FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE CAPITAL
Chemulpo, being on the island-studded estuary of the Han, which is
navigable for the 56 miles up to Ma-pu, the river port of Seoul, it
eventually occurred to some persons more enterprising than their
neighbors to establish steam communication between the two. Manifold
are the disasters which have attended this simple undertaking. Nearly
every passenger who has entrusted himself to the river has a tale to
tell of the boat being deposited on a sandbank, and of futile endeavors
to get off, of fretting and fuming, usually ending in hailing a passing
_sampan_ and getting up to Ma-pu many hours behind time, tired, hungry,
and disgusted. For the steam launches are only half powered for their
work, the tides are strong, the river shallows often, and its sandbanks
shift almost from tide to tide. Hence this natural highway is not
much patronized by people who respect themselves, and all sorts of
arrangements are made for getting up to the capital by “road.” There
is, properly speaking, no road, but the word serves. Mr. Gardner, the
British acting Consul-General in Seoul, kindly arranged to escort me
the 25 miles, and I went up in seven hours in a chair with six bearers,
jolly fellows, who joked and laughed and raced the Consul’s pony.
Traffic has worn for itself a track, often indefinite, but usually
straggling over and sterilizing a width enough for three or four
highways, and often making a new departure to avoid deep mud holes.
The mud is nearly bottomless. Bullock-carts owned by Chinese attempt
the transit of goods, and two or three embedded in the mud till the
spring showed with what success. Near Ma-pu all traffic has to cross
a small plain of deep sand. Pack bulls, noble animals, and men are the
carriers of goods. The redoubtable Korean pony was not to be seen. Foot
passengers in dress hats and wadded white garments were fairly numerous.
The track lies through rolling country, well cultivated. There are
only two or three villages on the road, but there are many, surrounded
by fruit trees, in the folds of the adjacent low hills; stunted pines
(_Pinus sinensis_) abound, and often indicate places of burial. The
hillsides are much taken up with graves. There are wooden sign or
distant posts, with grotesque human faces upon them, chiefly that of
Chang Sun, a traitor, whose misdemeanors were committed 1,000 years
ago. The general aspect of the country is bare and monotonous. Except
for the orchards and the spindly pines, there is no wood. There is
no beauty of form, nor any of those signs of exclusiveness, such as
gates or walls, which give something of dignity to a landscape. These
were my first impressions. But I came to see on later journeys that
even on that road there can be a beauty and fascination in the scenery
when glorified and idealized by the unrivalled atmosphere of a Korean
winter, which it is a delight even to recall, and that the situation of
Seoul for a sort of weird picturesqueness compares favorably with that
of almost any other capital, but its orientalism, a marked feature of
which was its specially self-asserting dirt, is being fast improved off
the face of the earth.
From the low pass known as the Gap, there is a view of the hills in the
neighborhood of Seoul, and before reaching the Han these, glorified and
exaggerated by an effect of atmosphere, took on something of grandeur.
Crossing the Han in a scow to which my chair accommodated itself more
readily than Mr. Gardner’s pony, and encountering ferry boats full of
pack bulls bearing the night soil of the city to the country, we landed
on the rough, steep, filthy, miry river bank, and were at once in
the foul, narrow, slimy, rough street of Ma-pu, a twisted alley full
of mean shops for the sale of native commodities, of bulls carrying
mountains of brushwood which nearly filled up the roadway; and with a
crowd, masculine solely, which swayed and loafed, and did nothing in
particular. Some quiet agricultural country, and some fine trees, a
resemblance to the land of the Bakhtiari Lurs, in the fact of one man
working a spade or shovel, while three others helped him to turn up the
soil by an arrangement of ropes, then two chairs with bearers in blue
uniforms, carrying Mrs. and Miss Gardner, accompanied by Bishop Corfe,
Mr. M’Leavy Brown, the Chief Commissioner of Korean Customs, and Mr.
Fox, the Assistant Consul, then the hovels and alleys became thick,
and we were in extra-mural Seoul. A lofty wall, pierced by a deep
double-roofed gateway, was passed, and ten minutes more of miserable
alleys brought us to a breezy hill, crowned by the staring red brick
buildings of the English Legation and Consular offices.
The Russian Legation has taken another and a higher, and its loftly
tower and fine façade are the most conspicuous objects in the city,
while a third is covered with buildings, some Korean and tasteful, but
others in a painful style of architecture, a combination of the factory
with the meeting-house, belonging to the American Methodist Episcopal
Mission, the American Presbyterians occupying a humbler position below.
A hill on the other side of the town is dedicated to Japan, and so in
every part of the city the foreigner, shut out till 1883, is making his
presence felt, and is undermining that which is Korean in the Korean
capital by the slow process of contact.
One of the most remarkable indications of the change which is stealing
over the Hermit City is that a nearly finished Roman Catholic
Cathedral, of very large size, with a clergy-house and orphanages,
occupies one of the most prominent positions in Seoul. The King’s
father, the Tai-Won-Kun, still actively engaged in politics, is the man
who, thirty years ago, persecuted the Roman Christians so cruelly and
persistently as to raise up for Korea a “noble army of martyrs.”
I know Seoul by day and night, its palaces and its slums, its
unspeakable meanness and faded splendors, its purposeless crowds, its
mediæval processions, which for barbaric splendor cannot be matched
on earth, the filth of its crowded alleys, and its pitiful attempt to
retain its manners, customs, and identity as the capital of an ancient
monarchy in face of the host of disintegrating influences which are at
work, but it is not at first that one “takes it in.” I had known it for
a year before I appreciated it, or fully realized that it is entitled
to be regarded as one of the great capitals of the world, with its
supposed population of a quarter of a million, and that few capitals
are more beautifully situated.[7] One hundred and twenty feet above the
sea, in Lat. 37° 34′ N. and Long. 127° 6′ E., mountain-girdled, for the
definite peaks and abrupt elevation of its hills give them the grandeur
of mountains, though their highest summit, San-kak-San, has only an
altitude of 2,627 feet, few cities can boast, as Seoul can, that tigers
and leopards are shot within their walls! Arid and forbidding these
mountains look at times, their ridges broken up into black crags and
pinnacles, ofttimes rising from among distorted pines, but there are
evenings of purple glory, when every forbidding peak gleams like an
amethyst with a pink translucency, and the shadows are cobalt and the
sky is green and gold. Fair are the surroundings too in early spring,
when a delicate green mist veils the hills, and their sides are flushed
with the heliotrope azalea, and flame of plum, and blush of cherry, and
tremulousness of peach blossom appear in unexpected quarters.
[Illustration: JAPANESE MILITARY CEMETERY, CHEMULPO.]
Looking down on this great city, which has the aspect of a lotus pond
in November, or an expanse of overripe mushrooms, the eye naturally
follows the course of the wall, which is discerned in most outlandish
places, climbing Nam-San in one direction, and going clear over the
crest of Puk-han in another, enclosing a piece of forest here, and
a vacant plain there, descending into ravines, disappearing and
reappearing when least expected. This wall, which contrives to look
nearly as solid as the hillsides which it climbs, is from 25 to 40
feet in height, and 14 miles in circumference (according to Mr. Fox of
H.B.M.’s Consular Service), battlemented along its entire length, and
pierced by eight gateways, solid arches or tunnels of stone, surmounted
by lofty gate houses with one, two, or three curved tiled roofs. These
are closed from sunset to sunrise by massive wooden gates, heavily
bossed and strengthened with iron, bearing, following Chinese fashion,
high-sounding names, such as the “Gate of Bright Amiability,” the “Gate
of High Ceremony,” the “Gate of Elevated Humanity.”
The wall consists of a bank of earth faced with masonry, or of solid
masonry alone, and is on the whole in tolerable repair. It is on the
side nearest the river, and onwards in the direction of the Peking
Pass, that extra-mural Seoul has expanded. One gate is the Gate of the
Dead, only a royal corpse being permitted to be carried out by any
other. By another gate criminals passed out to be beheaded, and outside
another their heads were exposed for some days after execution, hanging
from camp-kettle stands. The north gate, high on Puk-han, is kept
closed, only to be opened in case the King is compelled to escape to
one of the so-called fortresses on that mountain.
Outside the wall is charming country, broken into hills and wooded
valleys, with knolls sacrificed to stately royal tombs, with their
environment of fine trees, and villages in romantic positions among
orchards and garden cultivation. Few Eastern cities have prettier walks
and rides in their immediate neighborhood, or greater possibilities of
rapid escape into sylvan solitudes, and I must add that no city has
environs so safe, and that ladies without a European escort can ride,
as I have done, in every direction outside the walls without meeting
with the slightest annoyance.
I shrink from describing intra-mural Seoul.[8] I thought it the foulest
city on earth till I saw Peking, and its smells the most odious, till
I encountered those of Shao-shing! For a great city and a capital
its meanness is indescribable. Etiquette forbids the erection of
two-storied houses, consequently an estimated quarter of a million
people are living on “the ground,” chiefly in labyrinthine alleys, many
of them not wide enough for two loaded bulls to pass, indeed barely
wide enough for one man to pass a loaded bull, and further narrowed by
a series of vile holes or green, slimy ditches, which receive the solid
and liquid refuse of the houses, their foul and fetid margins being
the favorite resort of half-naked children, begrimed with dirt, and
of big, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, which wallow in the slime or blink in
the sun. There too the itinerant vendor of “small wares,” and candies
dyed flaring colors with aniline dyes, establishes himself, puts a
few planks across the ditch, and his goods, worth perhaps a dollar,
thereon. But even Seoul has its “spring cleaning,” and I encountered on
the sand plain of the Han, on the ferry, and on the road from Ma-pu to
Seoul, innumerable bulls carrying panniers laden with the contents of
the city ditches.
The houses abutting on these ditches are generally hovels with deep
eaves and thatched roofs, presenting nothing to the street but a mud
wall, with occasionally a small paper window just under the roof,
indicating the men’s quarters, and invariably, at a height varying
from 2 to 3 feet above the ditch, a blackened smoke-hole, the vent
for the smoke and heated air, which have done their duty in warming
the floor of the house. All day long bulls laden with brushwood to
a great height are entering the city, and at six o’clock this pine
brush, preparing to do the cooking and warming for the population,
fills every lane in Seoul with aromatic smoke, which hangs over it with
remarkable punctuality. Even the superior houses, which have curved and
tiled roofs, present nothing better to the street than this debased
appearance.
The shops partake of the general meanness. Shops with a stock-in-trade
which may be worth six dollars abound. It is easy to walk in Seoul
without molestation, but any one standing to look at anything attracts
a great crowd, so that it is as well that there is nothing to look
at. The shops have literally not a noteworthy feature. Their one
characteristic is that they have none! The best shops are near the
Great Bell, beside which formerly stood a stone with an inscription
calling on all Koreans to put intruding foreigners to death. So small
are they that all goods are within reach of the hand. In one of the
three broad streets, there are double rows of removable booths, in
which now and then a small box of Korean _niello_ work, iron inlaid
with silver, may be picked up. In these and others the principal
commodities are white cottons, straw shoes, bamboo hats, coarse
pottery, candlesticks, with draught screens, combs, glass beads,
pipes, tobacco-pouches, spittoons, horn-rimmed goggles, much worn
by officials, paper of many kinds, wooden pillow-ends, decorated
pillowcases, fans, ink-cases, huge wooden saddles with green leather
flaps bossed with silver, laundry sticks, dried persimmons, loathsome
candies dyed magenta, scarlet, and green, masses of dried seaweed and
fungi, and ill-chosen collections of the most trumpery of foreign
trash, such as sixpenny kerosene lamps, hand mirrors, tinsel vases,
etc., the genius of bad taste presiding over all.
Plain brass dinner sets and other brass articles are made, and
some mother-of-pearl inlaying in black lacquer from old designs is
occasionally to be purchased, and embroideries in silk and gold thread,
but the designs are ugly, and the coloring atrocious. Foreigners
have bestowed the name Cabinet Street on a street near the English
Legation, given up to the making of bureaus and marriage chests. These,
though not massive, look so, and are really handsome, some being of
solid chestnut wood, others veneered with maple or peach, and bossed,
strapped, and hinged with brass, besides being ornamented with great
brass hasps and brass padlocks 6 inches long. These, besides being
thoroughly Korean, are distinctly decorative. There are few buyers,
except in the early morning, and shopping does not seem a pastime,
partly because none but the poorest class of women can go out on foot
by daylight.
In the booths are to be seen tobacco pipes, pipestems, and bowls,
coarse glazed pottery, rice bowls, Japanese lucifer matches, aniline
dyes, tobacco-pouches, purses, flint and tinder pouches, rolls of oiled
paper, tassels, silk cord, nuts of the edible pine, rice, millet,
maize, peas, beans, string shoes, old crinoline hats, bamboo and reed
hats in endless variety, and coarse native cotton, very narrow.
In this great human hive, the ordinary sightseer finds his vocation
gone. The inhabitants constitute the “sight” of Seoul. The great bronze
bell, said to be the third largest in the world, is one of the few
“sights” usually seen by strangers. It hangs in a bell tower in the
centre of the city, and bears the following inscription:--
“Sye Cho the Great, 12^{th} year Man cha [year of the cycle] and moon,
the 4^{th} year of the great Ming Emperor Hsüan-hua [A.D. 1468], the
head of the bureau of Royal despatches, Sye Ko chyeng, bearing the
title Sa Ka Chyeng, had this pavilion erected and this bell hung.”
This bell, whose dull heavy boom is heard in all parts of Seoul, has
opened and closed the gates for five centuries.
The grand triple gateway of the Royal Palace with its double roof, the
old audience hall in the Mulberry Gardens, and the decorative roofs
of the gate towers, are all seen in an hour. There remains the Marble
Pagoda, seven centuries old, so completely hidden away in the back-yard
of a house in one of the foulest and narrowest alleys of the city,
that many people never see it at all. As I was intent on photographing
some of the reliefs upon it, I visited it five times, and each time
with fresh admiration; but so _wedged_ in is it, that one can only get
any kind of view of it by climbing on the top of a wall. Every part is
carved, and the flat parts richly so, some of the tablets representing
Hindu divinities, while others seem to portray the various stages
of the soul’s progress towards Nirvana. The designs are undoubtedly
Indian, modified by Chinese artists, and this thing of beauty stands on
the site of a Buddhist monastery. It is a thirteen-storied pagoda, but
three stories were taken off in the Japanese invasion three centuries
ago, and placed on the ground uninjured. So they remained, but on
my last visit children had defaced the exquisite carving, and were
offering portions for sale. Not far off is another relic of antiquity,
a decorated and inscribed tablet standing on the back of a granite
turtle of prodigious size. Outside the west gate, on a plain near the
Peking Pass, was a roofed and highly decorated arch of that form known
as the _pailow_, and close by it a sort of palace hall, in which every
new sovereign of Korea waited for the coming of a special envoy from
Peking, whom he joined at the _pailow_, accompanying him to the palace,
where he received from him his investiture as sovereign.
On the slope of Nam-San the white wooden buildings, simple and
unpretentious, of the Japanese Legation are situated, and below them a
Japanese colony of nearly 5,000 persons, equipped with tea-houses, a
theatre, and the various arrangements essential to Japanese well-being.
There, in acute contrast to everything Korean, are to be seen streets
of shops and houses where cleanliness, daintiness, and thrift reign
supreme, and unveiled women, and men in girdled dressing-gowns and
clogs, move about as freely as in Japan. There also are to be seen
minute soldiers or military police, and smart be-sworded officers,
who change guard at due intervals; nor are such precautions needless,
for the heredity of hate is strong in Korea, and on two occasions the
members of this Legation have had to fight their way down to the sea.
The Legation was occupied at the time of my first visit by Mr. Otori,
an elderly man with pendulous white whiskers, who went much into the
little society which Seoul boasts, talked nothings, and gave no promise
of the rough vigor which he showed a few months later. There also are
the Japanese bank and post office, both admirably managed.
The Chinese colony was in 1894 nearly as large, and differed in no
respect from such a colony anywhere else. The foreigners depend for
many things on the Chinese shops, and as the Koreans like the Chinese,
they do some trade with them also. The imposing element connected with
China was the _yamen_ of Yuan, the Minister Resident and representative
of Korea’s Suzerain, by many people regarded as “the power behind the
throne,” who is reported to have gone more than once unbidden into
the King’s presence, and to have reproached him with his conduct of
affairs. Great courtyards and lofty gates on which are painted the
usual guardian gods, and a brick dragon screen, seclude the palace in
which Yuan lived with his guards and large retinue; and the number
of big, supercilious men, dressed in rich brocades and satins, who
hung about both this Palace and the Consulate, impressed the Koreans
with the power and stateliness within. The Americans were very severe
on Yuan, but so far as I could learn his chief fault was that he let
things alone, and neglected to use his unquestionably great power in
favor of reform and common honesty--but he was a Chinese mandarin!
He possessed the power of life and death over Chinamen, and his
punishments were often to our thinking barbarous, but the Chinese
feared him so much that they treated the Koreans fairly well, which is
more than can be said of the Japanese.
One of the “sights” of Seoul is the stream or drain or watercourse, a
wide, walled, open conduit, along which a dark-colored festering stream
slowly drags its malodorous length, among manure and refuse heaps which
cover up most of what was once its shingly bed. There, tired of crowds
masculine solely, one may be refreshed by the sight of women of the
poorest class, some ladling into pails the compound which passes for
water, and others washing clothes in the fetid pools which pass for
a stream. All wear one costume, which is peculiar to the capital, a
green silk coat--a man’s coat with the “neck” put over the head and
clutched below the eyes, and long wide sleeves falling from the ears.
It is as well that the Korean woman is concealed, for she is not a
houri. Washing is her manifest destiny so long as her lord wears white.
She washes in this foul river, in the pond of the Mulberry Palace, in
every wet ditch, and outside the walls in the few streams which exist.
Clothes are partially unpicked, boiled with ley three times, rolled
into hard bundles, and pounded with heavy sticks on stones. After being
dried they are beaten with wooden sticks on cylinders, till they attain
a polish resembling dull satin. The women are slaves to the laundry,
and the only sound which breaks the stillness of a Seoul night is the
regular beat of their laundry sticks.
From the beautiful hill Nam-San, from the Lone Tree Hill, and from
a hill above the old Mulberry Palace, Seoul is best seen, with its
mountainous surroundings, here and there dark with pines, but mostly
naked, falling down upon the city in black arid corrugations. These
mountains enclose a valley about 5 miles long by 3 broad, into which
200,000 people are crammed and wedged. The city is a sea of low brown
roofs, mostly of thatch, and all but monotonous, no trees and no
open spaces. Rising out of this brown sea there are the curved double
roofs of the gates, and the gray granite walls of the royal palaces,
and within them the sweeping roofs of various audience halls. Cutting
the city across by running from the east to the west gate is one broad
street, another striking off from this runs to the south gate, and a
third 60 yards wide runs from the great central artery to the palace.
This is the only one which is kept clear of encumbrance at all times,
the others being occupied by double rows of booths, leaving only a
narrow space for traffic on either side. When I first looked down on
Seoul early in March, one street along its whole length appeared to be
still encumbered with the drift of the previous winter’s snow. It was
only by the aid of a glass that I discovered that this is the great
promenade, and that the snowdrift was just the garments of the Koreans,
whitened by ceaseless labor with the laundry sticks. In these three
broad streets the moving crowd of men in white robes and black dress
hats seldom flags. They seem destitute of any object. Many of them are
of the _yang-ban_ or noble class, to whom a rigid etiquette forbids any
but official or tutorial occupation, and many of whom exist by hanging
on to their more fortunate relatives. Young men of the middle class
imitate their nonchalance and swinging gait.
There, too, are to be seen officials, superbly dressed, mounted on
very fat but handsome ponies, with profuse manes and tails, the riders
sitting uneasily on the tops of saddles with showy caparisonings a
foot high, holding on to the saddle bow, two retainers leading the
steed, and two more holding the rider in his place; or officials in
palanquins, with bearers at a run, amid large retinues. In the more
plebeian streets nothing is to be seen but bulls carrying pine brush,
strings of ponies loaded with salt or country produce, water-carriers
with pails slung on a yoke, splashing their contents, and coolies
carrying burdens on wooden pack saddles.
But in the narrower alleys, of which there are hundreds, further
narrowed by the low deep eaves, and the vile ditches outside the
houses, only two men can pass each other, and the noble red bull with
his load of brushwood is rarely seen. Between these miles of mud walls,
deep eaves, green slimy ditches, and blackened smoke-holes, few besides
the male inhabitants and burden bearers are seen to move. They are the
paradise of mangy dogs. Every house has a dog and a square hole through
which he can just creep. He yelps furiously at a stranger, and runs
away at the shaking of an umbrella. He was the sole scavenger of Seoul,
and a very inefficient one. He is neither the friend nor companion of
man. He is ignorant of Korean and every other spoken language. His bark
at night announces peril from thieves. He is almost wild. When young he
is killed and eaten in spring.
I have mentioned the women of the lower classes, who wash clothes and
draw water in the daytime. Many of these were domestic slaves, and
all are of the lowest class. Korean women are very rigidly secluded,
perhaps more absolutely so than the women of any other nation. In the
capital a very curious arrangement prevailed. About eight o’clock the
great bell tolled a signal for men to retire into their houses, and
for women to come out and amuse themselves, and visit their friends.
The rule which clears the streets of men occasionally lapses, and then
some incident occurs which causes it to be rigorously reënforced. So
it was at the time of my arrival, and the pitch dark streets presented
the singular spectacle of being tenanted solely by bodies of women with
servants carrying lanterns. From its operation were exempted blind men,
officials, foreigners’ servants, and persons carrying prescriptions to
the druggists. These were often forged for the purpose of escape from
durance vile, and a few people got long staffs and personated blind
men. At twelve the bell again boomed, women retired, and men were at
liberty to go abroad. A lady of high position told me that she had
never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight.
The nocturnal silence is very impressive. There is no human hum, throb,
or gurgle. The darkness too is absolute, as there are few if any
lighted windows to the streets. Upon a silence which may be felt, the
deep, penetrating boom of the great bell breaks with a sound which is
almost ominous.
[Illustration: TURTLE STONE]
FOOTNOTES:
[7] By a careful census taken in February, 1897, the intra-mural
population of Seoul was 144,636 souls, and the extra-mural 75,189,
total 219,815, males predominating to the extent of 11,079.
[8] _Nous avons changé tout cela._ As will be seen from a chapter near
the end of the book, the Chief Commissioner of Customs, energetically
seconded by the Governor of Seoul, has worked surprising improvements
and sanitary changes which, if carried out perseveringly, will redeem
the capital from the charges which travellers have brought against it.