SEOUL, THE KOREAN MECCA
Further difficulties and delays, while they pushed my journey into the
interior into the hot weather, gave me the advantage of learning a
little about the people and the country before starting. In one sense
Seoul is Korea. Take a mean alley in it with its mud-walled hovels,
deep-eaved brown roofs, and malodorous ditches with their foulness and
green slime, and it may serve as an example of the street of every
village and provincial town. In country places there are few industrial
specialties. A Seoul shop of “assorted notions” represents the shop
of every country town. The white clothing and the crinoline dress hat
are the same everywhere as in Seoul. Whatever of national life there
is exists only in the capital. Strong as is the drift towards London
in our own agricultural districts, it is stronger in Korea towards
Seoul. Seoul is not only the seat of government, but it is the centre
of official life, of all official employment, and of the literary
examinations which were the only avenues to employment. It is always
hoped that something may be “picked up” in Seoul. Hence there is a
constant permanent or temporary gravitation towards it, and the larger
proportion of the youths who swing and lounge on sunny afternoons
along the broad streets, aping the gait of _yang-bans_, are aspirants
for official position. Gusts of popular feeling which pass for public
opinion in a land where no such thing exists are known only in Seoul.
It is in the capital that the Korean feels the first stress of his
unsought and altogether undesired contact with Western civilization,
and resembles nothing so much as a man awaking from a profound sleep,
rubbing his eyes half-dazed and looking dreamily about him, not quite
sure where he is.
Seoul is also the commercial centre of a country whose ideas of
commerce are limited to huckstering transactions. All business is
done there. All country shops are supplied with goods from Seoul. All
produce not shipped from the treaty ports converges on Seoul. It is the
centre of the great trading guilds, which exercise a practical monopoly
in certain sorts of goods, as well as of the guild of porters by whom
the traffic of the country is carried on. The heart of every Korean is
in Seoul. Officials have town houses in the capital, and trust their
business to subordinates for much of the year. Landed proprietors
draw their rents and “squeeze” the people on their estates, but are
absentees living in the capital. Every man who can pay for food and
lodging on the road trudges to the capital once or twice a year, and
people who live in it, of whatever degree, can hardly be bribed to
leave it even for a few weeks. To the Korean it is the place in which
alone life is worth living.
Yet it has no objects of art, very few antiquities, no public gardens,
no displays except the rare one of the _Kur-dong_, and no theatres.
It lacks every charm possessed by other cities. Antique, it has no
ruins, no libraries, no literature, and lastly an indifference to
religion without a parallel has left it without temples, while certain
superstitions which still retain their hold have left it without a tomb!
Leaving out the temple of Confucius and the homage officially rendered
to his tablet in Korea as in China, there are no official temples
in Seoul, nor might a priest enter its gates under pain of death,
consequently the emphasis which noble religious buildings give even
to the meanest city in China or Japan is lacking. There is a small
temple to the God of War outside the south gate, with some very curious
frescoes, but I seldom saw any worshippers there. The absence of
temples is a feature of the other Korean cities. Buddhism, which for
1,000 years before the founding of the present dynasty was the popular
cult, has been “disestablished” and practically proscribed since the
sixteenth century, and Koreans account for the severe enactments
against priests by saying that in the Japanese invasion three centuries
ago Japanese disguised themselves as Buddhist priests and gained
admission to cities, putting their garrisons to the sword. Be that true
or false, Buddhism in Korea to be found must be sought.
[Illustration: GUTTER SHOP, SEOUL.]
As there are no temples, so there are no other signs of religion, and
the hasty observer would be warranted in putting down the Koreans as
a people without a religion. Ancestral worship, and a propitiation of
dæmons or spirits, the result of a timid and superstitious dread of the
forces of Nature, are to the Korean in place of a religion. Both, I am
inclined to believe, are the result of fear, the worship of ancestors
being dictated far less by filial piety than by the dread that
ancestral spirits may do harm to their descendants. This cult prevails
from the King to the coolie. It inspires the costly splendors of the
_Kur-dong_, as well as the spread of ancestral food in the humblest
hovel on New Year’s Eve.
The graves within an area of ten miles from the city wall are among the
remarkable features of this singular capital. The dead have a monopoly
of the fine hill slopes and southern aspects. A man who when alive is
content with a mud hovel in a dingy alley, when dead must repose on a
breezy hill slope with dignified and carefully tended surroundings. The
little fine timber which exists in the denuded neighborhood of Seoul is
owed to the Royal and wealthy dead. The amount of good land occupied by
the dead is incredible. The grave of a member of the Royal family on
a hill creates a solitude for a considerable distance around. In the
case of rich and great men as well as of princes, the grave is a lofty
grassy mound, often encircled by a massive stone railing, with the hill
terraced in front and excavated in a horseshoe shape behind. A stone
altar and stone lanterns are placed in front, and the foot of the
hill, as at the “Princess’s Tomb,” is often occupied by a temple-like
building containing tablets with the name and rank of the dead. The
Royal tombs are approached by stately avenues of gigantic stone
figures, possibly a harmless survival of the practice of offering human
and other sacrifices at a burial. These figures represent a priest,
a warrior in armor, a servant, a pony, and a sheep (?). The poorer
dead occupy hillsides in numbers, resting under grass mounds on small
platforms of grass always neatly kept. The lucky place for interment is
in all cases chosen by the geomancer. Behind rich men’s graves pines
are usually planted in a crescent. The dead population of the hillsides
round Seoul is simply enormous.
Funerals usually go out near dusk with a great display of colored
lanterns, but I was fortunate enough to see an artisan’s corpse carried
out by daylight. First came four drums and a sort of fife perpetrating
a lively tune as an accompaniment to a lively song. These were followed
by a hearse, if it may be called so, a domed and gaudily painted
construction with a garland of artificial flowers in the centre of the
dome, a white Korean coat thrown across the roof, and four flagstaffs
with gay flags at the four corners, bamboo poles, flower-wreathed,
forming a platform on which the hearse was borne by eight men in peaked
yellow hats garlanded with blue and pink flowers. Bouquets of the
same were disposed carelessly on the front and sides of the hearse,
the latter being covered with shield-shaped flags of gaudily colored
muslin. The chief mourner followed, completely clothed in sackcloth,
wearing an umbrella-shaped hat over 4 feet in diameter, and holding
a sackcloth screen before his face by two bamboo handles. Men in
flower-wreathed hats surrounded him, some of them walking backwards
and singing. He looked fittingly grave, but it is a common custom for
those who attend the chief mourner to try to make him laugh by comic
antics and jocular remarks. There are “burial clubs” in Seoul to which
100,000 _cash_ are contributed (then worth about thirty-three dollars,
silver). The first man to die receives 30,000 _cash_, the second
33,000, and the third 37,000. This man had belonged to one of these,
which accounts for an artisan having such a handsome funeral.
Mourners dress in straw-colored hempen cloth, and all wear the enormous
hats mentioned before, which so nearly conceal the face that the
carrying of the grass-cloth screen is almost a work of supererogation.
A mourner may not enter the palace grounds, and as mourning for a
father lasts for three years, a courtier thus bereaved is for that time
withdrawn from Court.
Among the curious customs mainly of Chinese origin connected with death
are the dressing the dying person in his best clothes when death is
very close at hand. The very poor are buried coffinless in a wrapping
of straw, and are carried by two men on a bier, the nature of the
burden being concealed by hoops covered with paper.
When Buddhist priests and temples were prohibited in the walled towns
three centuries ago, anything like a national faith disappeared
from Korea, and it is only through ancestral worship and a form
of “Shamanism” practiced by the lower and middle classes that
any recognition of the unseen survives, and that is in its most
superstitious and rudimentary form. Protestant Christian missionaries,
preceded in 1784 by those of the Roman Catholic Church, entered Korea
in 1884, almost as soon as the country was opened by treaty, and
agents of the American Methodist Episcopal and Northern Presbyterian
Churches took up their abode in Seoul. They have been followed by
representatives of several of the divisions among Protestants--Southern
Presbyterians, Canadian Presbyterians, Australian Presbyterians, and
Baptists--and in 1890 the first English mission to Korea was founded
under Bishop Corfe. A Roman Catholic Church and a very large Roman
Catholic Cathedral with a spire occupy two of the most prominent
sites in Seoul. One of the best sites is covered with the buildings
belonging to the Methodist Episcopal Mission, schools for girls and
boys, a printing press, a Union Church, and hospitals for men and
women, with which dispensaries are connected. The girls’ school
connected with this mission is one of the most admirable in its
organization and results that I have seen. The Presbyterians occupy
a lowlier position, but have the same class of agencies at work, and
lately the King handed over to them a large hospital in the city, known
as the “Government Hospital.”
Bishop Corfe’s mission occupies two modest sites in modest fashion, all
its buildings being strictly Korean. On one side of Seoul, at Nak-tong,
it has the Community House, where the bishop, clergy, doctor, and
printer live and have their private chapel, also the Mission press,
and a very efficient hospital for men, admirably nursed by the Sisters
of St. Peter’s Kilburn. On the slope of the British Legation Hill
are the English Church of the Advent, a beautiful Korean building,
the Community House of the Sisters of St. Peter, and the Women’s
Hospital buildings, embracing a dispensary, a new hospital (the Dora
Bird Memorial) of eighteen beds, with a room for a private patient,
besides an old hospital, to be used only for infectious diseases. These
are under the charge of a lady physician, and are also nursed by the
Sisters of St. Peter, who in both hospitals do admirable work in a
bright and loving spirit which is beyond all praise.
There are about 75 Protestant and 34 Roman missionaries in Korea,
mostly in Seoul. The language has the reputation of being very
difficult, and few of this large number have acquired facility in the
use of it. The idea of a nation destitute of a religion, and gladly
accepting one brought by the foreigner, must be dropped. The religion
the Korean would accept is one which would show him how to get money
without working for it. The indifference is extreme, the religious
faculty is absent, there are no religious ideas to appeal to, and the
moral teachings of Confucius have little influence with any class.
The Korean has got on so well without a religion, in his own opinion,
that he does not want to be troubled with one, specially a religion
of restraint and sacrifice which has no worldly good to offer. After
nearly twelve years of work, the number of baptized native Protestant
Christians in 1897 was 777.[10] The Roman Catholics claim 28,802, and
that the average rate of increase is 1,000 a year.[11] Their priests
live mostly in the wretched hovels of the people, amidst their foul
surroundings, and share their unpalatable food and sordid lives.
Doubtless, mission work in Korea will not differ greatly from such work
elsewhere among the older civilizations. Barriers of indifference,
superstition, and inertness exist, and whatever progress is made will
probably be chiefly through medical missions, showing Christianity in
action, and native agency, and through such schools as I have already
alluded to, which leave every feature of Korean custom, dress, and
manner of living untouched, while Christian instruction and training
are the first objects, and where the gentle, loving, ennobling
influence of the teacher is felt during every hour of the day.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] In 1897 the influence of Christianity was much stronger than in
1895, and the prospects of its spread much more encouraging.
[11] For statistics of Missions in February, 1897, see Appendix.