THE KOREAN PONY--KOREAN ROADS AND INNS
A gray and murky morning darkening into drizzle, which thickened into
a day’s pouring rain, was an inauspicious beginning of a long land
journey, but the crawling up the north Han had become monotonous and
change and action were desirable. Being an experienced muleteer, I
had arranged the loads for each pony so equitably as to obviate the
usual quarrel among the _mapu_ or grooms at starting! The men were not
regular _mapu_, and were going chiefly to see the Diamond Mountain. One
was well educated and gentlemanly, and the bystanders jeered at them
for “loading like scholars.” They were a family party, and there were
no disputes.
My first experience of the redoubtable Korean pony was not reassuring.
The men had never seen a foreign saddle and were half an hour in
getting it “fixed.” Though a pony’s saddle, it was far too large for
the creature’s minute body, the girths were half a yard and the crupper
nearly a foot too long. The animal bit, squealed, struck with his fore
and hind feet, and performed the singular feat of bending his back into
such an inward curve that his small body came quite near the ground.
The men were afraid of him, and it was only in the brief intervals
of fighting that they dared to make a dash at the buckles. It was
“tight-lacing” that he objected to.
The Korean pony is among the most salient features of Korea. The breed
is peculiar to it. The animals used for burdens are all stallions,
from 10 to 12 hands high, well formed, and singularly strong, carrying
from 160 to 200 lbs. 30 miles a day, week after week, on sorry food.
They are most desperate fighters, squealing and trumpeting on all
occasions, attacking every pony they meet on the road, never becoming
reconciled to each other even on a long journey, and in their fury
ignoring their loads, which are often smashed to pieces. Their savagery
makes it necessary to have a _mapu_ for every pony, instead of, as in
Persia, one to five. At the inn stables they are not only chained down
to the troughs by chains short enough to prevent them from raising
their heads, but are partially slung at night to the heavy beams of the
roof. Even under these restricted circumstances their cordial hatred
finds vent in hyena-like yells, abortive snaps, and attempts to swing
their hind legs round. They are never allowed to lie down, and very
rarely to drink water, and then only when freely salted. Their nostrils
are all slit in an attempt to improve upon Nature and give them better
wind. They are fed three times a day on brown slush as hot as they can
drink it, composed of beans, chopped millet stalks, rice husks, and
bran, with the water in which they have been boiled. The _mapu_ are
rough to them, but I never saw them either ill-used or petted. Dearly
as I love horses, I was not able on two journeys to make a friend of
mine. On this journey I rode a handsome chestnut, only 10 hands high.
He walked 4 miles an hour, and in a month of travelling, for much of
it over infamous mountain roads, never stumbled, but he resented every
attempt at friendliness both with teeth and heels. They are worth from
50s. upwards, and cost little to keep.
Their attendants, the _mapu_, who are by no means always their owners,
or even part owners, are very anxious about them and take very great
care of them, seeing to what passes as their comfort before their own.
The pack saddle is removed at once on halting, the animals are well
rubbed, and afterwards thick straw mats are bound round their bodies.
Great care is given to the cooking of their food. I know not whether
the partial slinging of them to the crossbeams is to relieve their legs
or to make fighting more difficult. On many a night I have been kept
awake by the screams of some fractious animal, kicking and biting his
neighbors as well as he was able, till there was a general plunging and
squealing, which lasted till blows and execrations restored some degree
of order.
After I mounted my steed, he trudged along very steadily, unless any of
his fellows came near him, when, with an evil glare in his eyes and a
hyena-like yell, he rushed upon them teeth and hoof, entirely oblivious
of bit and rider.
A torrent of rain fell, and the day’s journey consisted in splashing
through deep mud, fording swollen streams, because the bridges which
crossed them were rotten, getting wet to the skin, and getting
partially dry by sitting on the hot floor of a hovel called an inn
at the noonday halt, along with a steaming crowd of all sorts and
conditions of men in clean and dirty white clothes.
The road by which we travelled is the main one from Seoul to the
eastern treaty port of Wön-san. It passes through rice valleys with
abundant irrigation, and along the sides of bare hills. Goods and
travellers were not to be looked for in such weather, but there were
a few strings of coolies loaded with tobacco, and a few more taking
dried fish and dried seaweed, the latter a great article of diet, from
Wön-san to the capital. _Pangas_, or water pestles for hulling rice,
under rude thatched sheds, were numerous. These work automatically,
and their solemn thud has a tone of mystery. The machine consists of
a heavy log centred on a pivot, with a box at one end and a pestle at
the other. Water from a stream with some feet of fall is led into the
box, which when full tips over its contents and bears down one end of
the log, when the sudden rise, acting on the pestle at the other end,
brings it down with a heavy thud on the rice in the hollowed stone,
which serves as a mortar. Where this simple machine does not exist the
work is performed by women.
Denuded hillsides gave place to wooded valleys with torrents much
resembling parts of Japan, the rain fell in sheets, and quite in the
early afternoon, on reaching the hamlet of Sar-pang Kori, the _mapu_
declined to proceed farther, and there I had my first experience of a
Korean inn. Many weeks on that and subsequent journeys showed me that
this abominable shelter, as I then thought it, may be taken as a fair
average specimen, and many a hearty meal and good sound sleep may be
enjoyed under such apparently unpropitious circumstances.
There are regular and irregular inns in Korea. The irregular inn
differs in nothing from the ordinary hovel of the village roadway,
unless it can boast of a yard with troughs, and can provide
entertainment for beast as well as for man. The regular inn of the
towns and large villages consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full
of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumble-down gateway. A
gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in
the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, _mapu_, hangers-on, and
travellers’ loads make up a busy scene.
On one or two sides are ramshackle sheds, with rude, hollowed trunks in
front, out of which the ponies suck the hot brown slush which sustains
their strength and pugnacity. On the other is the furnace-shed with the
oats where the slush is cooked, the same fire usually heating the flues
of the _kang_ floor of the common room, while smaller fires in the same
shed cook for the guests. Low lattice doors filled in with torn and
dirty paper give access to a room the mud floor of which is concealed
by reed mats, usually dilapidated, sprinkled with wooden blocks which
serve as pillows. Farming gear and hat boxes often find a place on the
low heavy crossbeams. Into this room are crowded _mapu_, travellers,
and servants, the low _residuum_ of Korean travel, for officials and
_yang-bans_ receive the hospitalities of the nearest magistracy, and
the peasants open their houses to anybody with whom they have a passing
acquaintance. There is in all inns of pretensions, however, another
room, known as “the clean room,” 8 feet by 6, which, if it existed, I
obtained, and if not I had a room in the women’s quarters at the back,
remarkable only for its heat and vermin, and the amount of _ang-paks_,
bundles of dirty clothes, beans rotting for soy, and other plenishings
which it contained, and which reduced its habitable portion to a
minimum. At night a ragged lantern in the yard and a glim of oil in the
room made groping for one’s effects possible.
The room was always overheated from the ponies’ fire. From 80° to 85°
was the usual temperature, but it was frequently over 92°, and I spent
one terrible night sitting at my door because it was 105° within. In
this furnace, which heats the floor and the spine comfortably, the
Korean wayfarer revels.
On arriving at an inn, the master or servant rushes at the mud, or
sometimes matted, floor with a whisk, raising a great dust, which he
sweeps into a corner. The disgusted traveller soon perceives that
the heap is animate as well as inanimate, and the groans, sighs,
scratchings, and restlessness from the public room show the extent of
the insect pest. But I never suffered from vermin in a Korean inn, nor
is it necessary. After the landlord had disturbed the dust, Wong put
down either two heavy sheets of oiled paper or a large sheet of cotton
dressed with boiled linseed oil on the floor, and on these arranged my
camp-bed, chair, and baggage. This arrangement (and I write from twenty
months’ experience in Korea and China) is a perfect preventative.
In most inns rice, eggs, vegetables, and a few Korean dainties, such
as soup, vermicelli, dried seaweed, and a paste made of flour, sugar,
and oil, can be procured, but tea never, and the position of the well,
which frequently receives the soakage of the courtyard, precludes a
careful traveller from drinking aught but boiled water. At the proper
seasons chickens can be purchased for about 4d. each, and pheasants
for less. Dog meat is for sale frequently in the spring, and pork
occasionally.
The charges at Korean inns are ridiculously low. Nothing is charged for
the room with its glim and hot floor, but as I took nothing for “the
good of the house,” I paid 100 _cash_ per night, and the same for my
room at the midday halt, which gave complete satisfaction. Travellers
who eat three meals a day spend, including the trifling gratuities,
from 200 to 300 _cash_ per diem. Millet takes the place of rice in the
northern inns.
The Korean inn is not noisy unless wine is flowing freely, and even
then the noise subsides early. The fighting of the ponies, and the
shouts and execrations with which the _mapu_ pacify them, are the chief
disturbances till daylight comes and the wayfarers move on. Travelling
after dark is contrary to Korean custom.
From this slight sketch, the shadows of which will bear frequent and
much intensifying, it will be seen that Korean travelling has a very
seamy side, that it is entirely unsuited to the “globe trotter,” and
that even the specialist may do well to count the cost before embarking
upon it.
To me the curse of the Korean inn is the ill-bred and unmanageable
curiosity of the people, specially of the women. A European woman had
not been seen on any part of the journey, and I suffered accordingly.
Sar-pang Kori may serve as a specimen.
My quarters were opposite to the ponies, on the other side of the foul
and crowded courtyard. There were two rooms, with a space under the
roof as large as either between them, on which the dripping baggage
was deposited, and Wong established himself with his cooking stove and
utensils, though there was nothing to cook except two eggs obtained
with difficulty, and a little rice left over from the boat stores. My
room had three paper doors. The unwalled space at once filled up with
a crowd of men, women, and children. All the paper was torn off the
doors, and a crowd of dirty Mongolian faces took its place. I hung up
cambric curtains, but long sticks were produced and my curtains were
poked into the middle of the room. The crowd broke in the doors, and
filled the small space not occupied by myself and my gear. The women
and children sat on my bed in heaps, examined my clothing, took out my
hairpins and pulled down my hair, took off my slippers, drew my sleeves
up to the elbow and pinched my arms to see if they were of the same
flesh and blood as their own; they investigated my few possessions
minutely, trying on my hat and gloves, and after being turned out by
Wong three times, returned in fuller force, accompanied by unmarried
youths, the only good-looking “girls” ever seen in Korea, with abundant
hair divided in the middle, and hanging in long plaits down their
backs. The pushing and crushing, the odious familiarity, the babel of
voices, and the odors of dirty clothing in a temperature of 80°, were
intolerable. Wong cleared the room a fourth time, and suggested that
when they forced their way in again, they should find me sitting on
the bed cleaning my revolver, a suggestion I accepted. He had hardly
retired when they broke in again, but there was an immediate stampede,
and for the remainder of the evening I was free from annoyance. Similar
displays of aggressive and intolerable curiosity occurred three times
daily, and it was hard to be always amiable under such circumstances.
The Koreans travel enormously, considering that they seldom make
pilgrimages. The pedlars, who solely supply the markets, are always
on the move, and thousands travel for other reasons, such as the
gatherings at ancestral tablets, restlessness, _ennui_, _ku-kyöng_ or
sightseeing, visits to tombs, place-hunting, literary examinations,
place-keeping and attempting to deprive others of place, litigation,
and business. The fear of tigers and dæmons prevents people from
journeying by night, which is as well, as the bearers of official
passports have the right to demand an escort of torchbearers from each
village. If necessity compels nocturnal travel, the wayfarers associate
themselves in bands, swinging lanterns, waving torches, yelling, and
beating gongs. The dread of the tiger is so universal as to warrant the
Chinese proverbial saying, “The Korean hunts the tiger one half of the
year, and the tiger hunts the Korean the other half.” As I have before
remarked, the mandarins and _yang-bans_, with their trains, quarter
themselves on the magistracies, and eat the fat of the land. Should
they be compelled to have recourse to the discomforts of an inn and
the food of a village, they appropriate the best of everything without
paying for it. Hence the visit of a foreigner armed with a _kwan-ja_ is
such an object of dread, that on this land journey I never let it be
known that I had one, and on my second journey discarded it altogether,
trusting in both to the reputation for scrupulous honesty which I at
once established with my men to overcome the repugnance which the
innkeepers felt to receiving me.
The roads along which the traveller rides or trudges, at a pace, in
either case, of 3 miles an hour, are simply infamous. There are few
made roads, and those which exist are deep in dust in summer and in mud
in winter, where they are not polished tracks over irregular surfaces
and ledges of rock. In most cases they are merely paths worn by the
passage of animals and men into some degree of legibility. Many of the
streams are unbridged, and most of the bridges, the roadways of which
are only of twigs and sod, are carried away by the rains of early
July, and are not restored till the middle of October. In some regions
traffic has to betake itself to fords or ferries when it reaches a
stream, with their necessary risks and detentions. Even on the “Six
Great Roads” which centre in the capital, the bridges are apt to be
in such a rotten condition that a _mapu_ usually goes over in advance
of his horses to ascertain if they will bear their weight. Among the
mountains, roads are frequently nothing else than boulder-strewn
torrent beds, and on the best, that between Seoul and Chemulpo, during
the winter, there are tracts on which the mud is from one to three
feet deep. These infamous bridle tracks, of which I have had extensive
experience, are one of the great hindrances to the development of Korea.
Among the worst of these is that part of the main road from Seoul to
Wön-san which we followed from Sar-pang Kori for two days to Sang-nang
Dang, where we branched off for the region known as Keum-Kang San,
or the Diamond Mountain. The earlier part of this route was through
wooded valleys, where lilies of the valley carpeted the ground, and
over the very pretty pass of Chyu-pha (1,300 feet), on the top of which
is a large spirit shrine, containing some coarsely painted pictures of
men who look like Chinese generals, the usual offerings of old shoes,
rags, and infinitesimal portions of rice, and a tablet inscribed, “I,
the spirit Söng-an-chi, dwell in this place.” There, as at the various
trees hung with rags, and the heaps of stones on the tops of passes,
the _mapu_ bowed and expectorated, as is customary at the abodes of
dæmons.
More than once we passed not far from houses outside of which the
_mu-tang_ or sorceress, with much feasting, beating of drums, and
clashing of cymbals, was exercising the dæmon which had caused the
sickness of some person within. Portions of the expensive feast
prepared on these occasions are offered to the evil spirit, and after
the exorcism part of the food so offered is given to the patient, in
the belief that it is a curative medicine, often seriously aggravating
the disease, as when a patient suffering from typhoid fever or
dysentery is stuffed with pork or _kimshi_! Recently a case came under
the notice of Dr. Jaisohn (_So Chai pil_) in Seoul, in which a man,
suffering from the latter malady, died immediately after eating raw
turnips, given him by the _mu-tang_ after being offered to the dæmons
at the usual feast at the ceremony of exorcism.
There is much wet rice along the route, as well as dry rice, with a
double line of beans between every two rows, and in the rice revel and
croak large frogs of extreme beauty, vivid green with black velvet
spots, the under side of the legs and bodies being cardinal red. These
appeared to be the prey of the graceful white and pink ibis, the latter
in the intensified flush of his spring coloring.
A descent from a second pass leads to the Keum-San Kang, a largish
river in a rich agricultural region, and to the village of Pan-pyöng,
where they were making in the rudest fashion the great cast-iron pots
used for boiling horse food, from iron obtained and smelted 33 _li_
farther north.
On two successive days there were tremendous thunderstorms, the
second succeeded, just as we were at the head of a wild glen, by a
brief tornado, which nearly blew over the ponies, and snapped trees
of some size as though they had been matchwood. Then came a profound
calm. The clouds lay banked in pink illuminated masses on a sky of
tender green, cleft by gray mountain peaks. Mountain torrents boomed,
crashed, sparkled, and foamed, the silent woods rejoiced the eye by
the vividness of their greenery and their masses of white and yellow
blossom, and sweet heavy odors enriched the evening air. On that and
several other occasions, I recognized that Korea has its own special
beauties, which fix themselves in the memory; but they must be sought
for in spring and autumn, and off the beaten track. Dirty and squalid
as the villages are, at a little distance their deep-eaved brown roofs,
massed among orchards, on gentle slopes, or on the banks of sparkling
streams, add color and life to the scenery, and men in their queer
white clothes and dress hats, with their firm tread, and bundled-up
women, with a shoggling walk and long staffs, brought round with a
semicircular swing at every step, are adjuncts which one would not
willingly dispense with.
Before reaching the Paik-yang Kang, a broad, full river, an affluent of
the northern Han, with singularly abrupt turns and perpendicular cliffs
of a formation resembling that of the Palisades on the Hudson River, we
crossed one of the great lava fields described by Consul Carles.[19]
This, which we crossed in a northeasterly direction, is a rough oval
about 40 miles by 30, a tableland, in fact, surrounded by a deep chasm
where the torrents which encircle it meet the mountains. Its plateaux
are from 60 to 100 feet above these streams, which are all affluents
of the Han, and are supported on palisades of basalt, exhibiting the
prismatic columnar formation in a very striking manner. In some places
the lava, which is often covered either with conglomerate or a stiffish
clay, is very near the surface, and large blocks of it lie along
the streams. It is a most fertile tract, and could support a large
population, but not being suited for rice, is very little cultivated,
and grows chiefly oats, millet, and beans, which are not affected by
the strong winds.
There are two Dolmens, not far from the Paik-yang Kang. In one the
upper stone is from 7 to 10 feet long, by 7 feet wide, and 17 inches
deep, resting on three stones 4 feet 2 inches high. The other is
somewhat smaller. The openings of both face due north.
After crossing the Paik-yang Kang, there 162 yards wide and 16 feet
deep, by a ferryboat of remarkably ingenious construction, rendered
necessary by the fact that the long bridge over the broad stream was
in ruins, and that the appropriation for its reconstruction had been
diverted by the local officials to their own enrichment, we entered
the spurs or ribs of the great mountain chain which, running north and
south, divides Korea into two very unequal longitudinal portions at the
village of Tong-ku.
The scenery became very varied and pretty. Forests clothed many of
the hills with a fair blossoming undergrowth untouched by the fuel
gatherers’ remorseless hook; torrents flashed in foam through dark,
dense leafage, or bubbled and gurgled out of sight; the little patches
of cultivation were boulder-strewn; there were few inhabitants, and the
tracks called roads were little better than the stony beds of streams.
As they became less and less obvious, and the valleys more solitary,
our tergiversations were more frequent and prolonged, the _mapu_ drove
the ponies as fast as they could walk, the fords were many and deep,
and two of the party were unhorsed in them, still we hurried on faster
and faster. Not a word was spoken, but I knew that the men had _tiger
on the brain_!
Blundering through the twilight, it was dark when we reached the lower
village of Ma-ri Kei, where we were to halt for the night, two miles
from the Pass of Tan-pa-Ryöng, which was to be crossed the next day.
There the villagers could not or would not take us in. They said they
had neither rice nor beans, which may have been true so late in the
spring. However, it is, or then was, Korean law that if a village could
not entertain travellers it must convoy them to the next halting-place.
The _mapu_ were frantic. They yelled and stormed and banged at the
hovels, and succeeded in turning out four sleepy peasants, who were
reinforced by four more a little farther on; but the torches were too
short, and after sputtering and flaring, went out one by one, and the
fresh ones lighted slowly. The _mapu_ lost their reason. They thrashed
the torchbearers with their heavy sticks; I lashed my _mapu_ with
my light whip for doing it; they yelled, they danced. Then things
improved. Gloriously glared the pine knots on the leaping crystal
torrents that we forded, reddening the white clothes of the men and
the stony track and the warm-tinted stems of the pines, and so with
shouts and yells and waving torches we passed up the wooded glen in the
frosty night air, under a firmament of stars, to the mountain hamlet of
upper Ma-ri Kei, consisting of five hovels, only three of which were
inhabited.
It is a very forlorn place and very poor, and it was an hour before my
party of eight human beings and four ponies were established in its
miserable shelter, though even that was welcome after being eleven
hours in the saddle.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] “Recent Journeys in Korea,” _Proceedings of the Royal Geographical
Society_, May, 1896.