies beside it. A huge
glimmering gong is this ; to call the brethren to
prayer and to rice. Around the edges of the mon-
astery's roofs runs a peculiar shell-like beading,
which is a distinction of a sacred or religious
edifice. The roof was a dark brown once, but
the tiles, those that have not been broken away,
have grown purple and blue, softened by time and
blighted by weather. Where the tiles have
crumbled away, and over many tiles that have
not yet succumbed to decay, honey-suckles,
yellow and buff, and white and rose-coloured, are
creeping and tangling themselves with great,
green ropes that are heavy with gourds — gourds
that are little and pale, and gourds that are big
and golden and speckled.

Or let us look at some one of the king's many
houses. Its round columns and its sqdare
rafters are lacquered and crimson. Its paper
walls are as fine and as polished as silk. Innu-

172 QUAINT KOREA.

merable steps lead up to it, and it is almost heavy
with carvings. Three roofs shelter it, and look
like a tent with an awning above an awning.
Each roof is a bed of flowers that are brilliant and
fragrant — flowers among which birds that are
splendid of feather, and sweet of throat, make
their nests. But the birds and the flowers are
not the only denizens of the typical Korean roof.
Effigies in mud, in bronze, or in wood squat on
the ridges. They look a little like monkeys, very
little like men, and some of them very much like
pigs. They are absurd and impossible to a degree,
and yet, for all that, they are rather life-like, and,
on a weird moonlight night, decidedly startling.
These are the protectors of the houses ; and what
the scarecrow which the European or American
farmer manufactures out of his oldest trousers,
his most ragged coat, and his most disreputable
hat, is to the blackbirds and the crows of the
Occident, these grotesque figures are to the evil
spirits of Korea. They frighten away the devils,
the gods of misfortune, and the demons of disease
that would fain light upon the roofs, and curse
the dwellers of the houses. Socially they belong
with the demons and the imps and the witches,
with the monks and the nuns, and the hundred
other personages of Korea's queer religious or
irreligious spiritualistic community. But physic-

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 173

ally they are a striking and a fascinating detail of
Korea's remarkable architecture.

I have spoken of the khans, which are the
furnaces of the Korean houses. They are not
altogether underground, and so every Korean
house rests, as it were, upon a pedestal — a
pedestal of stone or of earth. But the house is
almost never built of stone. Wood and paper
are its only materials, and few of the countries in
the world are richer in woods, and no country is
so rich in paper as Korea.

The fame of Korea's paper is more world-wide
than the fame of any other Korean product. But
admirable as it is, superior for many purposes as
it is to all other papers, it is really for her woods,
and for their quality, that Korea should be noted
more than for any other thing which she grows
or manufactures. Bamboo is there, of course, in
abundance, and abundantly used. Find me the
country in Asia where bamboo does not grow,
and I'll vow to you that that country has been
an iceberg and in some strange way become
detached from its anchorage at the North Pole,
drifted down to the southern seas, and after
centuries become overgrown with all sorts of
green and gay things, and so come to think itself,
and to be thought, a part of the Orient. When I
say that bamboo grows in Korea I am saying

174 QUAINT KOREA.

that Korea is in Asia, and I am saying no more.
The temples, the palaces, the shrines, and the
lumber-yards of China and Japan were for many
years, and now largely are, dependent for the
most choice of their woods upon the forests of
Korea. And many of the most valued of the tree
species in Japan have sprung up from seeds that
were gathered in Choson. In the palaces, and
in the joss-houses of Pekin, and in the famous
temples of Tokio and Kioto, columns and ceilings
of especial beauty and of great value, com-
mercially and artistically, have been hewn from
trees that grew in Korea. Korea is rich in
willow, in fur, in persimmon, in chestnut, and in
pine — pine which the Chinese prefer above all
other woods for many of the parts of waggons,
boats, and ships. Korea is rich in ash, in horn-
beam, in elm, and in a dozen other hard, very
hard, enduring timbers. The flag that flies above
the yamun of a Chinese mandarin is in all pro-
bability attached to a pole of Korean wood, and,
beyond doubt, the white flags that so recently
fluttered upon the ill-fated ships outside the forts
of Wei-Hai-Wei, had not those ships been built
in Europe, would have made their signals of
defeat from the top of what once had been trees
in Chei-chel-sang or in Hoang-hai. Korea is
splendid with oaks, and with maples, and is

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 175

well supplied with larch and with holly. And
at one season of the year many of her hill-
slopes are purple with mulberries. The juniper-
tree grows there in vast numbers ; the cork-
tree and the Korean varnish-tree, from the
sap of which conies the golden-hued lacquer,
which is one of the important materials of
Korean art. This sap is poisonous, so poisonous
that the men who work with it are paid above
the rates usually received by Korean art-artisans.
There is another tree in Korea which has so
disagreeable a name that I won't name it, but
from it a very fine white wax is extracted. And
there are trees that are pricked for the oil that
gushes from them — oil from which one of the
great national drinks — a hot, peppery drink — is
made, and which is almost the only oil used in the
toilet of a Korean woman.

So the Korean architect and the Korean builder
have the choice of many woods in the erecting
of Korean edifices. A marvellous species of oak
grows plentifully in Korea — oak whose timbers
have been known, and proved to have been, under
water for a century at least, and without decay-
ing. But perhaps the most famous of the woods
of Korea are the wonderful red and black woods
that grow on the island of Quelpaert.

Paper forms a larger part, and is almost' as in-

176 QUAINT KOREA.

destructible a part of the Korean house as is
wood. This paper is made from cotton — cotton
whose fibre is exceptionally long, soft, satiny,
and fine. Most Korean papers are beautiful to
look at, delightful to touch, and incredibly strong.
It is almost impossible to tear them, especially
when they are oiled as they are for all archi-
tectural purposes. The varieties of Korean papers
are almost endless. One kind is an excellent
substitute for cloth, and is used for the making
of garments, and for linings, and in many ways
it takes the place of leather, of woods, and of
metals, and of all sorts of woollen things. There
is a very thick paper which is made from the
bark of the mulberry-tree. It is soft and pliable,
and is as glazed as satin. It is almost, if not
quite, the most easily washed substance I have
ever seen, and is par excellence the Korean choice
for table-cloths.

Glass is almost unknown in Korea, and until
recent years was quite unknown there. And as
we are all very apt to prize most that with which
we are least familiar, and the use of which we least
understand, so Koreans set great value upon
glass. Old bottles, washed ashore from some
European shipwreck, often form the most prized
bric-a-brac in a mandarin's dwelling, and any
Korean who can get a square foot or two of glass

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 177

to insert in one of the paper windows of his house
is a very proud householder indeed.

In the house of a noble the front or outer apart-
ment is used as a reception-room. Here his
friends and acquaintances (indeed, all whose rank
entitle them to mingle with him) gather night
after night for gossip, for tobacco, and for drink.
These rooms take the place of clubs, of bar-rooms,
and of the smoking-rooms of hotels, all of which
are unknown in Korea.

Background and environments are so studied
by every architect in the Far East that landscape-
gardening may almost be said to be a part of
Korean architecture. No Korean building of any
importance lacks courtyards, lotus ponds, groves
of trees, and tangles of flowers, through all of
which are scattered elaborate little summer-
houses. And what the rich Korean does for the
surroundings of his house and his city, nature
almost invariably does for the surroundings of the
house of the poor Korean, who does not live in
one of the crowded cities. The Korean hut is
sometimes half covered with vines, and is alto-
gether cool and delightful from the shade and the
perfume of trees that are heavy with flowers, with
fruits, and with nuts. No Korean need be roofless.
If a house be burned down, or be blown down,
the entire community are more than ready to

N

178 QUAINT KOREA.

assist at its re-erection, and the poorest man in
the village, the hardest-worked, will spare some
fraction of his time to help in the re-building. If
a new-comer appear in a Korean village, the
inhabitants go to work to help him build, or, if
necessary, build for him a where-to-lay-his-head.

Such are a few of the characteristics, the most
vivid characteristics, I think, of the architecture
of Choson, — an architecture which is even more
significant than architecture usually is. Korean
architecture is significant of Korean artisticness.
It is significant of Korean good sense ; for the
architecture of Choson is invariably well-adapted
to the climate of the peninsula. But far beyond
this, Korean architecture is significant of the
Korean love of seclusion, and of the Korean
faith in the efficacy of appearances. The Koreans,
more perhaps than any other people, realize that
fine feathers make fine birds, and the most studied,
the most elaborated, and architecturally the most
important part of a Korean house is its fence;
which of course is not a part of the house at all.
This fence may be a hedge, it may be a wall
encircling the domains of a magistrate, or engird-
ling the city. It may be a series of hedges, of
moats, of walls, and of gates. The Koreans are
exclusive and seclusive to a degree. This should
command for them the sympathy of English

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 179

people. All Koreans strive heroically to put their
best feet forward, personally, financially, and
architecturally. This should command them the
sympathy of Americans. The Korean farmer
screens his house inside a quadrangle of hedges,
hedges as sweet as are the hedges of North Wales
in the month of July. A Korean king hides his
palace behind an externity of many walls that are
splendid in height, in colour, in detail, in outline,
and in material. Walls between which a score of
flowers fight each other for the glory of killing every
inch of the grass, — walls between which marble-
outlined ponds sleep cosily beneath their green
and pink and white coverlets of lilies, and of lotus.
And the Koreans who are neither princes nor
peasants, but who stand between the two, spend
a world of thought, and a good deal of money
upon the fences — floral or stone — thrown about
their homes. Only the poorest of Korean houses
— of which there are many — and only the shops —
of which there are few — lack some sort of a wall,
some manner of a barrier between the private
family life, and the public life of the going and
coming community.

Korean walls (I mean the walls of masonry
which mark the boundaries of a city or the limits
of a gentleman's grounds, and not the paper walls
of a Korean house) are, without exception,

N 2

180 QUAINT KOREA.

Chinese in character. But even more important
than these walls are the gateways with which
they are broken, and above all, the gateways or
gates that stand some distance outside the walls.
In Far Asia gates have a significance which they
never have had, even in our own old Norman
days, and never can have, in Europe. Gates are
the architectural ceremonies of the East. They
frame many of the most ceremonial ceremonies of
the East, and it necessarily follows that they are
big and georgeous. For never did a picture
justify more lavish framing than does the picture
of Eastern ceremony. There are three great
classes of gates in the Far East : the torii of
Japan, the red-arrow gates of Korea, and the
pailow of China. But before I try to say some-
thing of these three gates, there are two or three
pleasant things to be said of the gates that
ordinarily pierce the wall of a Korean city. The
gates themselves are heavily built of wood, are
elaborately ornamented with metal, and slowly
swing in a rusty sort of way at sunrise, and at
sunset — swing at sunrise to let the people of the
city out, and the people of the country in ; swing
at sunset to let the people of the country out, and
the people of the city in. Korea not being a land
of machinery, it becomes necessary for a certain
number of officials to tend these gates. They are

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 181

not called gate-keepers, but are officers, rather
important officers, if I remember, of the Korean
army. Now, an army officer, all the world over,
does not mind where he lies, what he eats, or
how he suffers — when he is on active service :
but when debarred from fighting, the soldier, all
the world over, and especially the officer-soldier,
wants to be well-housed, well-roomed, well-fed,
and above all, well-amused. This seems to be
the one military trait which Korea has not yet for-
gotten. Above the gates that open into Soul, and
into every other walled Korean city, are built
very cosy little stone houses. In these the
soldiers on guard — the gate keepers — play cards,
eat rice, munch sweetmeats, and sip arrack.
Above the gateways that lead into the houses of
Korean magistrates, Korean nobles, and of Korean
millionaires, just such houses are built. They are
the concert halls of Korea. In them the band of
the Korean magistrate, the Korean noble, or the
Korean millionaire discourses more or less discord-
ant music, and at delightfully respectful distance
from its employer's house. They never play in
the cold weather. It has been said that this is so,
not because the Korean in whose service they are
cares a whit whether their fingers freeze to their
instruments or not, but because he is unwilling to
open the paper walls of his house wide enough to

182 QUAINT KOREA.

hear the music that is being played in the gate-
houses of his outer walls. I doubt this. A rich
Korean, who is covered with layers and layers of
silk and wadding, and who sits upon a khan in
full fire, and who is surrounded by braziers of
charcoal, and whose house is deplorably lacking
in ventilation, does not, I think, as a rule, shrink
from having his front door or his side wall opened
once in a while. Beneath the guard-house build-
ing, above the gate of a Korean wall ; there can be
no khan, for the guard-house is above the gate,
and many feet from the ground in which the Khan
must be embedded. And so I put it down to the
humanity of the average well-to-do Korean that he
never makes his band play, on his walls, save in
fairly warm weather.

These rooms, these little houses built above the
gates of a Korean walled city or the gates of a
great man's domain, have been in years past the
scenes of many a Korean romance, and even now
they are often the favourite retreats or lounging
places of Korean poets and philosophers. They
are usually furnished with considerable comfort.
They are cosy in the autumn and in the spring,
and delightfully cool in the summer. They're
well above the city's sights, and high above any
unpleasant intrusion of the city's sounds, and so
are fit resting-places for one who wants to meditate

JN JL V

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 183

or dream or write poetry, or be at rest, or escape
from the hundred nagging vexations of daily
life.

Korean walls are adjuncts to Korean gates, and
not, as with us, the gates adjuncts to the walls.
The walls are built to emphasize the importance
of the gates, to supplement them, and to attract
attention to them. To the Korean mind the walls
are so much less important than the gates that
the gates are often built and the walls omitted
altogether. Such gates are the torii of Japan,
the pailow of China, and the red-arrow gates of
Choson. Every Korean gate has a name, a
name that is meant to be impressive and poetical,
symbolical of beauty and of good. And doubtless
these names are so to Korean ears, but they are apt
to strike the European mind of average stolidity
as amusing or silly. In Korea, indeed, every
edifice of any pretension has a name. The people
of the Far East personify their buildings to a great
extent, and endue them with individuality, and
with human attributes. Royal gateways are
often flanked by two immense Chinese lions, or,
as they are more generally called, Korean dogs.
These dogs are but one of the many most universal
expressions of Korean art. They are the one ex-
pression of Korean art with which we, in Europe,
are very familiar.

184 QUAINT KOREA.

There is nothing else in picturesque Korea so
picturesque as the red-arrow gates. I wish I might
devote a chapter to them, and I am rather ap-
palled at undertaking to at all clearly describe
them in a few paragraphs. A dozen or more of
the most eminent European authorities on Korea
unanimously declare the red-arrow gates to have
either been copied from, or to have been the
originals of the Japanese torii. Why, in the bulk
of literature that has been written about these
strange gates of the Far East, little or no
mention has been made of the Chinese pailow
puzzles me. There can, I think, be no doubt that
the three gates are three generations of one archi-
tectural family, or that they have had a common
origin. The pailow of China are memorial arches,
erected, as a rule, to commemorate the virtue and
the character of women who have slaughtered
themselves that they might follow their husbands
to the grave. These arches are heavier than the
Japanese torii, or the Korean red-arrow gates, but
they are like both in their general outlines and in
situation. And all Chinese architecture is very
much heavier than the architecture of Korea or
of Japan. The torii of Japan marks the approach
to a temple, or to some sacred place. It is formed
of two upright columns or pillars which lean
slightly toward each other at the top, and are

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 185

crossed by two or three graceful bars ; the upper
of which is slightly, but very beautifully curved.
The word " torii " is most usually translated
" birds' rest," from " tori " a " bird," and " I "
" to be/' or " rest." And the theory has been that
they were originally built as convenient resting-
places for birds : as birds, with all other animals,
were sacred in the eyes of the Buddhists. This
translation is unsatisfactory. The etymology of
the word itself, like that of so many other Japanese
words, is hidden in a good deal of mystery, and
though to-day we find the torii outside of every
Buddhist temple in Japan, we also find one out-
side every Shinto temple in Japan, and it is easily
proved that they were first reared outside the
Shinto, and not outside the Buddhist temples.
Long before Buddhism was introduced into Japan,
the torii stood outside numerous Shinto temples.
The most plausible translation of the word " torii,"
though it is not a translation altogether convinc-
ing, is " a place of passing through." It is Mr.
Chamberlain, I believe, who gives this translation,
but his book is not at my hand, and I am not
positive. Certainly both in Korea and in Japan
the birds make a very general resting-place of the
torii, and of the red-arrow gates. But then so do
they in China of the pailow, and so do they in
America and Europe of the telegraph wires. It is

i86 QUAINT KOREA.

very possible that from this habit of theirs " torii "
has come to mean, or has been thought to mean,
" birds' rest." The red-arrow gates of Korea are
taller and narrower than the torii of Japan. The
red-arrow gate never stands outside a temple, but
outside a palace or some high magistracy, and it
denotes the approach to a house of the king, or to
the house of one of almost kingly authority. So
in Soul we find a red-arrow gate standing outside
the yamun of the Chinese Resident, one of the
many silent, but clearly legible proofs that Korea
has long regarded herself as a vassal of China.
These gates are painted a most brilliant red, which
is the Korean royal colour. The upright columns
of a red-arrow gate are crossed by two horizontal
bars. These bars are quite straight, and unlike
the cross-bars of the torii, the upper one does not
extend quite to the top of the perpendicular
column. These gates are called arrow-gates
because of twenty or more speared-shaped bits of
wood that are embedded in the lower of the two
horizontal bars, pierce through the upper bar, and
extend a little higher than the shaped ends of the
perpendicular columns. They are simplicity itself,
these red-arrow gates, except for their gorgeous
colouring, and altogether lack the elaboration of
the Japanese torii. They are thirty feet high at
least, often much higher. But however simple in

KOREAN ARCHITECTURE. 187

themselves they make wonderful frames for won-
derful bits of Korean landscape. On the exact
centre of the upper cross-bar rests a peculiar
design which represents the positive and negative
essences — the male and female essences of
Chinese philosophy. This again is surmounted
by tongue-shaped or flame-shaped bits of wood,
which are supposed to, in some way, represent
the power of the king. The two symbols to-
gether signify Korea's king as omnipotent, since
he is under the protection of China, and has
espoused the religion of Confucius. It is notice-
able that the torii of Japan invariably marks the
vicinity of a temple, or of some building, or some
place sacred to one or more of the Japanese
deities ; while in Korea the red-arrow gate in-
variably signifies the proximity of the dwelling of
temporal power. I am inclined to think that the
Koreans borrowed the idea of their red-arrow gates
from the Chinese, and that the Japanese seeing
them, translated them into torii. If this is so, it
is presumable that in both instances the borrowers
erected the gates in front of what was to them the
most important places in their own countries.
The Emperor of Japan is the nominal head of the
Shinto religion. In the days when the torii was
introduced into Japan, religion was probably a
great force in the three islands, and the temples

i88 QUAINT KOREA.

seemed to the Japanese the most appropriate
places to be honoured by this arched sign of im-
portance. In Korea, on the other hand, religion
is, and for many years has been, under a social
and governmental ban. In Korea the king is all,
and the gods are naught, so — as a matter of
course — the red gates reared their graceful, arrow-
crowned heads outside the house of a king, or of
a deputed representative of the Chinese emperor.
The bridges of Korea, the big bell at Soul, and
a dozen other characteristic details of Korea's rich
architecture, all rise up before me and seem to
reproach me for passing them by without a word.
To touch upon them with anything approaching
adequacy would require pages and not words, and
the pages at my disposal are growing few. But I
can heartily recommend their study and the study
of Korean architecture in general to all who are
interested in the East, and in architecture, and
who are fascinated by the quaint and the sym-
bolical.

CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE, AND THE
KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES.

THERE is nothing else, I think, that so positively
proves the intimate relationship of China, Japan,
and Korea, as does the great similarity between
their games and their amusements — a similarity
which almost amounts to identicalness. If it is
true that " in vino veritas" it must be equally
true that men are most natural when they are
happiest, freest from care, and have neither
business nor duties beyond recreating themselves.
So when we study the Chinese, the Japanese, and
the Koreans at play, and find that they all play
very much alike, appreciate the same or kindred
amusements, have the same methods of feasting,
of resting, and of enjoyment, we are justified in
concluding that these three peoples are very
near of kin. But if they be children of the same
parents, they are not the children of one birth,
and this to me, at least, is proved by the 'few

igo QUAINT KOREA.

but sharp differences between each of their three
ways of amusing themselves.

China, Korea, and Japan ! And the greatest of
these is China. Let us watch them, beginning
with China, at their recreations, and then let
us note how in those recreations they differ.

Feasts naturally form an important part of the
happiness of a people, the majority of whom
commonly go hungry. A Chinese dinner is in
more than one way startling — to the average
European mind. But it is a very good dinner
for all that.

I have been at many a Chinese dinner. Some-
times I have sat with the quaint Chinese women,
behind the shelter of the lattice. Sometimes I
have feasted brazenly with the men ; and more
than once the women of a Chinese household
have, out of courtesy to me, come forth from the
prized seclusion of their lattice-screened coign
of vantage, and joined me in eating with the
commoner faction of the family herd ; in breaking
bread with men.

Chinese festivals ! The subject is so intricate
and so interesting that I have not the impertinence
to dismiss it in a sentence. But, in passing, I
may say that no people enjoy festivals more, no
people indulge in them more discreetly, less
frequently than do the Chinese.

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES, igi

Chinese ceremonials ! Funerals, weddings,
and a hundred others ! I know, in all the East,
nothing more incomprehensible to the average,
well educated European mind ; nothing more
philosophically pregnant to minds that are
exceptionally industrious and exceptionally open.

Chinese recreations are almost myriad.
They fly kites ; they let go perfumed, brightly-
lit balloons of silk and of silk-like paper ; they
light their fire-fly-lit land with a hundred thou-
sand lanterns, and in honour of those lanterns,
in indulgence of themselves, they hold a feast.

The dramatic is the chief of all arts. In China
dramatic performances take the precedence of all
entertainments. A Chinese theatre, at the best, is
a barn-like place. It is devoid of scenery. Only
men take part in Chinese theatrical performances.

In China, actors are looked down upon as
social pariahs, and their sons may not enter
for the competitive examinations which are the
birthright of almost every Chinaman.

But nevertheless the Chinese have a god of
play-acting, and they pay him no small homage.
Indeed, all the Chinese deities are supposed to
be great theatre-goers ; and for their benefit
theatrical performances are frequently held in the
courtyards of the temples. The people (who
have a free entree] flock to these performances and

192 QUAINT KOREA.

enjoy them as much or even more than the gods
are supposed to do.

To almost no Chinese dramatic performance
is admission charged. A number of people club
together, hire the actors, engage the musicians,
put up a shed — on the street, in a field, anywhere,
anyhow — invite the entire community — which
needs no urging — and the performance begins.
Or a rich man is the momentary impresario. But
even then the people expect to be admitted, and
usually are.

The Emperor of China is a great devotee of the
drama. He often commands a play at eight in
the morning. Indeed, the day is the more usual
hour for all theatrical performances in China.

But the most well worth seeing of Chinese
Thespian entertainments are those that take
place in the temple courtyards. No need of
scenery there ! Behind the bamboo stage rise
the not unimpressive walls of the queerly-archi-
tectured Chinese temple. Where we are wont
to have glaring footlights there is a soft, rosy
glow, for there great rhododendrons lift their
proud and heavy heads. The courtyard is partly
surrounded by a wall so old and broken that it
might be the veritable old wall of China. From
its sides lean double-flowering apricots and the
sweet yu-lan, with its thousand blooms of pale

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 193

peach colour. From the wall's top strange
Chinese grasses nod and flower-heavy vines hang.
Among the vines and grasses primroses nestle
cosily. Beside the wall tulips flaunt, and great
clumps of mignonette grow among the hibiscus
flowers. The actors are very fine with their
crowns of tinsel and their robes of silk. The
audience, too, is well worth watching, with their
intelligent yellow faces, and their glittering black
eyes. They are tense with interest, those Mon-
golian play-goers. And the Chinese orchestra !
Ah ! that is droll indeed.

We are apt to think of Chinese music as being
noise pure and simple. Certainly very much
Chinese music is superlatively noisy. But even
Chinese music has its softer side, its refined
moments. I remember a little band in Canton
that used to make very pleasant lullaby music,
and to handle their odd instruments with most
considerable taste.

When Noah was learning something of boat-
building, the Chinese were, in their Chinese way,
expert musicians. Their principal instrument
was made of twelve tubes of bamboo. Six
tubes were for the sharps, and six for the flats.

To-day the Chinese have over fifty musical in-
struments— instruments made of stone, of metal,
and of wood.

o

194 QUAINT KOREA.

Chinese dramatic literature is unusually in-
teresting. To study it is no mean mental tonic,
and it is, I believe, the best way to study the
Chinese people, unless one can live among them
with some little intimacy.

But I must not linger too long by the wayside
of my pleasant subject. Yet I must touch — if
only with a sentence — upon four or five of the
many other ways in which the Chinese recuperate
their overburdened bodies and their jaded minds.
. They take great joy in Nature. Picnics are a
most Chinese institution. They are invariably
planned to be at some spot where there is an
exceptional view. And the picnic party will sit
for hours, and watch the hills, or masses of fruit
trees in bloom, or the sunset — sit silently too ; for
the Chinese, though the noisiest nation on earth,
are apt to be hushed in the presence of nature,
however much they chatter in the presence of
their gods.

The Chinese are intensely fond of gardening.
Every Chinaman that can afford it has a flower
garden, and in nothing, save the graves of his
ancestors, does he take more pride. In the
garden's centre there will be a lake — a very
round, funny lake — and on its rippleless bosom
great drowsy lien-hoas will sleep away their
perfumed lives.

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 195

The lien-hoa is the Chinese water-lily. There
are many varieties. They are single and double.
They are red, they are rose, they are white.
And some are of an indescribably lovely pale red,
delicately streaked with white.

In almost every Chinese garden you will find a
summer-house, its roof heavy with festoons of
the wisteria. And there will be a pansy bed, a
bosque of bamboo, a grove of camellias, a field of
chrysanthemums, a world of peonies, trees of
peaches, of plums, and of apricots, parallelo-
grams planted with hydrangeas, and clumps of
azaleas.

There are two other Chinese pleasures that I
must at least mention — opium-smoking and
gambling. Both are ineradicable characteristics
of the Chinese.

The poppy gives the Chinese masses inestim-
able alleviation, and does them, I believe, the
veriest minimum of harm.

Gambling, I fear, has a more baneful effect
upon them. But it is their most positive and
commonest diversion, and it will, I fancy, always
be their national habit.

I have spoken of Chinese amusements, and

now my trouble begins. I am at an entire loss

to know how to speak of Korean amusements

without repeating myself almost word for word.

o 2

196 QUAINT KOREA.

I can think of but two Chinese amusements
which are not as general in Choson as in Cathay
— card-playing and theatre-going. In Korea it
is not good form to play cards, and they are not
played openly, except by the soldiers, and the
lowest grades of society. Soldiers are allowed to
play cards as much as they like, and for a very
quaint reason. A soldier is often called upon for
night duty. Now after eating, the thing dearest
to the average Korean is sleeping, and the
Korean government, which is not, from the Far
Asiatic point of view, so merciless after all, has
decreed that, as the playing of games of chance
is more likely than any other thing to keep a man
from being sleepy, the Korean soldiers may
indulge in any and every game of chance,
including those that are played with cards.

Korea is not without theatrical performances, no
Eastern land is ; but the theatrical performances
of Korea are very different from the theatrical
performances of China and of Japan. Indeed, in
no branch of amusements do the three countries
so differ as they do in the branch dramatic.
With the possible exception of the Hindoo and
the Mohammedan, the Japanese dramatic school
approaches our own more than that of any other
Oriental country. I have seen performances in
Yeddo that seemed to me to quite merit classifi-

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 197

cation with London productions at the Lyceum,
and at the Savoy. Chinese dramatic art is a
thing apart, and a law unto itself. It makes
little or no appeal to European intelligence, or
to European imagination. It is for the Chinese,
and takes as little concern as the Chinese them-
selves voluntarily do of other peoples.

Korean dramatic art, if it is at all akin with the
dramatic art of Europe, approaches most nearly
the art methods of the high-class music halls, and
the best French variety theatres. Every Korean
actor is a star, superior to, indifferent to, and
independent of scenery.

More often than not, the Korean actor is not
only the star, but the entire company. He plays
everything — old men, juveniles, low comedians
and high tragedians, leading ladies, ingenueux, and
rough soubrettes — plays them with little or no
change of costume, plays them in quick suc-
cession, and wholly without aid of scenery. And
very clever, indeed, he is to do it. Closely allied
as all the three great peoples of the far Orient are
in their amusements, the amusements of the
Koreans resemble the amusements of China very
much more than they do the amusements of Japan ;
and yet Korean acting is very much more like
Japanese than like Chinese acting. This is
especially worthy of note, I think, because in

ig8 QUAINT KOREA.

every nation in the world, the theatrical is the
highest form of amusement.

Korean acting would come, perhaps, more
properly under the heading of Korean art than
under the head of Korean amusements, or quite
as appropriately, perhaps, under the head of
Korean religion. For in Korea, as in every other
country, acting is not only an exquisite, and one
of the highest expressions of a nation's intellec-
tuality, but is the child, almost the first-born
child, of that country's religion. It is, perhaps,
because Korea has ceased to have a religion that
Korea has no theatre, at least, no permanent
theatre. The Korean actor gives his perform-
ance on the bare paper floor of some rich man's
banqueting hall, or at the street corner. The
actors of Japan are surrounded with every
possible accessory, and with the perfection
of accessories. The most faultless stage setting
I ever saw, the utmost nicety of properties that
I ever saw, and the best trained supers I
ever saw, I saw on the stage of a Tokio
theatre. The Korean actor has no stage
setting, he has no properties, and he never
heard of supernumeraries. His theatre — for, after
all, I am inclined to withdraw what I said, and
to maintain that wherever an artist acts there is
a theatre — his theatre consists of a mat beneath

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 199

his feet, and a mat over his head, and four per-
pendicular poles separating the two mats. And
yet the Korean actor shares very largely the
polish, the definiteness of method, and the con-
vincing artisticness of the Japanese actor. If
religion had flourished in Korea as it has flourished
in Japan, it is probable that, under the sheltering
patronage of religion, Korean acting would now
equal, if not excel, the best acting of Japan. As
it is, the Korean actor is remarkable for his
versatility, for his mastery of his own voice, his
mastery of facial expression, and his comprehen-
sion of, and his reproducing of, every human
emotion. A Korean actor will often give an un-
interrupted performance of some hours length.
He will recite page after page of vivid Korean
history ; he will chant folk-songs ; he will repeat
old legends and romances, and he will give Punch
and Judy-like exhibitions of connubial infelicity
and of all the other ills that Korean flesh is heir
to. And he will intersperse this dramatic
kaleidoscope with orchestral music of his own
producing. Perhaps he has pitched his theatre
of mats in the full heat of the noon-day sun, but
even so, he only pauses to take big, quick drinks
of peppery water, or of a very light, rice wine, in
which good-sized lumps of hot ginger float. If
the actor is performing at a feast of some man-

200 QUAINT KOREA.

darin or other wealthy Korean, he is, of course,
paid by an individual employer ; and the audience
which has, in all probability, been amply dined
and amply wined, sit near him, sit at their ease,
and in an irregular semicircle. If the perform-
ance is given in the street, it is purely a speculation
on the part of the actor. The audience sit about
on queer little wooden benches, or squat on mats,
or stand. And when the actor knows (and this is
something which an actor always does know, the
acting-world over) that he has struck the high-water
mark of his momentary possible histrionic ability,
he pauses abruptly and collects such cash as his
audience can or will spare. The result is usually
very gratifying to the actor. The audience
want to see the play out, and the player won't
play on until he is paid. A street audience ap-
preciates the play highly, appreciates it none the
less, perhaps, because it — the audience — eats
and drinks from the first scene until the last.
It is an interesting sight to see in front of the
temporary temple of a Korean actor a con-
course of men with eyes a-stark with pleasure, and
faces a-bulge with refreshment, but it is a sight
which is not too open to the criticism of the people
in whose own theatres ices and coffees and sweet-
meats are hawked about between the acts. It
always seems to me that we insult art grossly

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 201

when we tacitly admit that we cannot sit through
a fine dramatic performance without the stimulant
of meat or of drink. The Japanese also eat between
the acts, but then they have the excuse of sitting
through performances that are sometimes twelve
hours long. We lack that excuse in Europe. And
though the Koreans munch and sip through the
intensest moments of a Korean theatrical exhibi-
tion, no dramatic performance in Korea lasts,
unless I mistake, for more than three, or at the
utmost, four hours. A Korean actor, to attain
to any eminence in his profession, must be able
to improvise, and probably in no Eastern country,
certainly in no Western country, is the art of
improvising carried to so high a degree of per-
fection as it is in Korea. The Korean actor also
approaches somewhat to the Anglo-Saxon clown.
He must be quick with cheap witticisms, glib
jests, and jokes that would be coarse if they were
not above all stupid. He must be ready with
topical quips, for the Korean crowd will have its
laugh, or it won't pay. This branch of his trade
he is seldom called upon to ply when he performs
at private entertainments.

The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans
are all inveterate picnickers. They are all in-
tensely fond of Nature, and of feasting out of
doors. All three of these peoples take the

202 QUAINT KOREA.

greatest delight in tobacco. Opium is smoked in
Korea more than in Japan, but far less than in
China. But all the Koreans, whatever their age,
whatever their station, whatever their sex, smoke
tobacco almost as perpetually as do the Burmese.
The Koreans use a|pipe, of which the bowl is so
small that it only holds a pinch or two of tobacco,
and the stem of which is so long that it is almost
impossible to light one's own pipe. When not in
use, a gentleman's pipe is carried in his sleeve, or
tucked into his girdle. The labouring man or the
coolie usually thrusts his down his neck between
his coat and his back. All three of these peoples
are great patrons of professional story-tellers,
and of magicians. The Japanese excel the others
in magic, and the Koreans excel in story-telling.

It is a favourite pastime both in Japan and
Korea to watch trained dancers. There is no
dancing in China.

In Korea fights are the occasions of great
national joy. In Japan skilful wrestlers and
fencers give really artistic exhibitions, but never
carry them to the point of brutality. But in
Korea a fight is a real fight. Blow follows blow ;
limbs are bruised, dislocated, and broken. During
the first month of the year it is legal, and is the
height of Korean good form, to indulge in as many
fights as possible. Antagonistic guilds, number-

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 203

ing 'hundreds of men, face each other at some
convenient and appointed spot, and in the sight of
thousands of enthusiastic spectators, fight out an
entire year's debt of envy and hatred. Men en-
gage in the roughest of personal combat; men
who during the other eleven months of the year
scarcely fight upon the gravest provocation. A
considerable fight between two Korean women of
the poorest class is not unknown, and some of
them fight extremely well. Mothers often devote
considerable time training their small sons in the
art of defence, and of fisty attack. Every Korean
town, almost every Korean village, has a champion
fighter. Prize-fights are to Korea what the race-
course is to Europe and to Anglo-Asia. The
spectators bet until they have nothing left to bet
with, and then very often start an amateur fight
of their own. Korean gentlemen do not as a rule
fight, nor are they apt to attend a public fight.
They often, however, go to very great expense in
engaging professionals to give private exhibitions
of their prowess. There is one rather comical
side to a Korean fight. Every Korean wears an
abundance of big clothing, and the antagonists
never dream of disrobing in the least. And so
two fighting Koreans, from a little distance, look
as much like two fighting feather beds as. any-
thing else. Debt is said to be the cause of nine

204 QUAINT KOREA.

out of ten of the fights that are not exhibitions of
skill. In Korea, as in China, it is a great dis-
grace not to pay all your debts on, or before the
New Year ; and any Korean who fails to do so is
very apt to find himself involved in a pugilistic
reckoning. Club fights and stone fights are very
common. When a stone fight is proposed the
friends or admirers of the combatants spend some
hours in collecting two mounds of small rough
stones. Then the battle begins, and it is a battle.
Sometimes it is a duel, and sometimes fifty or
even a hundred take an active part in it, pelting
each other as rapidly and as roughly as possible.

But the most important, and the most popular
of all amusements in Korea is that of eating and
drinking. Intemperance, I fear, is very common,
and is so little condemned by public opinion that
it is quite as much a national recreation as a
national vice, but it is seldom or never indulged
in by women, and even the geisha girls are sobriety
itself. The Koreans drink everything and any-
thing of an intoxicating kind that they can get.
They are improving, however, in this respect, of
late years. Japanese beer is somewhat displacing
the heavier rice liquors, and among the very
wealthiest people both claret and champagne are
popular. But the Koreans eat as much as ever
they did, and no other people extract so much

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 205

genuine enjoyment from eating. The Koreans
season their food more highly, and use more
chillies, more mustard than any other people in
Asia. They are very fond of the taro, a smooth,
small, sweet potato. They devour sea-weed by
the pound, and eat lily-bulbs by the bushel. Here
is the menu of a very elegant Korean dinner : —

Boiled pork with rice wine.

Macaroni soup.

Chicken with millet wine.

Boiled eggs.

Pastry.

Flour.

Sesame and honey pudding.
Dried persimmons and roasted rice with honey.

Both the Koreans and the Chinese, at least
those who can afford it, use very much more meat
than do the Japanese.

Sleeping is another great national amusement
in Korea. I know no other people that seem to
take so much positive enjoyment in sleep, and
who go at it so deliberately and systematically.
They positively regard it as a pastime.

The Koreans are fond of music, and have many
concerts, but then so, too, do the Japanese and
the Chinese. Fishing is a popular sport in all
three countries.

The Koreans have many festivals, at which they
indulge themselves in as much pleasure as possible.
As in China, New Year's day is perhaps the most

206 QUAINT KOREA.

important, and certainly the most generally
observed of the festivals. The Korean New Year
customs and the Chinese New Year customs are
almost identical. I won't describe the New Year
customs of Korea, because to do so, I should have
to say almost word for word what I recently
wrote about the Chinese New Year. Kite-flying
and top-spinning occupy a good deal of the time
of old and young in China, in Korea, and in Japan.
Kite rights and top battles are of very frequent
occurrence, and are really very pretty to watch.

The Koreans are very fond of visiting, and of
being visited, but in this again, they in no way
differ from the other peoples of the further Orient.

Besides fishing, there are three manly sports in
vogue in Korea, and I believe, three only ; all
others being considered undignified and ungentle-
manly. The three are archery, falconry, and
hunting. Indeed, I scarcely know if I am right
in including hunting in the list. It is so very
generally pursued as a business, and not as a
pleasure. I believe that a few Koreans do some-
times hunt for sport, and very good sport they
usually get. Deer, tigers, leopards, badgers, bears,
martens, otters, sables, wolves, and foxes are abun-
dant, and the peninsula is full of feathered life.
Pheasants are as plentiful, as beautiful, and as
toothsome in Korea as they are in China. And

How THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES. 207

they have wild geese, plover, snipe, varieties of
ducks, teal, water hens, turkeys and turkey-
bustards, herons, eagles, and cranes ; and the
woods are full of hares and of foxes.

Archery is considered in Korea the most dis-
tinguished of recreations. Every Korean gentle-
man, from the king down, is, or tries very hard to
be, expert at archery. They use a tight, short
bow, never over three feet long, and arrows of
bamboo. The Koreans are wonderful marksmen,
and professional archers are among the most
popular of public entertainers.

Falconry is almost as popular as archery, and
every nobleman has at least one falcon. The
falcon is invariably extensively and gaudily ward-
robed, and has usually a personal attendant.
Falcon competitions, both public and private, are
frequent, and among the nobility are often made
the occasion of elaborate entertainments.

The Koreans have a quaint little festival, called
" Crossing the Bridges." Soul abounds in queer
little stone bridges. A moonlight night is chosen
for the festival. Usually a man and a woman
walk to the centre of the bridge, and make a wish
for the ensuing year, or pray for good-luck, and
search the stars for some augury of prosperity.
They have a number of peculiar, picturesque
customs in connection with " Crossing . the

208 QUAINT KOREA.

Bridges," but I fancy that with both men and
women it is more an excuse for a night out than
anything else.

The Koreans are even more impersonal than
the Chinese. The Japanese are intensely per-
sonal. The Korean is impersonal in business,
and impersonal in pleasure. He feasts with other
men, and mingles with other men in all his amuse-
ments, but his interest is absorbed by his surround-
ings, and not by his companions. Introspection,
and the study of other men, are seldom or never
methods of Korean self-entertainment. Nature is
after all the greatest entertainer of the Koreans ;
and to study Nature, to watch her, and to fall
more and more deeply in love with her, is a
Korean's greatest amusement.

CHAPTER IX.

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART.

" Far Eastern art draws its Inspiration from Nature, not
from man. It thus stands, in the objects of its endeavour, in
striking contrast to what has ever been the main admiration
and study of our own, the human figure. A flower, a face —
matter as it affects mind, mind as it affects matter — from such
opposite sources spring the two Art, or the desire to per-
petuate and reproduce the emotions, must, of course, depend
upon the character of those emotions. Now to a Far
Oriental Nature is more suggestive and man less so than
with us."— PERCIVAL LOWELL.

THE subject of Korean art is vast, intricate, and
difficult. It could not possibly be covered, even
in the most superficial way, in one chapter, or in
a series of several chapters. But it would be pre-
posterous to altogether exclude it from any book
whose pages are devoted to Korea generally.
For perhaps the most really interesting thing
about Korea, and certainly one of the most in-
teresting things to be said about Korea is this : —
Korea was the birthplace of a great deal that is
finest and highest in the art of that wonderful art
country — Japan.

P

210 QUAINT KOREA.

A great deal that is most distinguished in
Korean art, past and present, is undeniably indi-
genous to Korea, but, on the other hand, the Korean
artists have borrowed or absorbed a good deal from
the arts of other countries. In the early days of
its prosperity Korean art seems to have owed a
great deal to China. But, even in its infancy,
through the long years of its magnificent splen-
dour, and in these days of its decay or of trance,
Korean art always has had, and has, a marked in-
dividuality, and bears the indubitable hall-mark
of genuine originality.

In the beginning, then, Korean art was prob-
ably a mingling of the national expression of an
intensely artistic people, and what was most
striking in the rich, but less graceful art of China.
Under the Sung dynasty, between the years 960
and 1333 A.D., lay the most brilliant period of
China's literary existence, and perhaps the most
brilliant period of her art life. And it was also
between these years that Korean art reached, and
for some time maintained, its highest perfection.

No careful art student who visits both countries,
or has access to typical collections of the art pro-
ductions of both countries, can fail to observe
that apparently either Persia has distinctly in-
fluenced the art of Korea, or Persia's art been
distinctly influenced by Korea. Probably both

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 211

are true. Persian embassies and Korean em-
bassies were wont to meet in Pekin. Very
probably showed each other the presents sent by
their respective masters to the Chinese Emperor.
These presents were always largely made up of
works of art. And their inspection probably led
to an interchange of presents between the em-
bassies themselves, and later on, to reciprocal
studies, between Persia and Korea, of the art
methods of the two countries. Korea has excelled
in fret-work, in scroll-work, and in a great variety
of arabesque decorations, and in all of these has
very largely followed Persian lines.

The key-note of Korean art, as the key-note of
all Far Eastern and, indeed, of most Oriental art,
is the inferior place held in it by the study of the
human figure. Far Eastern art is a study of
nature and of decorations. This is even more
true of Korea than of China or Japan, though the
Koreans excel both the Chinese and the Japanese
in their drawing of animals. The chief character-
istic of Korean decorative art is its chastity. One
cannot fail to be reminded by it of the severe sim-
plicity of old Grecian art. A good specimen of
Korean pottery or porcelain is never heavily
covered with decoration. A Korean vase, or a
Korean bowl, is simple and elegant of outline, and
the surface is finely finished, but probably three-

P 2

212 QUAINT KOREA.

fourths of that entire surface is undecorated. The
old specimens of Japanese Satsuma (the Koreans
taught the Japanese how to make Satsuma) are
usually distinguishable from the new and cheaper,
because the former are touched with decoration,
and the latter are hidden beneath it. The
Koreans use colour very lavishly when they use it
at all. But conventional design, conventionalized
decorations, and decorations which are more
exact copies of nature, whether in black [and
white or in colour, they use very carefully, and
never crowd them together. Their porcelains are
not so glazed as those of Japan, and the usual, or
favourite colour is a creamy white. The dragon,
which is so conspicuous a personage in all Far
Eastern art, is perpetually drawn by Korean artists
in colour, and by Korean artists in black and
white, but is rather sparingly used on the Korean
pottery ; which in this differs from the potteries
of China and Japan. The mythical animals and
the symbolical animals, though they all figure
largely in Korean art, are not often found on
Korean porcelain. The Koreans value highly all
sorts of crackle ware, and have been excelled, I
fancy, in its manufacture by no other people.

Griffis says : " Decoration is the passion of the
Orient, and for this, rather than for creative or
ideal art, must we look from this nation, to whose

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 213

language gender is unknown, and in which per-
sonification is unthought of, though all nature is
animate with malignant or beneficent presences.
Abstract qualities embodied in human form are
unknown to the Korean, but his refined taste
enjoys whatever thought and labour have made
charming to the eye by its suggestion of pleasing
images to the imagination. His art is decorative,
not creative or ideal. His choice pieces of bric-a-
brac may be rougher and coarser than those of
Japan, but their individuality is as strongly
marked as that of the Chinese, while the taste
displayed is severer than that of the later
Japanese."

Perhaps the design that they most often employ,
in their decorative art, is the well-known " wave-
pattern." We find it on their porcelain, on their
bronzes, in the most conventional of their pictures,
and even on their coins. Some one has suggested
that it is perhaps used on the small copper coins
to symbolize their circulation and fluctuation in
value. The wave-pattern symbolizes successive
and interminable wave-motion. The love of the
Korean artist for water in nature, and for conven-
tionalized water effects in decoration, amounts to
a passion. Water in some form or phase is intro-
duced into almost every Korean picture, and on
to the majority of the porcelains, bronzes, the

214 QUAINT KOREA.

lacquers, and into the carvings. We find the
wave-pattern beautifully executed on curtains and
panels, on armour and on weapons. It often
circles the columns of a building, and is conspicu-
ous in interior architectural decorations. A strand
of twisting, turning, curling waves is commonly
the handle of a fine Korean teapot, and many a
Korean dish, or vase, or bowl rests upon a porce-
lain or bronze bed of seemingly angry waves. The
Japanese have seized upon the wave-pattern, and
have vastly improved it. It is doubtless through
their much exported, and much copied wares that
we have become very familiar with it ; and I have
not infrequently seen it mingled with incongru-
ous European patterns, in fancy printing, both in
London, on the Continent, and in America — used
for the background of decorative initial letters, or
introduced into fancy tail-pieces.

The chrysanthemum was the favourite, the
most favoured, and the most studied flower in
Korea long before it became the imperial flower,
the badge of Japan. The Koreans have always
been, and are, wonderfully skilled in rearing it ;
and in reproducing it in colour, in black and white,
in relief, and in conventional designs. We find
it whenever we turn our eyes toward Korean
objects of art. We find it, or some design sug-
gestive of it, in Korean brocades, and in Korean

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 215

carvings, and many of the most beautiful Korean
borders have been designed from ingenious
arrangements of its petals. In several ways
the chrysanthemum lends itself with pecu-
liar facility to Korean art ideals. It is rich,
splendid, and varied in colour, and the Koreans
have a passion for colour. It is interesting and
noble in shape, and comes out splendidly in relief,
or in half-relief. It is beautiful, but unique, and
sometimes even grotesque in outline, and all the
Eastern peoples admire the grotesque. Certainly
the artists of Korea and of Japan understand the
grotesque's usefulness in art above all other artists,
and employ it to relieve gentler, simpler forms of
beauty, which might grow monotonous if used
perpetually. Clouds and stars and the sun are
utilized in a variety of ways by the Korean
decorative artist. And a conventional pattern,
called " the dragon's tooth," is extremely striking,
and is nicely adaptable to vases or dishes that
are big at the base, and small at the top.

Lacquer has been for centuries as commonly
used in Korea as in Japan, but it has never
reached the perfection, the artisticness in the
former country that it has in the latter.

Korea was once the store-house of innumerable
and invaluable works of art ; art treasures of great
variety, fine in design, excellent in execution, and

216 QUAINT KOREA.

rich in symbolism. To-day there are compara-
tively few art treasures in Korea. The nobles
and the rich men probably each have a few hidden
away. The king has a number. And some are
still to be found in the ostracized monasteries, in
the nunneries, and in other unexpected places.
But Choson is no longer the great art treasure-
house she once was. In the palaces and the
temples of China and Japan are to be seen many
of what were once Korea's most prized works of
art. And these have been taken as booty from
Korea, or sent by Korea as tribute. But the
peninsula has not continued in her old glory of
art production. Korean art has deteriorated in
quality, and in many of its branches shrunk to
something nominal in quantity, because great
bodies of her best artists and artisans have been
sent to Japan, or have gone there. Keenly alive
to all that is beautiful in nature, and all that is
most exquisite in art, the Japanese readily ap-
preciated the high degree of excellence that had
been attained by the artists of Choson. Not
content with taking to Japan the most perfect
specimens of Korean art, the Japanese offered
every inducement to the best Korean artists to
settle in Japan, and spread throughout Japan their
superior knowledge of art, and skill in art work.
To the instructions of the Koreans the Japanese

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 217

owed their unrivalled skill in making the beautiful
Satsuma faience, and the almost as beautiful
Imari porcelain. The Koreans taught the
Japanese how to carve wood, and then, apparently,
forgot how to do it themselves ; though there are
still in Korea some very beautiful specimens of
fine carving, especially in the royal palace at Soul.
The majority of Japanese patterns for brocades
and for stuffs, and many of their favourite designs
for embroidery, are purely and indisputably
Korean.

A scholar, who seems to me always anxious to
do Japan full justice, has written : —

"The existence of any special traits or
principles of decoration, or a peculiar set of
symbols in Korean art, has been thus far hardly
known. When fully studied these will greatly
modify our ideas of Oriental art, and especially
of the originality of the Japanese designers.
Korea was not only the road by which the art
of China reached Japan, but it is the original
home of many of the art-ideas which the world
believes to be purely Japanese."

The Japanese themselves, to be fair to them,
do not claim to have a largely original art, and
my attention was first called to the magnitude of
Japan's art debt to Korea by a Japanese gentle-
man in Tokio. ~

:

OP THE

TNIVERSITY

2i8 QUAINT KOREA.

Old Persian writers express the greatest ad-
miration for Korean porcelains, and for the
beautiful decorated saddles that were sent to
Persia from Choson. The Koreans still excel
in the making of gorgeous and (after once the
eyes grow accustomed to their gorgeousness)
really beautiful saddles. They are inlaid with
pearls, and are richly embroidered. Bows and
arms and fans are among the many things that
the Koreans used to, and still do, make. They
are beautiful with pearls, with jade, and with
gold and silver and iron inlaying. The Koreans
once made splendid and beautiful bells, and were
expert in all sorts of metal work, but they have
lost or laid aside these arts to a very great
extent. There are still some very fine bells in
the peninsula, and some beautiful Korean bells
in Japan, but their manufacture dates back a long
time. And this is also usually true of many of
the best specimens of all kinds of Korean art-
work that we find in Choson or in Japan. It is
true of most of the beautiful images found in the
temples, and many of the vases, the braziers, the
incense-burners, the trenchers, the kettles, the
bowls, the decanters, and the censors, all of
which are exceedingly graceful in form, pure in
outline, and decorated with simplicity and
dignity.

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 219

The throne in the palace of Soul is a very beau-
tiful example of well-controlled art. It is sim-
plicity itself, but it is as majestic as it is simple ;
perfect in every detail, royal in its proportions,
and in severe but perfect taste.

Among the minor arts that still flourish in
Korea is that of toy-making. The Korean toy-
makers really are artists, and the playthings of
the children of the well-to-do are so carefully
designed and so faithfully executed, that in their
little way they have every claim to be considered
works of art. Armour, palanquins — indeed, all the
impedimenta of Korean daily life, and of the daily
life of old Korea — are reproduced with minute
exactness, and very wonderful toys are made out
of bits of tiger skins and of the fur of the tiger
and other wild beasts.

The battle-flags and the banners of Korea
are interesting both to the student of history and
the student of art. The mysticism and the
symbolism that is so characteristic of all Korean
art is noticeable on almost every Korean flag.

The strange animals that we find in Korean
art, animals that are like none that ever lived,
are symbolical, and, to the Korean mind, typify a
great deal that the Koreans think it important
to remember.

A branch of art which is much thought of in

220 QUAINT KOREA.

Chinese-Asia, and is there indeed a fine art, is
pen-work or brush-work. In this art the Koreans
are as adept to-day as they ever have been — as
adept as the Chinese or the Japanese. Fine
specimens of caligraphy are written with a brush
— written upon scrolls of silk or of soft paper,
and are either put away to be treasured, or are
hung upon the walls as ornaments of great in-
terest. The last time I was in Tokio the wife of
a Japanese official, whose home is very rich in
paintings, both European and Japanese, showed
me, with great pride, her collection of such
scrolls — scrolls, all of which were specimens of
fine writing. Very much such scrolls form the
principal wall decoration of the study of the
Chinese minister in London, and such scrolls are
among the most cherished household gods of
every well-to-do Korean. The Koreans write with
the greatest ease and elegance, and it is almost
as natural for them to draw and paint very
fairly well as it is for them to write.

The making of fine pottery is almost, if not
quite, a lost art in Korea, but they still know the
secret of, and still make and use, the exquisite
tints and the matchless colours that characterized
their glazes in the days when Korean art was at
its greatest height. The Korean potters are
among the nomads of the peninsula. A family,

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 221

or several families, of potters choose some spot
where wood and clay are convenient, and there
they build their huts, and there they live till the
wood or the clay is exhausted. All Korean
pottery is fired in ovens that are heated with
wood. There are no great potteries in Korea
or in Japan. Each specimen of their art is the
individual work of an individual, and in this,
perhaps, lays one of the secrets of the fascination
of any genuine work of art from these countries.
The most beautiful piece of porcelain that has
ever been made in China, Japan, or in Korea,
has probably been made in some humble little
hut and fired by an insignificant-looking little
oven.

I have spoken elsewhere of the famous Chinese
lion, or Korean dog. It is more grotesque than
beautiful, and is chiefly interesting because it has
so strong a hold upon the affections of three so
different peoples. For a conservative Asian, he is
a very great traveller, is this Korean dog. He has
found his way into every fancy bazaar, and every
cheap notion shop in Europe and America ; and
we really feel quite as if we had met an old friend
when we stumble upon him in Yeddo, in Pekin, or
in quaint Soul.

It is being constantly urged against Far Eastern
art that it is artificial. Mr. Lowell refutes this so

222 QUAINT KOREA.

clearly, so distinctly, with so much discernment,
and to my mind, so convincingly, that I feel it
would be a pity to refute it in any other words.
He says : —

" Far from being artificial, Far Eastern art is
emphatically natural. The reason that it does
not so appear to us at first is due to two causes.
The first is very simple — an absence with us of
what the Far Oriental sees around him at home.
A picture of snow-peaks would undoubtedly appear
conventional, in the sense used above, to a man
who had dwelt all his life on the plains, and never
heard of such things as white-headed mountains.
The second cause is that certain very salient
features of his landscapes have engrossed the Far
Oriental attention, to the partial neglect of other
less striking but, perhaps, even more common
scenes.

" Every traveller knows the effect of this in other
things beside art. Narrators insensibly, if not on
purpose, pick out the salient points of any land
to give an idea of it to those to whom it is an un-
discovered country. The result is, that on
acquaintance no country seems so odd as imagina-
tion, fed on a few startling facts, has pictured it
to be ; and yet, for all that, the facts may be per-
fectly true. Now, what we do to give others an
idea of foreign lands, the Far Oriental does to give

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 223

himself an idea of his own. His art, by reason of
this strong simplicity, is all the higher art."

Landscape gardening holds a prominent place
among the arts of Korea, and is as well under-
stood, and as generally practised to-day as it has
ever been in the history of the peninsula. Water
forms the principal, and the indispensable feature
of every Korean garden. Indeed, the pond, which
must be in the centre of the garden, often takes
up nine-tenths of the garden's entire area. This
pond is always called a " lotus pond." Usually
the lotus is there, but not always, and its absence
only emphasizes the title of the pond. It is inte-
resting to notice how indispensable the sight of
water is to the Koreans, and it speaks a great deal,
I think, for their genuine love of Nature.

Korea is so surrounded by water, so intersected
with rivers, and has so many high hills from which
water can be seen for some distance, and down
which rivulets and water-falls break, that every
Korean must be very familiar with water in all its
moods and tenses. But he does not tire of it. On
the contrary, a Korean who has his domain on the
very sea-shore, will dig up the larger part of his
garden for the sake of having an artificial lotus-
pond ; that he may sit on the artificial island in
its centre and fish and dream and watch the water.
Fantastic groups of strange rock work are put in

224 QUAINT KOREA.

almost every Korean garden : groups to which
European eyes have to grow very used before they
can see any beauty in them.

Korean music, like almost all Asiatic music,
requires a great deal of study before we can at all
understand it or like it. Its scale differs entirely
from our gamut — differs even more than do
Korean instruments from ours. Japanese music
is of Korean origin, but has changed greatly of
later years. But all classical Japanese music is
still identical with Korean music, which has
changed little or not at all. Korean government
labourers are called to and released from their
day's work by music, and to music do the gates
of a Korean city close or open for the day.

When Korea was in its infancy she was thrown
into intimate contact with China. Korea had not
had time to develop a literature, and so she very
naively adopted the literature of China. Chinese
literature is the classical literature of Korea still.
The great majority of Korean books (and they are
not surprisingly many), are written and printed in
Chinese. The Koreans have neglected their own
language and its literary possibilities for centuries.
Still there is considerable poetry written in the
Korean tongue (but in the Chinese character
almost always), and we may consider the writing
of this poetry as one of Korea's national arts.

A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART. 225

" Poetry parties " are a popular form of Korean
picnics. A number of friends meet at some un-
usually beautiful spot. They have been preceded
by servants carrying writing materials and wine.
Very gravely the competitors (for such they are)
set to work. They sun and joy themselves in the
beauty of the scene, they sip the cup that cheers,
but alas ! intoxicates too ! and when they have
enough assimilated the beauty of the scene and
the gladness of the wine, then they write verses.
The verses take the form of songs, or are ballads
in praise of nature. They write of the bamboo,
of the stars, of the storm, of moonlight and of
sunrise, but never of woman !

Q

CHAPTER X.

KOREA'S IRRELIGION.

KOREA has no religion. This is a sweeping state-
ment, I know, and one that is susceptible of a
great deal of dispute, but I believe that in the
main it is true. The books that have been
written during the last hundred years about
Korea teem with thick chapters on Korea's
religion, but for all that, I believe that Korea is
without religion. There are without doubt
Koreans who are deeply and genuinely religious,
but they are so infinitesimal a fraction of the
population of the peninsula that they no more
justify us in crediting Korea with a religion than
the handful of Theosophists, who are probably in
England to-day, would justify a Korean in credit-
ing England with an at all large acceptance of
Theosophy. Buddhism, which was once as domi-
nant in Korea as ever it has been in China or
Japan, has been almost destroyed. Confucianism

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 227

is still a great power in Korea, as it must be in
every country where ancestor-worship and the
sanctity of the family are the backbone of the
nation's moral existence. But I maintain that
Confucianism is not, properly speaking, a religion.
It is a theory of ethics, a code of morals, admirable,
sublime even, but it is not, as I understand the
word religion, a religion. There are superstitions
in Korea and to spare. The common people are
as superstitious as the common people of any
other civilized country, which is saying a great
deal, and the upper classes are by no means free
from superstition. But who shall venture to call
superstition a religion ? Unless we call super-
stition and religion synonymous ; unless we
accept Confucianism as an individual and actual
religion ; or unless we say that a few scattered
monasteries, that must by law be built far beyond
the walls of a city — monasteries inhabited by
monks, who are looked down upon even by the
common people, and are not allowed within the
gates of any city ; monasteries that are resorted to
by the leisure classes for revel and for roystering,
and never for prayer or penitence — unless we say
that these constitute a national religion, we
must, I think, admit that Korea is distinctly irre-
ligious.

The real difficulty in deciding whether Korea is
Q 2

228 QUAINT KOREA.

in any way religious or altogether irreligious lies
in the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between
religion and superstition. The dividing line
between the two is often indistinct — sometimes
missing altogether — so perhaps I am wrong in
saying that a country so amply dowered with
superstition is devoid of religion.

I base my statement that Korea has no religion
not upon the absence of religion from Korea, not
upon the paucity of religion in Korea, but upon
the fact that in Korea religion is neither respected
nor respectable. Of course, if we define religion
as broadly as do some of the most eminent
authorities (Rossiter Johnson, W. Smith, Bishop
Taylor, Macaulay, and a host of others), and admit
that atheism and superstition are forms of
religion — and I am far from sure that they are not
—my statement totters, if it does not altogether
tumble.

Buddhism was until three hundred years ago
strong in Korea, and Confucianism, which, if not
a religion, is the most elaborate, and one of the
most perfect systems of morality that the world
has ever known, and has served humanity better
than most religions, is strong in Korea still. A
study of these two is, as is the study of all the
higher Oriental doctrines, beliefs, and systems of

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 229

thought, intensely interesting, and the temptation
to dwell here upon Buddhism and Confucianism is
great. But I fancy that everyone who is inte-
rested in reading about so remote a part of the
East as Korea is more or less familiar with the
outlines at least of both Buddhism and Confucian-
ism, and so I will content myself with trying
to tell how the first was driven out of Choson,
and how the second is still the guardian angel of
such morality as the peninsula possesses.

Buddhism flourished there for centuries, and it
was at least tolerated until the Japanese invasion
in 1592. Indeed, up to that time Korea was not
only not without a religion, but she was not with-
out several. The religions of the Far East are as
easy-going as the peoples — they are modest as a
rule, the beliefs of further Asia — and rub along
together very amicably, no one of them seeming
over-sure that it is better than its fellows.

Three hundred years ago, when two great
Japanese warriors, Konishi and Kato, with their
respective armies landed in Korea, each was so
anxious to have the glory of reaching and
conquering the capital before the other, that
neither dare pause to subdue the towns and the
fortresses (and many of these latter were monas-
teries) that lay along his route. Yet neither

230 QUAINT KOREA.

dare leave behind him a long track of unsubdued
and, for those days, well-armed country. In this
dilemma they dressed themselves and their
followers in the garbs of Buddhist priests, and so
by strategy made their entrance into the walled
cities, and into the forts, and once in, put the
inhabitants, the unprepared soldiers and monks,
to death. About thirty years afterwards, when
Korea had shaken off, for the time at least, the
Japanese yoke, the Korean priests suffered for the
cupidity of the Japanese generals ; as the innocent
so generally do suffer for the guilty in this nice
world of ours. The royal decree went throughout
Korea that no Buddhist priest might dwell or
even pass within the gates of a walled city. The
priests fled to the mountains, and there erected
themselves such dwellings as they. could. The
monasteries, in which they had lived within the
city's walls, crumbling away with time, and
decaying with disuse, ceased to be architectural
features of any Korean city. And this is why all
Korean cities are so monotonous in aspect. For
religion has been the patron of architecture as of
art, of music, of literature, and of drama the world
over, and more especially so in the Orient. The
priests of the temples of Buddha, having incurred
the disfavour of the government, rapidly lost what
hold they had had upon the people. And the

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 231

nation, which had always considered its king
almost mightier and more divine than its very
gods, soon ceased to pay tribute to, or ask the
services of, a body of men who had lost the royal
countenance. Then, too, the Koreans are great
dwellers in cities. They go far into the country
to look at Nature, to rest, and to amuse them-
selves, but it would never occur to the Korean
mind to journey far for prayer or sacrifice. So
the revenues of the monasteries fell off. Men
well-born and well-to-do ceased to join the order.
And little by little Korean Buddhism passed away,
until now it is but a wraith of its old self.

This at least is the most general account of
how Korea ceased to be Buddhist, but its authen-
ticity is disputed by several of the most reliable
historians, and by one, at least, who has written
in English. These historians claim that some
centuries ago all the powerful people in Korea
were divided into two factions — one Buddhist,
one Confucist — and great was the rivalry between
these two. Social war ensued, and the Buddhists,
who had become corrupt and enervated, were
terribly defeated. Buddhism was forbidden to
dwell within the capital or within the cities. True,
the monasteries that had always been important
features of the rural landscape were in no way
interfered with, but "banishment from the-cities

232 QUAINT KOREA.

produced two results. First, desuetude rendered
the mass of the people quite oblivious to religious
matters ; and secondly, the withdrawal of religion
from the seats of power threw the profession into
disfavour with the aristocracy. . . . Here, then,
we have a community without a religion — for the
cities are to a peculiar degree the life of the land—
a community in which the morality of Confucius
for the upper classes, and the remains of old
superstitions for the lower, takes its place."

How, then, in Korea have the religiously mighty
fallen ! For Buddhist monks once formed a fourth
portion of the entire male population of Choson,
and there were tens of thousands of them in Soul
alone. At first thought it seems strange that now
any Korean should be found willing to embrace the
monastic life; but the Koreans are not indus-
trious, many of them are wretchedly poor, and
life in the monasteries affords the greatest oppor-
tunity for the indolent, dreamy, and meditative
life, and the proximity to Nature, which is so dear
to the Korean heart. No Korean monk is called
upon to do hard manual labour, and it is still
almost a religion with the Koreans, rich and poor,
to give something toward the sustenance, and
even toward the creature comforts of the
brothers. So laziness, and poverty, and misery
keep the Korean monasteries and the Korean

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 233

nunneries from falling into utter disuse. Strangely
enough, the monks of Korea rarely or never have
the brutal sinful-looking faces that characterize so
many of their brethren in China.

I should divide the religion, or the irreligion,
of Korea into rationalism : the religion of the
patricians ; and superstition : the religion of the
plebeians. Both rationalism and superstition are
well controlled by a system of morality which is
rooted in Confucianism, and impregnably enwalled
by ancestor-worship.

Rationalism and superstition have their points
of touch — points at which the one is indistinguish-
able from the other — lost in the other — in Korea
as everywhere else.

I do not mean that reason and unreason ever
lose themselves in each other, though, like other
rival powers, the boundary line between them
may be narrower than any fraction of any
hair, and quite imperceptible to human eyes.

Korean rationalism is practically identical with
rationalism the world over. Korean superstitions
are unique in form if not in essence. It merits at
least passing notice that Reason expresses herself
in one way everywhere, and that Unreason in
different parts of the earth speaks in tongues as
differing as fantastic.

The expression of Korean superstition is

234 QUAINT KOREA.

picturesque. The more picturesque a supersti-
tion is the more impregnable it is.

Korean demon-worship is positively fascinating.
Superstition has not always been the power in
Korea that it is now. In Korea religion and
superstition have played a long game of see-saw.
The Koreans outgrew their early superstitions,
discarded them, and embraced a highly civilized
and civilizing form of religion ; then they dis-
carded that religion. Now, the average human
mind must believe in something outside of its
own material ken, beyond its own demonstrating.
Quod erat demonstrandum forms no part of the
rituals and the creeds of most religions, so when
the time carne that Buddha and his coterie of well-
bred and fairly rational deities had practically
been banished from Korea, the Koreans fell back
on their old superstitions, and to-day superstition
and its ridiculous rites are more rife in Korea
than in any other civilized country.

There are three classes of supernatural beings
in whom the people of Korea believe — the
demons who work all manner of evil, the bene-
ficent spirits whose practice it is to do good
occasionally, and who semi-occasionally combat
the evil spirits, and an intermediate class of
spirits who dwell, as a rule, on the mountains,
and neither work good nor evil, but who, in them-

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 235

selves and in their lives, are the subjects of much
charming folk-lore. The Korean — the Korean of
the populace — the superstitious Korean attributes
all his ills to demons. He, being a Korean,
cannot conceive that Nature can be malignant,
nor can he conceive that he is ever punished for
breaking laws of whose very existence he is
ignorant. So he peoples the air, the sea, and
the rocks with devils of earthquake, devils of
pestilence, devils of lightning, devils of hurricane,
and a thousand other devils of blight and of sorrow.
Having determined that they cause all his troubles,
he then sets about doing the best he can to propi-
tiate the spirits of evil. Korean demons are
supposed to be very small, and I have never heard
of one to whom much physical strength was
attributed ; and almost always when it comes to
a face-to-face contest between one of them and a
powerful man (and such contests occur very
often in Korean myths), the demon has the
worst of it. Still, the majority of the Korean
populace live in unceasing terror and dread of
these demons. Korean methods of circumventing
them are delightful, and delightfully simple. I
have already spoken of the beasts that sit on
guard on many Korean roofs. They are supposed
to be the most efficacious combatants of the
Korean devils ; but the privilege of having them

236 QUAINT KOREA.

is rather monopolized by royalty and by the high
favourites of the royal family. On lintels of
the houses of well-to-do Koreans are usually hung
two oblong pieces of coloured paper upon which
are drawn in black, or two oblong pieces of white
paper on which are drawn in colours, terrible
enough portraits of two famous old generals. One
of these warriors was a Chinaman, the other was
a Korean, and both are renowned in the legends
of the peninsula as having waged highly success-
ful warfare against several evil spirits of Choson,
and their portraits are supposed to protect the
houses, outside of which they hang, from the in-
vasion of the imps of mischief and of misery.
Korean devils, for some unfathomable reason, are
supposed to be far more powerful indoors than
out, and so the Koreans are at special pains to
exclude their devilships from Korean interiors.
The Korean householder, who is debarred by
poverty or by his own social inferiority both
from using the roof-scarecrows, and from hanging
counterfeit presentments of the two old warriors
on his portals, fastens a strip of cloth and some
wisps of rice straw outside his door. He fastens the
rice straw there in the hope that the devil about
to enter may be hungry, and stop to gorge him-
self and then go away. He fastens the bit of cloth
(which must be torn from some old garment of

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 237

his own), because the Koreans have the nice taste
to consider their devils extremely stupid, and so
believe that any devil who is confronted with a
fragment of a man's garment will mistake it for
the man himself, and, in view of how often men
have defeated devils, fly and trouble that house
no more.

The evil spirits of Korea are also frightened
away by noise ; noise so enormous, so metallic,
so discordant, so altogether diabolical, that it is
no wonder the devils rush from it, rush on their
wings of sulphurous flame, and the only wonder
is that any human person or persons can endure
to make it. This practice of frightening with
noise the evil ones of heaven (for mark you, the
peoples of the Far East, unlike the Greeks, have
no belief in Hades) is common to China, to Siam,
to Korea, and to Burmah. The devil-jails and
the devil-trees, and the professional devil-catchers,
of which I have spoken before, come in import-
ance next to the roof-beasts, and then, I think,
come the prayer-poles. A prayer-pole may be a
straight, symmetrical, polished piece of wood, or
it may be a carelessly cut branch of a tree. In
either case it is stuck in the earth a few feet from
the doorway, and on it are hung prayers to the
good spirits, and bits of rag, and bits of refresh-
ment to allure and deceive the evil spirits.* Some-

QUAINT KORV

times a bell is hang on the top of the branch to
attract the attention of both the cursers and the
blessers of the land.

The good spirits that inhabit the big kingdom
of Korean credulity are unfortunately lazy, and
have to be rather urgently supplicated when their
good services are needed. When their good
services are not needed they are left, to do the
Koreans justice, beautifully alone. But when the
evil-doers who dwell in the Korean heaven get
altogether unmanageable, the good spirits are
called upon with dance and with song, with
counting of rosaries and with ringing of bells, to
wage war against their wicked brethren. Often
the Korean angels, bong Korean, go to sleep,
forget to wake up, and neglect to send rain. The
sending of rain is one of their few active offices.
If it does not rain in Korea the rice does not grow
in Korea, and then, indeed, are the Korean devils
to pay. \YltendroughtJaUsupon Korea all Korea
prays. The superstitious and the rational kneel
down together, and if their united invocations (ail
to pierce the slumber of their well-meaning
deities, then the king goes beyond die city's
watts, and entering into a temple, or a sort of
rustic palace that is kept in readiness for the pur-
pose, throws himself upon the ground, and prays
that his people may be biased with rain. Hie rain

's IKKI.LIGION. 239

may fall the next day, it may fall the next moon;
but whenever it falls the loyal Koreans attribute
it altogether to the int .-«n of their king. It

is only when drought falls upon the land that the
ordinary Korean is allowed to pray dinvt'

. Hut every Koivan has

a household spirit— a good guardian angel of his
own hearthside— to whom he may pray as often
as he likes. And best Ivl '\ed. most god-like.
most fit to be worshipped, most tit to be; prayed
to, most lit to be loved of the Korean gods, and
of all the Korean spirits, is one called " the blesser
of little children." He is the favourite vassal of the
I spirit: the phrase "great Spirit" is as olu-n
upon the tongue of a KOI ipon the tongue of

a North American Indian. " The blesser of little
children " has under his personal charge every
home in Korea. He journeys from house to house
scattering blessings upon the baby heads, and for-
bidding evil to approach the baby people.

The Koreans emphatically believe that Korea

originally peopled by spirits and by fairies,

and this belief has developed a folk-lore that is

delightful and interesting in the extreme, and that

often reminds us of the Norwegian folk-lore.

" When a belief rational and pure enough to be
called a religion disappears, the stronger minds
among the community turn in self-reliance to a

240 QUAINT KOREA.

belief in nothing ; the weaker, in despair, to a
belief in anything. This happened here; and
the anything to which they turned in this case
was what had never quite died out, the old
aboriginal demon-worship."

And the stronger minds among the Korean com-
munity turned to the belief in nothing, which is so
often called rationalism. But in Korea rationalism
is tinged with, almost disguised by, that strange
phenomenon of Asiatic mentality, of Asiatic
belief, of Asiatic instinct called ancestor-worship.

Ancestor-worship in Korea, and ancestor-wor-
ship in China, are almost identical. The most
thorough-going, the most uncompromising agnostic
I ever knew was a Korean. The most thorough-
going, the most uncompromising atheist I ever
knew was a Chinaman, but both were staunch
and uncorruptible ancestor-worshippers. Korean
ancestor-worship is more than interesting, but it
is merely a vassal of Chinese ancestor-worship.
Like, and with Confucianism, it has come from
China to Korea, and like and with Confucianism
it is the mainstay of Korean morality. The wor-
ship of ancestors is an almost daily detail of
Korean life. The observances of ancestor- worship
are more rigidly carried out by the well-to-do
Korean rationalist than by the poor superstitious
Korean peasant. Death and burial mark the first,

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 241

the greatest, and the most picturesque of the func-
tions of ancestor-worship. Logically enough, the
death and the interment of a child or of any un-
married person involves almost no expense, and
demands no ceremonial. The infant (an un-
married man or woman of eighty is an infant in
Korea) is wrapt about with the mats, the tiger
skins, or the rugs upon which he died. These are
wrapt about with rice straw, and the bundle is
buried. That is the end of a Korean who leaves
no descendants. When the father of a family
dies his eldest son closes the eyes as the breath
leaves the body, and the family (men and women
gather together for once) let loose their hair, and
shriek and sob, and, if possible, weep. So long as
the dead remains in the house his relatives eat
the food they like least, and as little of that as
will sustain life. Indeed, the eldest son is sup-
posed to eat nothing. Four days after the death,
the members of the family redress their hair, and
put on their first mourning. In Korea, as in all
the Far East, mourning consists of coarse, un-
bleached fabrics that are commonly called, but are
not quite, white. On this fourth day the family,
friends, and acquaintances prostrate, prostrate, and
prostrate themselves before the dead, and an excep-
tionally good dinner is laid beside him. Huge
loaves of especially prepared bread also,, and as

R

242 QUAINT KOREA.

many kinds of fruit as the market affords — the rarer,
the more expensive, and the more hard to obtain,
the better. A dinner is also prepared for the
friends, but not for the family. About the body, and
throughout the house, candles and incense burn,
and wailing is incessant. The mourners and the
professional wailers take turns in sleeping, and
relieve each other in the audible grieving. Paper
money, that is, imitation money, and long paper
banners covered with the titles and the good
qualities of the dead, are burned. With the poor,
burial takes place five, or at the most nine days
after death. With the rich the body remains un-
buried for at least three months. Korean coffins,
like Chinese coffins, are, or are supposed to be,
air-tight. But the Korean coffin is much smaller
than the Chinese coffin, and the spaces left be-
tween the outlines of the coffin and the outlines
of the body are, in Korea, filled up with the old
clothing of the dead. If the dead had not enough
clothing, pieces of linen or of silk are added to
it. The rich Koreans usually employ a geomancer
to indicate the most auspicious day for burial.
The coffin is covered with beautiful brocaded silk,
or with beautifully carved pieces of wood.
Prayers are said almost continuously, from the
hour of death until some time after the interment,
The coffin is borne on a death-car, a unique

KOREA'S IRRELIGION. 243

Korean vehicle, or by men who are hired for a
small sum and who do nothing else. Beside
the coffin are carried the banners, recording the
rank and the virtues of the dead, and the lanterns
which in life he was entitled to use. His sons
follow him, in Korean mourning, and, Chinese-like,
leaning heavily upon sticks. Acquaintances and
friends bring up the rear, in sedan chairs and on
horseback.

Korean graves are usually on hill sides, and are
decorated at the utmost possible expense. Even
the graves of the Korean poor are well tended,
and covered with the gentle green grass, and with
the soft flowers of spring, if no monument or
temple is possible. But if it can be managed, a
miniature temple is erected near the grave — a
temple which is a shelter for those who come
periodically to mourn the dead— and the grave is
guarded with quaint stone images of men and
other animals.

If a Korean family is unlucky they are very apt to
think that one or more of their ancestors has
been buried in an uncongenial spot. Then, no
matter what the cost, no matter what the trouble,
the grave is, or the graves are, opened, and the
dead moved to some more desirable place. Korean
mourning is as long or longer, as intricate or more
intricate, than Chinese mourning, but so similar

R 2

244 QUAINT KOREA.

to Chinese mourning, which has been so often
and so fully described, that it would be superfluous
to here more than mention Korean mourning.

Such, then, is the religion or the irreligion of
Korea. Superstition for the people; ancestor-
worship for the people, the princes, and for those
who are between. Strange that a nation that has
driven from its midst one of the great religions of
this earth, and has unrelentingly persecuted the
religion of Christ, should be so devoted in its
ancestor- worship. But which of us that has ever
lain awake through the wordless watches of the
lonely night and longed in vain —

" For the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still,"

shall blame the Koreans for their incessant, their
blind, filial devotion ?

CHAPTER XL
KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL.

IN the tenth century Korea assumed its present
boundaries, and for nine hundred years it has re-
mained unchanged in its coast line, and its
northern limits. Except on the north, Korea is
surrounded by the sea, and its northern boundary
is marked by the Yalu and the Tiumen rivers, that
almost meet at two of their sources. For conveni-
ence in the recapitulation of Korea's history — a
recapitulation in which everything else must be
sacrificed to brevity — the history of the peninsula
may be divided into three periods : First, the
period antecedent to the final settlement of Korea's
boundaries — a period whose history is in part at
least, conjectural ; second, a period reaching from
then until modern times ; and third, a period
covering Korea's recent history, and the compara-
tive opening up of Korea to foreign travellers, and
to foreign influence. We know as much and as
little of Korea's remotest ancestry as we do of the
ancestries of other countries. The Korean family

246 QUAINT KOREA.

can trace its pedigree a long way, but at length
the pedigree becomes lost in the mists of remote
history and of prehistoric times, and we can form
no conclusive opinion as to who were the first
founders of the race.

Korean civilization came chiefly from China,
and the Koreans themselves from the highlands of
Manchuria and the Amoor valley.

The kingdom of Korea, and indeed the nation
of Korea, was founded by an ancestor of Confucius.
In Latin his name is Kicius, in Japanese it is
Ki-shi, and in Chinese Ki-tsze, which means
Viscount of Ki. He was a faithful vassal of the
Chow dynasty of old China, and when the
Chows were overthrown in 1122 B.C. he refused to
acknowledge the new power, and fled with, some
say five some say ten thousand followers to the
north-east. Here he founded a kingdom which he
called Choson, and of which he made himself
king. He was welcomed by the people already
living there, and these aborigines and the
followers of Ki-tsze are among the remotest
ancestors to which Koreans can prove their
claim. Ki-tsze introduced into his kingdom the
study and the practice of medicine, agriculture,
literature, the fine arts, and a dozen other in-
dustries in which China was then most proficient.
He founded his kingdom on the lines of Chinese

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 247

feudalism, and very much as he founded it the king-
dom endured until the beginning of the Christian
era, and the Koreans to-day call Ki-tsze the father
of Choson, and because of him, and the quality
of his kingdom, claim that their civilization is
almost as ancient as the civilization of China, and
older than the civilization of Chaldea.

Just where this first kingdom of Choson
was nobody knows. Some authorities believe
that it lay exactly north-west of the Yalu river,
just beyond the present borders of Korea, and in
the present Chinese province of Shing-king. It
seems more probable that the first Choson was in
the valley of the Sungari river, and some
historians, with considerable show of reason,
locate it still further north, in the valley of the
Amoor. Certainly its borders shrank and ex-
tended almost continually, and its entire position
seems to have been more or less changed at
several times, and only for a few years was any
part of the Korea we know included within its
area. At one time old Choson certainly was
located north-east of Pekin. It became part of
China, politically and geographically, in the first
century.

In the territory taken from the kings of old
Choson, and annexed to China, lay the kingdom
of Kokorai. It lay east; as the old Chinese

248 QUAINT KOREA.

historians state, directly east, and slightly north
of modern Mukden, and between the sources
of the Yalu and the Sungari rivers. The people
of Kokorai were warlike and able. They seem to
have been rather independent of China as early
as 9 A.D. ; to have begun in 70 A.D. a struggle
with China, which lasted until the seventh century.
During this long warfare — a warfare in which their
country was repeatedly invaded by the Chinese —
these warlike people, instead of being conquered
or exterminated by China, flourished and increased
until they had overrun the peninsula of the present
Korea as far as the Han river.

This, then, is the outline of the history of the
western and the northern parts of modern Korea,
but before turning to the history of southern and
eastern Korea, it will be interesting to glance a
little more particularly at the history of Kokorai.

Well, north of Kokorai, north of the Sungari
river, there existed in very ancient times (if we may
trust Chinese tradition) a little kingdom called
To-li or Ko-rai. While one of the early kings of
To-li was out hunting, a favourite waiting-maid
"saw, floating in the atmosphere, a glistening
vapour which entered her bosom. This ray or
tiny cloud seemed to be about as big as an egg.
Under its influence she conceived.

" The king, on his return, discovered her condi-

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 249

tion, and made up his mind to put her to death.
Upon her explanation, however, he agreed to spare
her life, but at once lodged her in prison.

" The child that was born proved to be a boy,
which the king promptly cast among the pigs.
But the swine breathed into his nostrils and the
baby lived. He was next put among the horses,
but they also nourished him with their breath, and
he lived. Struck by this evident will of Heaven,
that the child should live, the king listened to its
mother's prayers, and permitted her to nourish
and train him in the palace. He grew up to be a
fair youth, full of energy, and skilful in archery.
He was named ' Light of the East,' and the king
appointed him master of his stables.

" One day, while out hunting, the king permitted
him to give an exhibition of his skill. This he did?
drawing bow with such unerring aim that the
royal jealousy was kindled, and he thought of
nothing but how to compass the destruction of the
youth. Knowing that he would be killed if he
remained in the royal service, the young archer
fled the kingdom. He directed his course to the
south-east, and came to the borders of a vast and
impassable river, most probably the Sungari.
Knowing his pursuers were not far behind him, he
cried out, in a great strait, —

" ( Alas ! shall I, who am the child of the Sun,

250 QUAINT KOREA.

and the grandson of the Yellow River, be stopped
here powerless by this stream ? '

" So saying, he shot his arrows at the water.

" Immediately all the fishes of the river assem-
bled together in a thick shoal, making so dense a
mass that their bodies became a floating bridge.
On this the young prince (and according to the
Japanese version of the legend, three others with
him) crossed the stream and safely reached the
further side. No sooner did he set foot on land
than his pursuers appeared on the opposite shore,
when the bridge of fishes at once dissolved. His
three companions stood ready to act as his guides.
One of the three was dressed in a costume made
of seaweeds, a second in hempen garments, and a
third in embroidered robes. Arriving at their
city, he became the king of the tribe and kingdom
of Fuyu, which lay in the fertile and well-watered
region between the Sungari River and the Shan
Alyn, or Ever- White Mountains. It extended
several hundred miles east and west of a line
drawn southward through Kirin, the larger half
lying on the west."

Certainly as early as 25 B.C. To-li had attained
very considerable civilization. Millet, sorghum,
rice, beans, and wheat grew in abundance, and
were carefully cultivated. Spirits were distilled
from rice and grain, as they still are in Korea,

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 251

Japan, and China. The people ate from bowls
and with chop-sticks, as the people of modern
China eat. The men were strong, well-built, and
fearless. They were skilled in the manufacture
and the use of swords, and lances, and bows and
arrows. They were expert horsemen ; were fond
of dancing and music ; decked themselves with
pearls, and with gems of red jade. They had an
elaborate system of etiquette which was rigidly
observed. They had granaries, and well-built
houses of wood, and their cities were surrounded
by walls or palisades of stakes. They had a well-
developed and a civilized religion, freer from su-
perstition and from superstitious rites than many
of the religions of modern Asia. They had a king,
a well-defined feudal system, farms and farmers,
nobility and serfs. They had prisons, and their
system of justice was rigid. All this is surprising,
for at that time the people by whom they were
surrounded were barbarians, without literature,
without form of government, in brief, without
civilization. And yet these people of Fuyu, who
were then far beyond the reach of Chinese influ-
ence, were in the full enjoyment of a civilization
which was apparently of some maturity. From
this many historians have inferred that the old
kingdom of Fuyu was the exact site of the kingdom
of Ki-tsze. This may have been. At all events,

252 QUAINT KOREA.

the people of Fuyu or their descendants peopled
the kingdom of Kokorai, whose people in their
turn populated the northern and the western parts
of modern Korea.

Undoubtedly, the peoples of old Ko-rai and of
Fuyu were the ancestors of the Koreans of our
time. Very probably they were also the ancestors
of the modern Japanese.

We know little or nothing, and we seem
unlikely ever to learn much more about the
early settlers of southern and eastern Korea.

Some time before the beginning of the
Christian era Chinese authorities mention three
independent kingdoms or nations that lay upon
the shores of the Japan Sea, and south of the
Han River. Early in the sixth century they had
become very considerably civilized. Their litera-
ture, their art, their forms of government, and
their social customs they had adopted from the
Chinese. They were Buddhists ; and Buddhism
was then in its flower, sound in itself, and
comparatively pure, and a powerful force for good
and for culture. These three states were Pe-tsi
(called by the Japanese historians Hiaksi), which
was in the west ; Sin-lo (called by the Japanese
Shin-ra), which was in the south-east ; and in
the north, Ko-rai. They banded themselves
together to attack or to repel the attacks of

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 253

China and Japan. When this was unnecessary
they fought each other. They fought steadily
until the tenth century. Their appetite for
warfare seemed insatiable, and when they could
not fight among themselves they sought foes in
China and Japan, and when they could not fight
the Chinese or the Japanese they picked quarrel-
some wars with each other. But this period of
national and international strife and of wholesale
bloodshed was one of great mental and artistic
activity. The civilization and the culture, and
the learning of China, flowed rapidly and steadily
into Korea, and through Korea into Japan.

Sin-lo, Pe-tsi, and Ko-rai appear in their origins
to have had nothing in common. They were
alike in being conquered by at least one alien
race. Each of the three nations was greatly
enriched by an influx of, and intermarriage with,
Chinese, Tartars, and several other peoples of
Far Asia. Their rivalry and their warfare lasted
for hundreds of years ; then they were united under
one monarch, and slowly and surely became one
nation.

The ninth and the tenth centuries were centuries
of peace in Korea, and our knowledge of Korea's
history during these two hundred years is most
meagre. Sin-lo was then, and had been for some
time, the dominant province, but the reigning

254 QUAINT KOREA.

house of Sin-lo had become enervated and
incapable. In 912 A.D. a Buddhist monk
initiated a rebellion which spread with amazing
rapidity, and was entirely successful. The monk
proclaimed himself king, but he in his turn was
rebelled against, conquered by, and slaughtered
by a descendant of the kings of old Ko-rai, whose
name was Wang-hien, or Wang-Ken. Wang-hien
chose Kaiseng, which was then called Sunto, as his
capital. He became absolute monarch of the whole
peninsula, and gave back to it its ancient name of
Ko-rai. Kai-seng is but a short distance north-
east of Soul, and so the first capital of united, and
possibly the last capital of united Korea, are
but a stone's throw from each other. A war
which shortly occurred with the Kitan Tartars,
who lived west of the Yalu River, resulted in a
change of frontier, the Kitans taking and holding
most of the north-western territory of Korea.
From that day to this the boundaries of Korea
have practically remained unchanged, and this
brings us to the second period of Korea's history.!
Four hundred years of peace now fell upon
Korea. These four were the most brilliant
centuries in Korea's history. Feudalism gave
place to absolute monarchy, and the peninsula
was divided into eight provinces, over each of
which the king placed a governor. Buddhism

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 255

became the national religion ; temples, pagodas,
monasteries, nunneries in the best forms of
Chinese architecture, and in Chinese-like, but
better than Chinese forms of architecture, were
built everywhere. The naturally rich resources of
the peninsula were developed, augmented, and
made the most of, and a flourishing trade was
driven with both of the rival kingdoms — China
and Japan. But China still remained the
fountain-head of Korean learning and culture.
The wealthy and the noble Koreans sent their sons
to China to be educated. This was the period of
the Sung dynasty in China — the wonderful
period of Chinese literature and art to which I
referred a chapter or two ago. Korea, which was
then more abjectly the vassal of China in culture,
in letters, in art, and in sociology, than she was
politically, followed as fast as she could in the
footsteps of China's literary and artistic progress.
It was then that Korea first became deeply
interested in Chinese classics, and from then
until now a thorough knowledge of the Chinese
classics has been, and is, the supreme test of
Korean education and culture. Then the
Koreans first learned to print, printing from
raised letters cut in blocks of wood. Toward
the close of these memorable four hundred years
it is said that there were more books, more

256 QUAINT KOREA.

printed books in Korea than there were inha-
bitants. It was then that general education
became a matter of course in the peninsula. It
was then, as I have said, that Korean art was at
its best and broadest; and it was then that the
Korean alphabet was invented, or at least became
generally used. Many scholars maintain even
now that the Korean is the most beautiful, and
the most sensible alphabetical system that the
world has, or ever has had.

Early in the fourteenth century the Mongols had
begun their run of unprecedented conquest. Khu-
blai Khan and Genghis Khan, the mightiest Mon-
gols of their time, determined to conquer the earth.
Their ideas of the extent of the earth were limited,
very limited, but within the narrow limits of those
ideas they very approximately carried out their
bold intentions. Korea was completely subdued.

The history of Korea during the period of the
Mongolian supremacy in China is a history of
entire subjection. Toward the decadence of the
power of the Mongols Korea was called upon to
conquer Japan, but escaped from the farce of
trying to do so. For the Mongol was already
tottering on his throne. The Mongols most in
power were quarrelling among themselves, and
plotting against each other, and the people whom
they ruled had grown dissatisfied enough (as the

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 257

Chinese once in a very great while do), to not only
contemplate but execute a rebellion. During the
last days of the Mongol's already shattered power
Korea was almost free from Chinese supervision,
and altogether free from Chinese control ; for
China had more than she could do at home. At
last a Chinese monk, a Buddhist priest, calling
himself Ming, or " Bright," pushed the insecurely
seated Mongol from his throne. This priest pro-
claimed himself, and the people acclaimed him,
the Emperor and Deliverer of China. He married
that he might found a dynasty. The first Ming
was indeed a man of might, and the period during
which he and his descendants were supreme in
China is peculiarly interesting to the student of
Korean history. For it was during this period
that the Koreans copied the Chinese Mings ;
assumed the dress in all its details which they
have worn ever since, and many of their most
characteristic customs. When the Mongols fell,
the king of Korea, who seems to have been an
exceptionally good sort, wished to give his one-
time masters sanctuary in his hermit kingdom,
but a greater than the king — a powerful courtier
named Ni Taijo — disallowed the king's judgment,
dethroned the king, imprisoned him, and usurped,
or at least ascended, the Korean throne, and
established the present Korean dynasty. That

's

258 QUAINT KOREA.

was five hundred, or to be exact, five hundred and
three years ago. The name of the peninsula was
again changed, and it was re-named Ta Cho-sun.
Soul, which he called, and which in fact we ought
to call, Han-yang, was made the capital. And it
was then that the famous wall of Soul was built,
and then that her imposingly wide streets were laid
out and made. Ni Taij5 changed the boundaries
of Korea's eight provinces. Those boundaries
have not been changed since. It was during
his reign that the pale blue, which we carelessly
and generally call white, became the colour of
every ordinary Korean dress. It was then that
the Korean hat in all its glory was born. It was
then that the Korean top-knot was erected upon
Korean heads. It was then that Buddhism made
way for Confucianism ; and it was then that the
gaining of office or position of trust was deter-
mined solely by the result of competitive literary
examinations. And it was then that the Koreans
invented, as they did invent, in their part of the
world at least, the art of printing by movable and
cast metal type.

Again Korea had peace, peace for two hundred
years. Then like the Romans of old the Koreans
who, like them, had feasted and lounged too much,
became enervated and thriftless. Japan grew
bolder, and for more than a quarter of a century

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 259

Korea was' constantly ravaged by pirates and
piratical armies from the islands of Japan. In 1592
Konishi and Kato devastated large tracts of Korea,
and it was after their final expulsion, after the
final expulsion of the power of which they were
powerful units, that (as I mentioned before)
according to many historians, religion fell in
Korea into the disgrace from which it has never
arisen. Ping-yang was the site of many of the
most desperate struggles that took place between
the natives and the invaders. All through
Choson's history Ping-yang has been the battle-
field of a large proportion of the most desperate
conflicts that have taken place on Korean soil.
In 1597 the Japanese made their second invasion
of Korea. It was during this invasion that the
Japanese seized upon vast quantities of Korean
treasure and of art works — works of art which,
transplanted to the fertile soil of Japan, quickly
took root, and became the seed-plants of a con-
siderable portion of Japan's best art.

During this second Japanese invasion China, in
answer to Korean prayers, sent vast reinforcements
to the aid of the Chosonese. For seven years
Korea suffered from fire, from pillage, from war,
from pestilence, and from famine, and her already
depleted resources were drained with the necessity
of feeding and sheltering, wily-nily, two great alien

S 2

260 QUAINT KOREA.

armies. A million Koreans died during these
seven years ; a million, beyond the normal death-
rate, of men were killed in battle, or died after
battle, or succumbed to starvation, or one of the
dire diseases bred of war, and in war-time. The
sun of Korea's greatness set then, and never since
have the Koreans been able to say, or to approxi-
mately say, —

' Now is the sun upon the high-most hill of our national
day's journey.3

Korea struggled, struggled bravely enough, to
retrieve her fallen fortunes, but before her old
wounds were healed new ones were inflicted.
Beyond the mountains that marked, and still
mark, her northern boundaries a mighty race had
risen — a race that became supreme in China as
in Korea, and a race that only now seems in
danger of extermination or degradation. The
Manchius dwelt where the people of old Fuyu
had dwelt. They conquered Korea, and then they
conquered China. In 1627 the Manchius practi-
cally mastered Choson ; and ten years later they
so completely humbled the King of Korea that he
acknowledged as his master the Manchiu Emperor,
who was now supreme in Pekin, and the Korean
King covenanted to send four times a year to the
Tartar an enromous tribute, and the Koreans bound
themselves to perform to the Tartar and to his re-

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 261

presentatives the kow-tow which has played so
ridiculous a part in our European difficulties with
China, and to sing hymns of praise commemorative
of the Manchius' generosity and graciousness in
not having wiped Korea from off the face of the
Asiatic earth. Let me quote a short paragraph
from an historian who never appears over-partial
to China : —

" Aside from the entrance at stated times of the
imperial envoy to collect the tribute, and the
annual embassy of Korean nobles to Pekin to do
homage to * the Great Khan,' the internal politics
of ' the little outpost state ' were not interfered
with by the Chinese Government."

Should Japan become the mistress of Korea ;
should Japan become the mistress of China — will
she, I wonder, be as magnanimous ?

Twenty years brought little or no change to the
people of Choson. In 1653 Hamel was wrecked
upon the Korean shores, and what I have quoted
from his memoirs indicates, by no means suffici-
ently, but as sufficiently as my space will allow
me to indicate, the condition of Korea from then
until 1777. And in 1777 begins the history of
modern Korea.

That history affords neither pleasant writing
nor pleasant reading to any one of European or
Europeanly-American birth. Korea is hardly

262 QUAINT KOREA.

enough placed with China on the one hand and
Japan on the other, but for all that she, perhaps
because she has been the weakest and the most
exposed of Oriental countries, has suffered most
from — no, I do not mean suffered, but been most
at the mercy of Europe. " Courtesy with the
East, respect to the West, tribute to them both,
and no foreigners wanted in the kingdom," was
Korea's political creed when Korea ceased to be
one of the intrinsically great nations of the past,
and become one of the unjustly unimportant
nations. During the last hundred or hundred and
twenty years Korea has changed but little centri-
fugally, but centripetally she has changed, well —
considering that she is Asiatic — enormously.
Christianity, in an insidious Portuguese sort of
way, had peeped into Korea many years before,
but'now Christianity is forcibly injected into Korea,
injected in a way of which, however admirable it
may seem to us, Christ would never have
approved. Christianity, the species of Christi-
anity offered to Korea, has not flourished there,
and the nice, new Occidental civilization which
was offered to Korea a year after the patriarchs of
Massachusetts perfumed the Bay of Boston with
tea-leaves, seems to have been rather a failure in
the Land of the Morning Calm.

About the Jesuit fathers who sneaked into

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 263

Korea under the shelter of the big hats that
Korean widowers wear, and about the American
and English missionaries who laid down their
lives, and who have amplified and luxuriated their
lives in Korea, I should like to say a good deal,
but when one cannot say all that one might say
and wishes to say, it is perhaps least stupid to say
nothing. But to those who would like to study
Christian missions in the East I would first of
all recommend Mr. Curzon's " Problems of the Far
East," and then, as far as Korea is concerned, I
would recommend the works of the missionaries
Griffis and Ross.

Korea itself has undergone little change since
Hamel escaped from Korea. Korea has suffered
during those years a good deal of change at the
hands of others, a change that is, I think, not
altogether to our credit. An American commo-
dore opened Japan up to the West, and now (so
at least they tell me), Japan is threatening to
annihilate the West. Another American com-
modore, rather a noisier man, and not blessed
with so fortunate a field of action, opened modern
Korea to nineteenth century Europe and nine-
teenth century North America. Since then, the
history of Korea has been a history of Korean
degeneration, and European and United States
advancement. The King of Korea has become

264 QUAINT KOREA.

a patron of telephones, and the hero of innumer-
able magazine articles — magazines published on
both sides of the Atlantic.

Such is the outline of Korea's history — hurried,
dry, and incomplete ; so incomplete, indeed, that
it is not in truth an outline but rather scraps of
outline. But Korea's history is anything but
dry, if we study it in something like intelligible
entirety.

One who reads only English — or even the lan-
guages of modern Europe — but wishes to know
Korean history in some detail, will be forced to do
considerable literary browsing. A full and al-
together satisfactory history of Korea has yet to be
written in English. Its writing would involve years
of earnest work, and could only be accomplished by
one thoroughly familiar with the Chinese language
and Chinese literature. In the meantime there is
much interesting information to be found in
periodicals, in English papers printed in Shanghai,
and to be gleaned from Blue-books.

Both Ross and Griffis have contributed valu-
ably to our literature re Korea. But neither of
them are the easiest of reading, and both write
from a sectarian, if not a narrow point of view.
No one who is interested in Korea can afford not
to read Curzon's " Problems of the Far East,"
Lowell's " Choson," Carles' " Life in Korea," and

KOREA'S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL. 265

almost above all Ballet's " Histoire de VEglise de
Coree" And don't forget dear, quaint old Hamel.
There are more to be by-all-means read, but not
many, and in reading one we shall learn the titles
of others.

The chapter headed " Korea," in " The Life of
Sir Harry Parkes " is, like all the other chapters
in that admirable work, delightfully written, and
peculiarly interesting. Korea has been rather
cruelly used — it seems to me — but it is pleasant
to feel that in connection with Korea, England
has little or no cause to reproach herself.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA.

IT is the present war between China and Japan
that has brought Korea to our general notice ; has
caused us to ask and learn something of where
and what Korea is. It is this war that will largely
open up Korea, directly or indirectly, to Occidental
travellers, to Occidental adventurers, and to Occi-
dental enterprise.

Whatever the ultimate effect of the war upon
Japan the effect will be far greater upon Korea,
greater even than it will be upon China. China is
a huge place, and will, I think, change but slowly,
no matter how great her defeat may be, no matter
how many and how sweeping the concessions
she may perforce yield to Japan. Korea is small
and weak, and may, if force enough is brought
to bear upon her, change swiftly.

Korea has been now almost lost sight of in the
present struggle ; because it has ceased to be the
theatre of the strife. But the war concerns Korea
no whit less than it concerns China and Japan.

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA. 267

This war is an essential part of Korea's history —
the most recent scene in Korea's dramatic life.

With the war in the details of its action we are
all very familiar, at this moment. But I doubt
if we are quite au courant of the causes of the
war ; and we have yet much to learn of the two
interesting peoples who are waging the war.

There are several reasons why China fell a
fighting of Japan — China had to, for Japan
forced the war — China hates Japan — China, an
important part of China, was unnerved by a fearful
plague and easily excited into indulging in the
dissipation of war. It was easy and comparatively
safe for Japan to make China fight, because
China had for years so neglected the art of war
(if so holy a name may be attached to so often
so unholy a thing), that she was ill prepared to
cope with any foe that was more than a foe of
straw ; was ill prepared but did not know it. The
Chinese for long have not regarded warfare as the
manliest of occupations. Scholars, not soldiers,
are their beau ideals, and the scum of their popu-
lace fills the ranks of their standing army. Their
officers know little of military tactics, and are
wont to direct, from behind the curtains of palan-
quins, the actions of their troops.

Japan has fallen a fighting of China because
she hates China ; because she dearly loves a bit

268 QUAINT KOREA.

of glory, and saw a splendid chance to gain it ;
and because she too felt the need of a national
stimulant : the course of her true politics had not
been flowing over smoothly, and she had been
badly unnerved by earthquake.

China is the home of the wild white roses, of
supreme philosophy, and of deadly pestilence.
The recent plague in Hong Kong and Canton
was merely an outbreak of an inevitably recurrent
pest which is the sure result of the conditions of
Chinese life. We are railing loudly just now
against Chinese dirt. I feel that Chinese dirt is
very much less than Chinese poverty. And it is
a significant fact that the dirt and the poverty are
usually found together. The houses and grounds
of the rich Chinese that I have known in Singa-
pore, in Penang, in Shanghai, and in Hong Kong,
have been models of order and neatness, if not
(according to European standards) of beauty.

The poorer quarters of the Chinese cities are
undeniably filthy. But it is the filth bred of over-
crowding and of dire penury, and of the inability
of the government to cope with such enormous
masses of humanity, rather than of natural un-
cleanliness. It is an almost infallible rule that
only lazy people are dirty ; sloth and filth are old
bedfellows. The Chinese are the most indus-
trious, thrifty nation on our globe ; and I am

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA. 269

convinced that the national dirt, the dirt of the
poorer classes, is their misfortune and not their
fault.

But there the dirt is, and, like a thousand
maggot-breeding filth-heaps, it is constantly
creating horrid germs of deadly disease.

It is very much to our national shame that the
Chinese quarters of Hong Kong are almost as
filthy as the poorer parts of Canton. We are
absolute in Hong Kong ; but we have done dis-
gracefully little for the sanitation of the native
quarters in the island we have conquered.

And yet Hong Kong ought to be the healthiest
city in the world, the freest from pestilence. I
know of no other city so admirably situated for
conditions of health. Aside from the beauty of
the place, and regarding it only as adaptable to
healthy modes of human life and residence, it is
ideal. And our flag waves over Hong Kong.
And yet but yesterday a plague was raging there ;
only to think of which must make the gorge of
Christendom rise.

While the plague raged, no doubt everything
was done that terror and wisdom could devise.
But the evil is deep-rooted, and it will not be up-
rooted in an hour.

Except for their unavoidable proximity to the
possibility of dire disease (in which the Chinese

270 QUAINT KOREA.

are born, live, and die), the European inhabitants
of Hong Kong are in every way to be envied.

Alas ! almost the latest duty of the doyen of
that Queen's house was the sending of a disin-
fecting party through the plague-stricken districts
of Hong Kong — a party including British soldiers,
some of whom were attacked by the seemingly
invincible plague, and died a death almost
Chinese in its horror.

The conditions of well-to-do Chinese life are
very pleasant in Hong Kong.

But in the Hong Kong of the poor there is
nothing much but a tragic struggle for human
existence, and misery, misery almost unalleviated,
and yet not quite unalleviated. The poorest,
hardest pressed of the Chinese have — more than
most peoples — the love of home, the joy in work,
the affection for kith and kin that go far to
alleviate any lot, however hard. And they have
other blessings — the poverty-cursed Chinese — they
have their festivals and their temples. The
cobbler, who sits by the wayside and works for a
few sen, smokes now and again his tiny pipe of
opium ; he burns his incense sticks and his red,
paper prayers in the joss-house, and once in every
four years he contributes some mite of work, of
treasure, or of interest to the Soul festival.

Plagues fall upon China almost with a grim re-

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA. 271

gularity ; they crush into terrible graves countless
thousands. But China goes on, and the Chinese
go on ; and, ignorant as they may often be of the
laws of sanitation, they remain for ever steadfast
to themselves and to their country, and to what
they conceive to be for the best advantage of
both. What nation does more ?

We have made many conquests in the East.
But we have not been altogether victorious over
Asiastic disease. We have carried our flag in
triumph into the Chinaman's Mecca — into Pekin.
And we have knocked open the doors of the
emperor's palace, knocked them open with the
butts of our rifles. We have made Shamien our
own. We have made it bloom like a fair English
garden, and at the very gate of Canton ; where it
lies a mute but eloquent reproach to the filth of
the Chinese city. We have gained the probably
most beautifully situated city in the world — the
city of Hong Kong — and there we have built for
our soldiers an almost ideal barrack. But we
have been powerless — we are powerless to-day
against the relentless outbreak of a Chinese
plague. And Shamien — that proud spot of our,
perhaps, supremest Chinese triumph — reeks
with the poisonous stench that comes from
Canton.

Alas ! alas ! We have paid a high price for

272 QUAINT KOREA.

our occupancy of Asia. We have often sacrificed
to her our children.

The history of China is spotted with plagues.
And the sanitary condition of many of the
Chinese cities and the density of their populations
are such that we can scarcely hope for China a
future much freer from such plagues than her past
has been.

Go into the native market in Hong Kong ; see
the burning sun pour down upon the half putrid
fish and a hundred unwholesome looking native
foods ; see the dense, sweating, seething human
mass that is packed in among the stalls, and you
will wonder that Hong Kong is ever free from
pestilence. But the European residents of Hong
Kong are not, as a rule, over familiar with the
details of the native quarter. They live on the
Peak, or on the outskirts of the beautiful public
gardens, where no smells reach them coarser than
the indescribable perfume of the wisteria.

Nothing could be lovelier, happier than Hong
Kong the European. It is a place of charming
bungalows, of superb verdure, a place of green
hills and of fanning breezes, a place of shady
streets and sweetly fragrant nooks.

Nothing could be more picturesque, nothing
could be sadder than most of Hong Kong the
Chinese. It is a crowded place of deepest

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA. 273

poverty. When I have said that, I have said it
all.

As I have said, the Chinese are not, I believe,
greatly responsible for either the gravity or the
frequency of their epidemics. Poverty, extreme
poverty, commits most of the crimes against the
Chinese health. People who are too poor to buy
soap cannot wash themselves, and much less
their clothes. People who can afford none of the
necessities of health cannot be blamed for falling
ill. And the Chinese government, which is at the
fountain head the most paternal of all govern-
ments (but corrupt in many of its branches), is
unable to cope with the unavoidable poverty of
China's overplus of humanity in those parts of the
empire in which the population is densest and
most congested. It is a common mistake to
suppose that there are more people in China than
China could support if those people were equally
scattered over her vast territory. But in the great
centres of Chinese life the people are overcrowded
to starvation and to pestilence.

Yes ; things seem to be going rather badly in
Asia just now — Mahommedan and Hindoo strife,
mysterious and ominous mango smearing, native
regimental insubordination, and buried treasure
that refuses to be dug up, are rife in India and
Burmah. Siam is slowly, but I fear surely, dis-

T

274 QUAINT KOREA.

appearing within the insatiable maw of France.
China has been smitten down by a dire plague.
Japan has been torn with earthquake : and now
a black war cloud has broken over the Far East,
drenching with its deadly rain of bullets Korea,
China, and Japan.

For centuries Korea has given China and Japan
an excuse to exchange discourtesies, and to vent a
spleen, which for many hundreds of years has
sometimes slept, but never slept soundly, and
much less died.

The Koreans have never of recent years been
skilful in averting calamity from themselves or
from their country. The Japanese are as brave
as they are venturesome. The knight errant
spirit that characterized old feudal Japan has by
no means died out of Japan the new, probably
never will die out of Japan. It is " bone of her
bone, flesh of her flesh." The land which was for
so many decades the theatre of that dignified but
horrible butchery called Hari-Kari, is not the
land of cowards. Hari-Kari, or self-disembowel-
ment, was looked upon in old Japan as a cere-
monial of more than religious importance. And,
even now, numbers of the Japanese deplore the
abolition of Hari-Kari. It follows that the
Japanese are neither afraid to die, nor reluctant to
fight against fearful odds. But it is China who is

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA. 275

fighting against fearful odds now. And yet I ven-
ture to think that in the long run Japan will lose
more, gain less than her adversary. The Chinese
are slow to anger. They are slower to forgive.
They are not fond of withdrawing from any posi-
tion they have taken. They are not prone to look
at things through the eyes of others. They are not
easy to convince. The Chinese in things military
are shockingly behind the times, and the Japanese
are splendidly up-to-date. But there are qualities
that are, in the long run, more apt to win an
Oriental war than being up-to-date.

China may cry, " Peccavi," but she won't
mean it. Unless, indeed, she be permanently
crippled she will bide her time, watch her oppor-
tunity, and fight again and to better purpose.
Japan is China's natural foe. China has for-
given us, I verily believe, for forcing ourselves
into Pekin and for wresting from her Hong
Kong. But she will never forgive Japan. And
why should she ? Shame to any nation that
forgives a Port Arthur !

In half a day the Japanese can steam from
their own coast to Korea : but also any Power in
possession of Korea can steam from there to
Japan as quickly. Korea is certainly more
necessary to Japan than to China. But geo-
graphical propinquity does not necessarily con-
T 2

276 QUAINT KOREA.

stitute territorial right ; and so far as we can
judge the merits and demerits of so perplexed,
so involved, so almost prehistoric, so Oriental
a question, China has more right to Korea than
Japan has. But international right is fast be-
coming (if it has not already become) a matter
of national might, and concerning Korea the
question of the moment is not, as it was a few
months ago, " Who will fight the better, China
or Japan ? " but " How far shall we let them
fight ? "

Russia has her eye upon Korea. Even the
United States may crave to stick a finger, a
modest little finger, in this political pie.

What right have we to interfere in the quarrels
of Eastern Powers ? What right have we ? It
is too late for us to think of that now. We
have kinsfolk in all those Oriental places, and
shall have in the generations to come. It is our
supreme duty to protect them, even though
to do that * great right we do a little wrong.'
Russia securely, strongly lodged in Korea would
not be an altogether desirable sight for British
eyes.

And Korea, where does she come in in the
present quarrel ? Alas, she bids fair to go out,
unless indeed Europe should be sentimentally
chivalrous and forbid the disnationalization of

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA. 277

one of the few remaining unchanged countries of
the old Eastern world, and decree that Korea
should remain yet a little longer a steadfast land-
mark upon the ever shifting sands of history.

What rights have the Koreans in the matter ?
Alas, it is also too late to ask that question.
Their rights seem very apt to be torn into shreds
between the dragons of China and Japan, or else
to be (as most Eastern rights are) crushed into
dust beneath the heavy but righteous foot of
advancing civilization.

CHAPTER XIII.

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE.

JAPAN is ungrateful. She always has been, and,
I fear, always will be. She has achieved over
an adversary, in most essentials abler than her-
self, a brilliant run of, at least temporary,
victories, largely because she has adopted
Western methods of warfare ; and now she is
celebrating the victory of her European-borrowed
arms by slapping Europe in the face. How
very like a woman ! How very like Japan !

The Emperor of Japan has politely informed
us — cautiously informed us through the Japanese
minister in Washington — that we must please
mind our own business, for " no offer of mediation
on the part of a third Power would be accepted
by Japan until her object, which was to crush
the power of China, had been completely at-
tained."

And it is being more or less openly said (I
believe the authority I quote to be entirely reli-

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 279

able) on the streets of Yokohama : " When we've
finished China we must teach one of the big
European Powers a lesson. England, for in-
stance, thinks a great deal too much of herself
and not half enough of us." If Japan is really
ambitious for a war with England, let us hope
that she will soon find an excuse for it. The
sooner such warfare is waged the better — for
China — and it will not greatly inconvenience us.

Japan has drunk of the awful, red wine of war,
and the wine has gone to her pretty little head.
Let us hope that she will not have too much of a
headache in the inevitable morning, and that
she may, for the near future at least, have the
good sense to drink our health and her own in the
beverages that best suit her : a cup of tea and a
wee thimbleful of saki.

There are two reasons why Japan has so far
triumphed over China, reasons which prove
Japan our debtor ; and yet Japan has, as far as
we are concerned, borne her honours so badly
that it deserves at least our passing attention.

Compare China and Japan on the map ;
compare their populations and it certainly seems
that by this time the Chinese Goliath should have
crushed and appropriated the Japanese David.
But maps don't tell us everything, and figures lie,
if we ask them to say more than they ought.

280 QUAINT KOREA.

Figures are excellent things, if we permit them to
mind their own business. But they are not philo-
sophers ; they are not logicians. Then, too, David
always has so many advantages over Goliath.
David can get about so much quicker. He can
move his body sooner than the giant can move one
limb. His hand can receive the message sent it
by his brain in a fraction of the time that the
same transaction takes Goliath.

Perhaps we have all — those of us who are
surprised at China's at least momentary defeat —
been looking too much upon the surface, taking a
too topographical view of the situation. Bulk is
not always a blessing. It may become an
embarrassment. It is, at any rate, often mis-
leading. The size of China, and its vast popula-
tion have been misleading to many of us who
have had more interest in the present Chino-
Japanese war than knowledge of China and
Japan.

I call the war the Chino-Japanese war, because
it is a Chino-Japanese war. Korea is the excuse
for the war, not the cause of the war. Poor,
picturesque, badly-used place, let us pray that
she may not be too the victim, altogether the,
victim of the war.

China has been, so far at least, quite unable to
mobilize her forces. Japan — who is the art

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 281

concentration of many nations — has concentrated
her comparatively small, but altogether fine
forces, concentrated them with a nicety and a
shrewdness that might well be a lesson to the
Europe from which she has learned her art of
war.

The Art of War ! Japan seems indeed to be
making War a fine art — but, alas ! she is making
it, no less than it has always been, a butchery !

There is, however, an underlying fact, which
seems to me to account above everything else —
yes, and to account philosophically — for the
humbling of China, and the swift advance of
Japan. The Chinese are creative as a race ; the
Japanese are imitative. A creative nature is self-
reliant ; and an imitative nature is, of necessity,
self-doubtful. China has been inclined to rely
upon herself; Japan has doubted herself and
relied upon Europe. China's strength has been
China's weakness ; the weakness of Japan has
proven Japan's strength. It is true that China
has bought ships and guns from Europe ; that
she has borrowed officers to drill her soldiers, and
to manage her ships ; but all this has been done
in a spirit of disallowance. She has always be-
lieved in herself. To her, all the rest of the
world is, as it was to ancient Rome, "barbarian."

Japan lacking, as a nation, the creative faculty,

OF THE

UNIVERSITY

282 QUAINT KOREA.

possesses, more eminently than any other nation,
the imitative faculty. Her art is borrowed from
China and Korea ; her methods of government,
and her methods of war from that Western world
to which she has so lately, for the first time,
opened her gates. Japan is victorious to-day
because of her self-distrust, and because of her
eager and compliant imitation of Western
methods. China is defeated to-day because of
her half-hearted adoption of European ways and
means.

Japan jumps at conclusions with the swift
intelligence of a bright woman. China proves,
and proves again, the worth of any custom or
method that she adopts. Japan improves every-
thing that she adopts. China is more like a
wise man, she understands everything that she
adopts. China is the slower, but China is the
surer.

Japan has so far had the best of the fight,
because she has imitated us, and because she has
been able to mobilize her forces.

Whether the present war will suddenly break
through the thick crust of Chinese self-sufficiency,
of Chinese bigotry, of Chinese hatred of change,
remains to be seen. If it does, China may
swiftly regain her lost ground. In any event it
is not probable that so thoughtful, so wise, so

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 283

reasonable a people as the Chinese will fail to
sooner or later learn thoroughly the lesson which
this present war preaches to them. Perhaps in a
few months, perhaps in twenty or thirty years,
but surely sometime, China will learn how right
Galileo was, how decidedly the world does move,
and how needful it is that we who live on the
world, should move with the world. Then we
may all learn how great a people the Chinese
really are ; how vastly superior in many ways to
their more fascinating, more artistic, but less
stable neighbours — the Japanese.

I am not, I know, taking a popular view of the
relative admirableness of China and Japan; but
I believe that I take the true view. It is a view
diametrically opposed to the concensus of Euro-
pean opinion, but it is not a view altogether
original with me. A number of eminent men,
who have spent some of the best years of their
lives in China and Japan, compare the two peoples
quite as much to the advantage of China as I have
ventured to do. In 1882 Herr von Brandt, who
was then the German minister to Pekin, who had
previously been in office in Tokio, an able diplomat,
and a man greatly valued by Sir Harry Parkes,
wrote to Sir Harry : — " The news you gave me
about the treaty revision has interested me much.
For my part I would see no objection to the insti-

284 QUAINT KOREA.

tution of a kind of mixed court for all cases in
which Japanese were concerned, provided the
judges were elected from a certain number of
persons nominated by the Treaty Powers. The
proposal to submit foreigners to the Japanese
police jurisdiction seems inadmissible ; conflicts
of all kinds and gravity would, in my opinion, be
the immediate consequences of such a concession.
In general it seems to me that the Japanese have
done nothing which could entitle them to the
concessions they demand, and that the experience
of the past hardly authorizes any far-going experi-
ment for the future ; the fact that Japanese juris-
diction is at the present moment as bad as bad
can be can hardly be given as a reason to extend
it over those who are not subjected to it for the
present. The opening of the country to foreign
trade can hardly be considered as a fair equivalent,
as the Japanese, if the measure is carried out, are
certain to reap much more benefit from it than
the foreigners will ever do. After all, I am glad
that it is not my business to put the Japanese
world right again : with all their faults there is
much more steadiness and logic in the Chinese
than in their high flightinesses the sons of the land
of the Rising Sun."

Yes ; the Japanese have a graceful knack of
quietly getting the best of most bargains, and

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 285

certainly the opening of the Japanese treaty ports
to Europeans has, as regards everything but art,
benefited Japan far more than it has benefited
Europe. Herr von Brandt's prophecy has been
more than fulfilled, and that gives some little
weight to his opinion that there is more steadiness
and logic in the Chinese than in the Japanese.

Sir Harry Parkes had as much cause as man
well could have to hate the Chinese ; and yet,
again and again, he has felt impelled to utter
some testimony in their favour. On the four-
teenth of December, 1874, he wrote to Sir D.
Brooke Robertson : — " I think our views resemble
very closely on the China-Japan question, now of
the past fortunately. The luck has fallen to
Japan, who certainly did not deserve it. I can't
help feeling sorry to see the old country opposite
give in, when she had right on her side, to this
youngster among nations."

How history repeats itself! Twenty years ago
the war cloud that hung over China and Japan was
fanned away by the temperate winds of European
advice, absorbed in the sunshine of common sense.
To-day the storm of war has burst over Further
Asia, burst in splendid, awful fury; and the Chinese
and Japanese are slaying each other by the shoal.
We have taught them how to do it. And the
Chinese Goliath lies smitten (smitten almost to

286 QUAINT KOREA.

death, at least so his enemy seems to think), by
the well directed pebbles of Japan. Of the effect
of the successive and reportedly crushing blows
administered by Japan to her colossal neighbour,
it is, of course, too early to speak with confidence.
Success means so much to China, that should the
present run of ill luck continue, the downfall of
the reigning dynasty would not be surprising. A
victorious Japanese army in the streets of Pekin
would almost inevitably so result. Let us hope
that China — China the picturesque, China the
beautiful — will not be bowed so low as that. Our
own interests in the Orient would suffer materially
through such a radical disturbance of the balance
of power. For our own sake, and for the sake of
right, it is to be hoped that China will be spared
the humiliation of opening the gates of her sacred
and capital city to an invading army from Japan.
That would be the saddest misfortune that has
ever befallen China : sadder far than the mis-
fortune that befell her when we took from her the
island of Hong Kong, and flew our flag above the
dragon on the imperial palace at Pekin. But so
long as Japan is essentially stronger in army and
in navy than China, China must submit, with
what grace she can, to defeat. But having learned
from us how to fight, it really is too bad of Japan
to turn up at us her pretty, little, yellow nose, to

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 287

shake her flower-crowned head at us in derision,
or to make it uncomfortable for our countrymen
and women within her gates.

This is as true of the Japanese to-day as when
Sir Harry Parkes wrote it twenty years ago : —
" The Japanese have committed the error of
believing all that they have been told about them-
selves and increasing this by their own imagination,
and the result is that their own little island is too
small to hold them."

At this moment Japan evidently believes that
her present victories are attributable more to her
own skill and prowess than to her exact and
servile adoption of European methods and models,
and so she is tossing her head and treating us a
little rudely.

Ah, well! we all have to learn some sharp lessons,
whether we are individuals or nations. China is
learning such a lesson now. I wonder whose turn
it will be next — Japan's ?

This, at least, when next Japan fights let us hope
that she may have become Europeanized enough
not to wage war before she declares it.

Ingratitude seems to me to have been the trait
most pronounceably shown by the Japanese during
this present struggle. And the desire of some
Japanese women to join the army as combatants
seems to me the most amusing incident in a war

288 QUAINT KOREA.

that has had more than one funny side to it. But
there is one other thing to have been noticed about
Japan of late : a thing that seems to have rather
escaped notice — Japan is trembling.

In the glowing moment of her supreme victories,
in this long hour of her almost unprecedented run
of luck, does it seem more stupid, or more imper-
tinent to speak of Japan as being a-tremble ? The
laws of some countries hold that truth is no libel.
The laws of other countries hold that truth is the
greatest libel. I am uttering libel or I am not
uttering libel, according to the country by whose
laws I may be judged. Most emphatically, I am
uttering the truth. No other word so truly
adjectives Japan as does the word trembling.

This is the age of earthquakes. Almost daily
the papers record the upheaval of some part or
other of the world. And earthquakes are becom-
ing almost common where they used to be nearly
or quite unheard of. Japan, as far we know, always
has been, and probably always will be, the strong-
hold of earthquakes. That inscrutable some one
whom some of us call God ; that inscrutable some-
thing which some of us call Fate ; that inscrutable
some one or something of which the bravest of us,
the most phlegmatic of us, the most callous of us, one
and all, stand in more than wholesome dread ; for
uncountable centuries, has seen fit, and will see fit,

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 289

to hold over the flower-crowned head of Japan a
Damoclean sword. The thread by which that
sword is held is very much frailer than the thread
that, in the classic days of old Greece, held that
sword's prototype. It breaks, does the Japanese
thread. It breaks very often. It breaks with a
persistent irregularity that is almost regular in its
frequency. And Japan is disembowelled with a
Hari-Kari far more terrible, far more merciless
than the Hari-Kari which used to be the glory of
the well-born criminals, or the well-born unfor-
tunates of old Japan.

The first time I ever saw a Japanese earthquake
(and I have had the misfortune to see many), it
occurred to me that the Japanese, who create
nothing, who imitate and ornament everything,
had caught from the brutal butchery of Nature
(Nature who is worshipped in Japan, as she is
worshipped almost nowhere else), the idea of that
terrible self-annihilation which was for centuries
the gruesome glory of Japan. Japan is the pet
lamb of Nature, the favourite home of art, the
chosen throne of beauty, and yet the Japanese
always have had the greatest enthusiasm for the
horrible in Nature, and the horrible in art.

Nature is, perhaps, the most convenient term by
which we, who believe in God, we who believe in
Fate, and we who believe in nothing, can agree to

' u

2go QUAINT KOREA.

commonly express our common wish to personify
that of which none of us know too much, but of
which we all think, more or less, and of which
most of us wish to speak rather frequently.

I have called Japan the pet child of Nature, and
so she is. Not all the earthquakes that have ever
out-canniballed the cannibals ; not all the earth-
quakes that ever swallowed houses and gulped
down humans, could counterbalance the enormous
partiality which Nature shows for Japan. Never
bloomed such flowers, never grew such trees, never
did such moonlight, with such dappled gold and
silver, glorify such landscapes. Verily doth Nature
love Japan as she loves no other spot on earth.
Out of the great womb of Nature Japan was born,
and truly every star in heaven danced and shone
the brighter. But Nature, like many another
mother, seems to have overtaxed herself in giving
to the world so sublime a child. The umbilical
cord has never been cut between Nature and
Japan. The Japanese have never ceased to suck
the wonderful milk of Nature, the milk that has
nourished in them their great love for the beautiful,
their great appreciation of the beautiful, and their
supreme gift of reproducing the beautiful. But all
this seems to have worn on Nature. The mother
who nurses her child beyond a physically reason-
able period invariably suffers. The child may

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 291

thrive, but the mother grows ill : most women who
are ill are hysterical. Nature, if there is such a
thing as Nature, is a mother. Nature, if there is
such a thing as Nature, is a woman. Nature is a
mother, because from Nature have we, all parts of
our world, and all other worlds, been born. Nature
is a woman, because no manly thing could be so
cruel to its offspring as Nature is. The child is so
over-grown, so hungry, so perpetually demanding
of, draining Nature, that Nature, veriest woman
that she is, must needs, once in a way, lose patience
with Japan.

But save for her momentary losses of temper,
Nature is to Japan the tenderest of mothers,
fashioning for her, as all mothers love to fashion
for their favourite children, the daintiest of gar-
ments. And never yet did pet child wear such
fine frocks, such robes of soft but splendid beauty,
as Nature makes, year in year out, season in season
out, for Japan. She weaves them of flowers, she
buckles them with brilliant berries, and she sprays
them with a drench of soft, warm, unsoiling, and
altogether incomparable perfume. She sings sweet
songs of mother-love to her pet child. Such lul-
labies she croons to it ! She keeps for it the
most wonderful of orchestras. An orchestra that
makes ceaseless, but everchanging music. Hum-
ming birds wing notes of music into that marvellous
u 2

292 QUAINT KOREA.

concerto, silver rills " that gush out i' the
midst of roses," waterfalls that in the moonlight
and in the sunlight kiss the moss-warmed rocks,
and leap in passionate ecstasy into the arms of the
flower-dressed earth, drip liquid notes of beauty
into that wondrous symphony. The wings of
butterflies add falsetto, but, oh ! so sweet, notes,
and the wind, as it wantons between the wanton
trees, and kisses the fragrant flowers, steals from
them their honey, and adds perfume unto perfume,
and music unto music, until Japan, Nature's pet
baby, cuddles down into the warm eider-down
of its cradle, an eider-down that is incomparably
soft with flower-petals, and that smells of blossoms
that are sweeter than music.

Nature does ten hundred gracious, gentle,
mother-kindnesses to Japan, and Japan accepts
them all, and asks for more, and then Nature, well,
Nature's nerves give out, and as many another
mother, who has an almost idolatrous love for her
child, has done, Nature gives Japan a fearful shak-
ing. When Nature recovers herself a bit, and
sees what she has done, she is always very sorry,
and about the tumbled, broken, paper houses,
through the ruined fields of paddy and of rice,
over the heaps of torn and burned wisteria, well,
she does what mothers have done before her, she
stoops and kisses the place that she has made
sting, she scatters violets over her pet child's

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 293

bruises, she makes vines, blue with blossom and
purple with perfume, grow over the marks which
she has made upon the dimpled limbs and the
pretty features of her favourite, but somewhat
trying child.

But a kiss never yet altogether made up for a
blow. Our children forgive us our cruelties, but
they never forget them ; and Japan is always in a
state of apprehension. Japan is always afraid
that in another moment its mother Nature may
lose her temper, and Nature does not often keep
Japan long waiting.

For centuries the great artifice of the Japanese
Government (or should I say the great art ?) has
been to divert the minds of the perpetually
frightened Japanese people. The criminal going
to the gallows often conserves his personal dignity,
and augments his personal courage with a glass
of brandy. The Japanese Government holds to
the lips of its once-so-often-to-be-by-earthquake-
shaken-and-perhaps-destroyed people a cup of
redder wine — Blood. The blood of adversaries,
or the blood of themselves, seems to be the liquor
that, from the earliest history of Japan, has had
the greatest power to intoxicate the Japanese
people, and to make them forget the sword that
hangs above them, and which in any moment may
fall and cut into the bowels of their country.

Korea has, of course, been for a very long time

2Q4 QUAINT KOREA.

an excuse for war between China and Japan.
They seem to have an uncontrollable appetite for
wrangling with each other, and poor Korea hangs,
like a ready bone, between the open, snarling
mouths of Ah-man and Yamamato.

But, for all that, I verily believe that the im-
mediate causes of the present war in Asia were the
plague in China, and the earthquakes in Japan.
The minds of the Chinese, and the minds of the
Japanese, had to be diverted, else might they both
have gone mad. This is true, at least of Japan,
who struck the first blow, and in many ways
forced the war. Korea has been offered up in
sacrifice by China and Japan, with a devotion to
their own safeties, and a belief in their own gods,
which would have done credit to Abraham. They
poured the vitriol of their hatred over Korea, and
lit her myriad gardens with the torch of war, as
complacently as Moses slew the task-master in the
brick-field of Pharaoh.

Earthquakes are perhaps as little understood as
any of Nature's mysterious phenomena. A new
science has sprung up almost mushroom-like
amongst us of recent years ; a science that is
attempting the elucidation to human understand-
ing of the laws that govern earthquakes. This
new science has not as yet made much positive
headway, and seismologists themselves know
comparative little of the phenomena they study.

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 295

To-day we are in a Japanese village. In every
door-yard great clumps of gorgeous chrysanthe-
mums echo the glory of the sunset, wonderful
tangles of wisteria throw their plum -coloured
shadows upon the clean white paper windows, and
the clean white paper doors of the hundred or more
clean little houses. Upon the spotless-floored,
flower-wreathed verandahs the waning sunshine
sketches in crimson, in purple, and in gold the
outlines of the wisteria petals, and the wisteria
leaves. Roses, crimson and white and yellow,
spot the grass. Painted bowls of blue and white
porcelain, heaped with silky rice, stand on the
verandahs, and on one verandah, perhaps, stands
an old bowl of yellow Satsuma, which holds the
evening meal of rice. Lacquered trays of fish
stand beside the bowls of rice. The families, soft-
featured, pleasing of face, graceful of gesture,
gentle of manner, squat artistically upon the spot-
less floors. The sun sets, the moon comes up, the
rice and the fish have been eaten. The birds and
the butterflies sing. All is peace and content-
ment. The beautiful bowls have been tenderly
washed, and the villagers have gone to sleep,
resting their elaborately dressed heads upon their
queer little wooden pillows.

To-morrow we are in the same village, but
where is the village ? It is torn and crushed. A
thrill has passed through the earth at sunrise

296 QUAINT KOREA.

The chrysanthemums shake their heavy heads
in terror, the wisteria vines are alive with dismay,
every purple head quivering with afright. Every
golden bell upon every crimson, lacquered, carved
temple cries out in alarm so musical, so sweet,
that it is incomprehensible that even so angry,
so momentarily relentless a mother as Nature is
not moved to pity, and to stay her hand. But
no. The wisterias are roughly wrenched from off
the walls up which they were wont to climb, deck-
ing foot after foot with their lavish beauty. The
chrysanthemums are torn into rags so small and
pitiful, that if here and there we find an unmuti-
lated petal it seems to us quite huge.

There are few sights more pitiful than the sight
of a Japanese village that has been broken by
earthquake. Bits of wood, shreds of paper,
wrecks of trees, broken flowers, torn vines are
tangled together in picturesque, but deplorable
debris. The people are homeless, at the best, more
than probably, they, too, are torn and maimed,
most possibly they are killed. The rice is spilled,
and the bowls of blue, and white, and of yellow
Satsuma are broken. Silver pipes, torn kimonos,
bits of pottery, that if whole again were worth a
king's ransom, strew the scene, and for the moment
hide the gashes in the ground. And yet, like
everything else in Japan, even this scene of
desolation has its juvenile aspect ; it looks not

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 297

unlike a toy that a spoiled child has broken in
anger.

The trouble, the misery, the agony, physical
and mental, that earthquakes entail year in and
year out on the people of Japan is beyond ex-
aggeration, and quite beyond the pale of light
writing. All thinking travellers must feel that it
is no wonder that a people periodically subjected
to such momentous torture, periodically need a
big stimulant. And so, perhaps, it is less shame
(than at the first glance it seems) to the powers
that in Japan be, that soon after the recent dis-
embowelment of Nagasaki, and the upheaval of
many other Japanese states and villages, they,
the powerful ones of Japan, have seen fit to go to
war with China.

The plague that so recently devastated China,
though more repulsive in detail, is far less hope-
less to contemplate than the Japanese earth-
quakes. If China should ever come to the adopt-
ing of fairly proper sanitary laws, if China's
poverty should ever go down once and for all
beneath the iron heel of China's really vast
common sense, and China's infinite capacity
of contrivance, then would China, always vigor-
ous, be baptized into new health, and then would
China's plagues be matters of the past.

I am fain to hope all good things for China.
But I fear that earthquakes will never be matters

298 QUAINT KOREA.

of the past in Japan. Well, both these peoples-
one very great, the other very charming — have
been sorely afflicted within the last year, and both
have fell a-fighting.

We can only hope that right may prove mighty,
and that in the near end peace may crown the
Asiatic all.

We always think of Japanese women as the
embodiment of everything that is feminine and
gentle. And with the exception of the yoshiwara
and the hardest worked women of the coolie
class, we picture the women of Japan as shrinking
from publicity, from unnecessary exertion, and
from anything bordering on self-assertion. Yet
in the days gone by Japan has had a class of
women who have been quite opposite to all this,
and yet who have been neither yoshiwara nor
coolies. I mean the Japanese Amazons, who have
more than once played active parts in Japanese
warfares. This class has quite died out, but
during the present Chino-Japanese war a number
of Japanese women of high birth have petitioned
the Mikado to permit them to join the army — join
it as active soldiers — at least, so a recent despatch
says. This is funny ; but not in the least in-
credible. The Japanese are the funniest people
alive. They are perpetually doing the most un-
expected, I might almost say the most inde-
fensible things, but they do them with such an air

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 299

of artistic propriety, that it is a very keen-eyed
European indeed who realizes that anything not
altogether au fait, mentally or morally, has
happened.

The Japanese are so incapable of a gaucherie
that we do not appreciate their very extensive
capacity for folly.

A Japanese woman in the thick of the fight !
Her kimono well tucked up from her little
dimpled feet. Her obi bulging with cartridges !
A knapsack rubbing corns on the sweet, stooped,
brown shoulders ! Armed cap-a-pie ! A plumed
helmet crushing down the elaborate shape of her
perfumed coiffure ! A sword hitting roughly
against the warm limb, to which bright-eyed,
brown children have been wont to gently cling ! A
great coarse gun chafing the soft arm and softer
breast where laughing, yellow babies have slept
and dreamed glad, soft dreams, and as they
learned to love their mother's milk, learned the
three great lessons of Japanese life : learned to be
happy, learned to be courteous, learned to be
beautiful and artistic ! It makes me laugh.

And yet I do not discredit the veracity of the
telegram. The Japanese women are very, very
drowsy. But when they wake up — and semi-
occasionally they do wake up — they wake up with
a start.

Great occasions seem to infuse therri with elec-

300 QUAINT KOREA.

tricity. I quite believe that to-day there are in
Japan thousands of delicate, daintily accustomed,
women who would gladly join the active ranks of
war. Japanese patriotism is as supreme, as
gracious, as graceful as Japanese art ; and unlike
Japanese art it is often visionary.

That the Japanese women want to fight the
Chinese soldiers — is very amusing, and rather
interesting. It proves that they have pluck. It
proves that they have bad taste. That it does
prove them guilty of bad taste makes it remark-
able. The Chino-Japanese wrangle over Korea
is, I believe, the first event in all our world's long
history that has convicted the women of Japan of
bad taste.

Whether any Japanese women would prove effec-
tive soldiers, I doubt. I doubt if even the women
of the coolie class : the women who sort tea in
Kobe, the women who, in Nagasaki, running up
and down the sides of P. and O. and other
steamers, carry upon their muscular brown backs,
murderous loads of coal, would advantageously
augment the Japanese army. I doubt if the
women of the Ainos (the Ainos are the fiercest,
wildest people of Japan) would acquit themselves
usefully in the field of battle. That the women
of Japan would acquit themselves bravely, nobly,
in the terrible moment of battle, admits of no

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 301

doubt. But to be brave is one thing ; to be noble
is another ; to be useful is still another.

Greatly to his credit (he seems to be — take him
all in all — a very worthy, manly sort of fellow),
the Emperor of Japan has not, I believe, allowed
the women of Japan to swell the pretty ranks of
his victorious army.

Yes ; the Japanese army is a pretty army. I
am speaking disrespectfully of the army of a
nation that has beaten the great nation of China !
China is not beaten yet. Japan has trod hard,
very hard on one of China's toes, and the toe is
crushed and bleeding. But China — great big,
broad, yellow China is not beaten ; and won't be
for a few days more.

The Manchu dynasty may be unthroned. But
China will go on for hundreds of years very much
as she has gone on for hundreds of years. The
Japanese army has proved itself a very indus-
trious, capable, workman-like army indeed ; but
for all that, it is a pretty army.

The Japanese soldiers are plucky little heroes,
every one of them, but they look for all the world
like toy warriors — toy warriors in nice new uni-
forms.

If Japan were engaged in war, not with China,
but with one of the first-class European Powers,
Japan would fight as bravely as she is fighting

302 QUAINT KOREA.

now, every bit as bravely, but would her success
be so swift and meteor-like ? I wonder.

If Japan should ever fall a-fighting of a Western
power, then I advise the Mikado to enlist as many
of his lady subjects as he can, and when the
bugle sounds the battle hour, place them in the
front ranks. Then might Japan hope to conquer,
not one, but every nation in Europe, and have
at her feet every army in Christendom. No Euro-
pean soldier could draw sword, or aim gun against
the Japanese army, if its front ranks were filled
with almond-eyed, smiling-mouthed, crepe-clad,
Amazons. Then would the British soldier cease
to sing " God Save the Queen " and " Rule
Britannia." Then would he stand at attention
before the ranks of Japan ; and this the battle
hymn he'd sing : —

" I fear no foe in shining armour

Though his lance be swift and keen,
But I fear and love the glamour
3Neath thy drooping lashes seen."

The Chinese soldier is not so sentimental. He
is extremely sensible. " All's game that comes
to my gun," is his motto in time of war, and he
would argue (not without some show of justice)
that if a woman were foolish enough, unsexed
enough, to go into the field of battle as a com-
batant, a maker of carnage, the sooner she were
exterminated the better.

JAPAN'S INGRATITUDE. 303

Yes ; the Emperor of Japan has done well to
exclude the dainty women folk of Japan from
active participation in the present fray. Let the
women of Japan wait. When there is a Japanese-
European war, then their turn will have come, and
they will have the proud happiness of being Japan's
invincible defenders, Japan's strongest soldiers,
and the conquerors of all Europe.

A number of Japanese women have petitioned
the Emperor to enrol them as army nurses, and
send them to the seat of war. So wise a man as
Mutsuhito will not, I feel sure, refuse so admirable
a suggestion. Cooks are taught sometimes :
statesmen made, poets manufactured as often as
not. Nurses are born.

The knack of nursing is a gift ; a gift from God.
Japanese women have this gift to a delightful
degree. Physically, they are ideal nurses. Their
voices are sweet, low, and clear. Their motion is
gentle and graceful. Their touch is cool but com-
fortable, soft, comforting. They have not a single
quality among them that could rasp the sorest
nerves.

A Japanese girl (now the wife of a lieutenant in
the Japanese navy) used to make illness a perfect
treat to me when we were girls at school together.
It was a big family ours, almost a thousand, if I
remember, but Shige nursed us all, from the
Lady Principal to the college cat. We always

304 QUAINT KOREA.

thought her inspired with a gentle, loving talent
for helping and soothing the siek. Certainly she
was the best nurse I ever knew: but when I came
to live in Japan, I learned that every Japanese
woman is an almost ideal nurse.

The Chinese hospitals are hells of horror. The
Japanese hospitals are heavens of flower-perfumed
rest and consolation.

The soldiers of Japan have acquitted them-
selves well in the field and in the sea of battle.
And they seem to have had all the best of the
Korean war.

The woman of Japan will excel always and
everywhere in the holier half of war : the binding
of wounds, the staunching of blood flow, the
decent shrouding of the dead.

And so the strife goes on. The fate of Korea,
and perchance the fate of the Far East, hangs in
war's awful balance. Yet even now Korea is half
asleep amid her lotus-flowers, and far more inclined
to dream away a hermit life, hidden behind the
Ever-white Mountains, lulled by the crooning of
the Yellow and the Japan Seas, than to come out
into the tumult, the struggle, and the glare of
international day.

THE END.

GLOSSARY.

Ainos — A fierce, almost barbarian people, living in the north

of Japan.

Arrack — A strong liquor distilled from rice.
Chulalongkorn — The present king of Siam.
Flower-boats — The boats upon which the Chinese flower-
girls live.

Geisha — (Literally) An accomplished person.
Jinrickshaw — A two-wheeled vehicle, pulled by a coolie, or

by coolies.

Joss-house — The temple of a Chinese god.
Junks — A species of Chinese boats.
Khan — A partially underground furnace.
Kimono — The principal or outer robe worn both by Japanese

men and women.
Ki-saing — A Geisha girl.
Kow-tow — A profound Chinese obeisance.
Lien-hoas — Chinese water-lilies.
Mogree flowers- A peculiarly sweet Indian blossom, worn

by the Nautch girls when they dance.
Mutsuhito — The present Emperor of Japan.
Obi — A narrow Japanese belt, worn above a broad sash.
Paddy — Young rice.
Pailow — A Chinese memorial arch, usually erected to the

honour of a woman who, upon her husband's death,

has killed herself.

X

306 GLOSSARY.

Purdah-women — Oriental women living in strict family
seclusion.

Queue — The long braid of hair worn by Chinese men.

Saki — A strong Japanese liquor.

Sampan — A small, rude, native boat.

Samsku—b. Chinese liquor.

Satsuma — A famous Japanese family. A peculiarly beauti-
ful and valuable pottery, especially noted for its glaze,
its exquisite decorations, and for its interesting history.

Sen — A small Chinese coin ; a cent ; a hundredth part of a
Yen, or dollar.

Son wang-don — The home of the king of the fairies.

Tai-wan — Formosa.

Taro — A Korean sweet potato.

Torii — A Japanese arch, marking the approach to a temple
or sacred place.

Yamun — The official residence of a Chinese mandarin.

Yu-lan—k beautiful flower of the Far East.

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