ALONG THE COAST
On leaving Chang-an Sa for Wön-san we retraced our route as far as
Kal-rön-gi, and afterwards crossed the Mak-pai Pass, from which there
is a grand view of the Keum-Kang San. Much of a somewhat tedious day
was spent in crossing a rolling elevated plateau bordered by high
denuded hills, on which the potatoe flourishes at a height of 2,500
feet. The soil is very fertile, but not being suited to rice, is very
little occupied. Crossing the Sai-kal-chai, 2,200 feet in altitude,
the infamous road descends on a beautiful alluvial valley, a rich
farming country, sprinkled with hamlets and surrounded by pretty hills
wooded with scrub oak, which in the spring is very largely used for
fertilizing rice fields. The branches are laid on the inundated surface
till the leaves rot off, and they are then removed for fuel. In this
innocent-looking valley the tiger scare was in full force. A tiger, the
people said, had carried off a woman the previous week, and a dog and
pig the previous night. It seemed incredible, yet there was a consensus
of evidence. Tigers are occasionally trapped in that region by baiting
a pit with a dog or pig, and the ensnared animal is destroyed by poison
or hunger to avoid injury to the skin, which, if it is that of a fine
animal, is very valuable.
A man is not the least ashamed of saying that he has not nerve or pluck
for tiger-hunting, which in Korea is a dangerous game, for the hunters
are stationed at the head of a gorge, usually behind brushwood, and
sometimes behind rocks, the big game, tigers and leopards, being driven
up towards them by large bodies of men. When one realizes that the
arms used are matchlocks lighted by slow matches from cords wound round
the arm, and that the charge consists of three imperfectly rounded
balls the size of a pea, and that, owing to the thickness of the screen
behind which the hunters are posted, the game is only sighted when
quite close upon them, one ceases to wonder at the reluctance of the
village peasants to turn out in pursuit of a man-eater, even though the
bones bring a very high price as Chinese medicine.
We put up at the only inn in the region. It had no “clean room,” but
the landlord’s wife gave up hers to me on condition that I would not
keep the door open for fear of a tiger. The temperature was 93°, and
to secure a little ventilation and yet keep my promise, I tore the
paper off the lattice-work of the door. Mr. Miller described his
circumstances thus. “I wanted to sleep in the yard, but the host would
not let me for fear of tigers, so I had to sleep in a room 8 feet by
10” (with a hot floor), “with seven other men, a cat, and a bird. By
tearing the paper off a window near my head I saved myself from death
by suffocation, and could have had a good night’s rest had not the
four horses been crowded into two stalls in the kitchen. They found
their quarters so close that they squealed, kicked, bit, and fought
all night, and their drivers helped them to make night hideous by
their yelling.” Nobody slept, and I had my full share of the unrest
and disturbance, a bad preparation for an eleven hours’ ride on the
next day, which was fiercely hot, as were the remaining six days of the
journey.
The road from this lofty tiger-haunted valley to the sea level at
Chyung-Tai is for the most part through valleys very sparsely peopled.
Much forest land, however, was being cleared for the planting of
cotton, and the peasant farmers are energetic enough to carry their
cultivation to a height of 2,000 feet. [On nearly the whole of this
journey I estimated that the land is capable of supporting double its
present population.] At Hoa-chung, a prettily situated market-place,
a student who had successfully passed the literary examination at
the Kwagga in Seoul, surrounded by a crowd in bright colored festive
clothing, was celebrating his return by sacrificing at his father’s
grave. On the various roads there were many processions escorting
village students home from the great competition in the Royal presence
at the capital, the student in colored clothes, on a gaily-caparisoned
horse or ass, with music and flags in front of him, and friends, gaily
dressed, walking beside him. On approaching his village he was met
with flags and music, the headman and villagers, even the women in gay
apparel, going out to welcome him. After this success he was entitled
to erect a tall pole, with a painted dragon upon it, in front of his
house. Success was, however, very costly, and often hung the millstone
of debt round a man’s neck for the remainder of his life. After
“passing” the student became eligible for official position, the sole
object of ambition to an “educated” Korean.
At Hoa-chung we turned eastwards, and took the main road to the coast,
attaining an altitude (uncorrected) of 3,117 feet by continued ascents
over rounded hills, which, when not absolutely bare except for coarse,
unlovely grasses, only produced stunted hazel bush. After this an easy
ascent among absolutely denuded hills leads up to a spirit shrine of
more than usual importance, crowded with the customary worthless _ex
votos_, rags and old straw shoes. At that point the road makes an
altogether unexpected and surprising plunge over the bare shoulders of
a bare hill into Paradise!
This pass of the “Ninety-nine Turns,” Tchyu-Chi-chang, deserves its
name, the number of sharp zigzags not being exaggerated, as in the
case of the “Twelve Thousand Peaks.” It is so absolutely rocky, and
so difficult in consequence, that it is more passable in snow than in
summer. Its abrupt turns lead down a forest-clothed mountain ridge
into a magnificent gorge, densely wooded with oak, Spanish chestnut,
weeping lime, _Abies excelsa_, and magnolia, looped together with the
white _mille-fleur_ rose. On the northern side rises Hoang-chyöng San,
a noble mountain and conspicuous landmark, much broken up into needles
and precipices, and clothed nearly to its summit with forests, of which
the _Pinus sylvestris_ is the monarch. The descent of the pass takes
one hour and a half, the road coming down upon a torrent 50 feet wide,
only visible in glints of foam here and there, amid its smothering
overgrowth of blossoming magnolia, syringa, and roses.
The filthy, miserable hamlet of Chyung-Tai, composed of five hovels,
all inns, was rather a comfortless close to a fatiguing day. These
houses are roofed, as in some other villages, with thick slabs of wood
heaped on each other, kept on, so far as they are kept on, by big
stones. The forest above on the mountains is a Royal reservation, made
so by the first king of this dynasty, who built stone walls round the
larger trees.
I had occasion to notice at Chyung-Tai, and in many other places, the
extreme voracity of the Koreans. They eat not to satisfy hunger, but
to enjoy the sensation of repletion. The training for this enjoyment
begins at a very early age, as I had several opportunities of
observing. A mother feeds her young child with rice, and when it can
eat no more in an upright position, lays it on its back on her lap and
feeds it again, tapping its stomach from time to time with a flat spoon
to ascertain if further cramming is possible. “The child is father to
the man,” and the adult Korean shows that he has reached the desirable
stage of repletion by eructations, splutterings, slapping his stomach,
and groans of satisfaction, looking round with a satisfied air. A
quart of rice, which when cooked is of great bulk, is a laborer’s
meal, but besides there are other dishes, which render its insipidity
palatable. Among them are pounded capsicum, soy, various native sauces
of abominable odors, _kimshi_, a species of sour kraut, seaweed, salt
fish, and salted seaweed fried in batter. The very poor only take two
meals a day, but those who can afford it take three and four.
In this respect of voracity all classes are alike. The great merit of a
meal is not so much quality as quantity, and from infancy onwards one
object in life is to give the stomach as much capacity and elasticity
as is possible, so that four pounds of rice daily may not incommode it.
People in easy circumstances drink wine and eat great quantities of
fruit, nuts, and confectionery in the intervals between meals, yet are
as ready to tackle the next food as though they had been starving for a
week. In well-to-do houses beef and dog are served on large trenchers,
and as each guest has his separate table, a host can show generosity
to this or that special friend without helping others to more than is
necessary. I have seen Koreans eat more than three pounds of solid meat
at one meal. Large as a “portion” is, it is not unusual to see a Korean
eat three and even four, and where people abstain from these excesses
it may generally be assumed that they are too poor to indulge in them.
It is quite common to see from twenty to twenty-five peaches or small
melons disappear at a single sitting, and without being peeled. There
can be no doubt that the enormous consumption of red pepper, which is
supplied even to infants, helps this gluttonous style of eating. It is
not surprising that dyspepsia and kindred evils are very common among
Koreans.
The Korean is omnivorous. Dog meat is in great request at certain
seasons, and dogs are extensively bred for the table. Pork, beef,
fish, raw, dried, and salted, the intestines of animals, all birds and
game, no part being rejected, are eaten--a baked fowl, with its head,
claws, and interior intact, being the equivalent of “the fatted calf.”
Cooking is not always essential. On the Han I saw men taking fish off
the hook, and after plunging them into a pot of red pepper sauce,
eating them at once with their bones. Wheat, barley, maize, millet, the
Irish and sweet potato, oats, peas, beans, rice, radishes, turnips,
herbs, and wild leaves and roots innumerable, seaweed, shrimps, pastry
made of flour, sugar, and oil, _kimshi_, on the making of which the
whole female population of the middle and lower classes is engaged in
November, a homemade vermicelli of buckwheat flour and white of egg,
largely made up into a broth, soups, dried persimmons, sponge-cakes,
cakes of the edible pine nut and honey, of flour, sugar, and sesamum
seeds, onions, garlic, lily bulbs, chestnuts, and very much else are
eaten. Oil of sesamum is largely used in cooking, as well as vinegar,
soy, and other sauces of pungent and objectionable odors, the basis of
most of them being capsicums and fermented rotten beans!
The magistracy of Thong-chhön, where we halted the next day at noon,
and where the curiosity of the people was absolutely _suffocating_,
is a town sheltered from the sea, which is within 2 miles, by a high
ridge, and is situated prettily in a double fold of hills remarkable
for the artistic natural grouping of very grand pines.
At this point a spell of the most severe heat of the year set in, and
the remainder of the journey was accomplished in a temperature ranging
from 89° to 100° in the shade, and seldom falling below 80° at night,
phenomenal heat for the first days of June. Taking advantage of it, the
whole male population was in the fields rice planting. Rice valleys,
reaching the unusual magnitude for Korea of from 3 to 7 miles in
breadth, and from 6 to 14 miles in length, sloping gently to the sea,
with innumerable villages on the slopes of the hills which surround
them, were numerous. Among them I saw, for the only time, reservoirs
for the storage of water for irrigation. The pink ibis and the spotted
green frog were abundant everywhere. The country there has a look of
passable prosperity, but the people are kept at a low level by official
exactions.
On this coast of Kong-wön-Do are the P’al-kyöng or “Eight Views,” which
are of much repute in Korea. We passed two of them. Su-chung Dai (The
Place Between the Waters) is a narrow strip of elevated white sand with
the long roll of the Pacific on the east, and the gentle plash of a
lovely fresh-water lake on the west. This lake of Ma-cha Töng, the only
body of fresh water which I saw in Korea, about 6 miles in length by 2
in breadth, has mountainous shores much broken by bays and inlets, at
the head of each of which is a village half hidden among trees in the
folds of the hills, while wooded conical islets break the mirror of the
surface. On the white barrier of sand there are some fine specimens
of the red-stemmed _Pinus sylvestris_, with a carpet of dwarf crimson
roses and pink lilies. Among the mountain forests are leopards, tigers,
and deer, and the call of the pheasant and the cooing of the wild dove
floated sweetly from the lake shore. It was an idyll of peace and
beauty. The other of the “Eight Views” is rather a curiosity than a
beauty, miles of cream-colored sand blown up in wavy billows as high as
the plumy tops of thousands of fir trees which are helplessly embedded
in it.
During the long hot ride of eleven hours, visions of the evening halt
at a peaceful village on the seashore filled my mind, and hope made the
toilsome climb over several promontories of black basalt tolerable,
even though the descents were so steep that the _mapu_ held the ponies
up by their tails! In the early twilight, when the fierce sun blaze was
over, in the smoky redness of a heated evening atmosphere, when every
rock was giving forth the heat it had absorbed in the day, across the
stream which is at once the outlet of the lake and the boundary between
the provinces of Kang-wön and Ham-gyöng, appeared a large, straggling,
gray-roofed village, above high-water mark, on a beach of white sand.
Several fishing junks were lying in shelter at the mouth of the stream.
Women were beating clothes and drawing water, and children and dogs
were rolling over each other on the sand, all more or less idealized by
being silhouetted in purple against the hot, lurid sky.
As the enchantment of distance faded and Ma-cha Töng revealed itself
in plain prose, fading from purple into sober gray, the ideal of a
romantic halt by the pure sea vanished. A long, crooked, tumble-down
narrow street, with narrower off-shoots, heaps of fish offal and
rubbish, in which swine, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, and children, much
afflicted with skin disease, were indiscriminately routing and rolling,
pools covered with a thick brown scum, a stream which had degenerated
into an open sewer, down which thick green slime flowed tardily,
a beach of white sand, the upper part of which was blackened with
fish laid out to dry, frames for drying fish everywhere, men, women,
children, all as dirty in person and clothing as it was possible to be,
thronging the roadway as we approached, air laden with insupportable
odors, and the vilest accommodation I ever had in Korea, have fixed
this night in my memory.
The inn, if inn it was, gave me a room 8 feet by 6, and 5 feet 2 inches
high. _Ang-paks_, for it was the family granary, iron shoes of ploughs
and spades, bundles of foul rags, seaweed, ears of millet hanging in
bunches from the roof, pack saddles, and worse than all else, rotten
beans fermenting for soy, and malodorous half-salted fish, just left
room for my camp-bed. This den opened on a vile yard, partly dunghill
and partly pigpen, in which is the well from which the women of the
house, with sublime _sang-froid_, draw the drinking water! Outside is a
swamp, which throughout the night gave off sickening odors. Every few
minutes something was wanted from my room, and as there was not room
for two, I had every time to go out into the yard. Wong’s good-night
was, “I hope you won’t die.” When I entered, the mercury was 87°. After
that, cooking for man and beast and the _kang_ floor raised it to 107°,
at which point it stood till morning, vivifying into revoltingly active
life myriads of cockroaches and vermin which revel in heat, not to
speak of rats, which ran over my bed, ate my candle, gnawed my straps,
and would have left me without boots, had I not long before learned to
hang them from the tripod of my camera. From nine years of travelling,
some of it very severe and comfortless, that night stands out as
hideously memorable.
The _raison d’être_ of Ma-cha Töng, and the numerous coast villages
which exist wherever a convenient shore and a protection for boats
occur together, is the coast fishing. The fact that a floating
population of over 8,000 Japanese fishermen make a living by fishing
on the coast near Fusan shows that there is a redundant harvest to be
reaped. The Korean fisherman is credited with utter want of enterprise,
and Mr. Oiesen, in the Customs’ report for Wön-san for 1891, accuses
him of “remaining content with such fish as will run into crudely
and easily constructed traps, set out along the shore, which only
require attention for an hour or so each day.” I must, however, say
that each village that I passed possessed from seven to twelve fishing
junks, which were kept at sea. They are unseaworthy boats, and it is
not surprising that they hug the shore. I believe that the fishing
industry, with every other, is paralyzed by the complete insecurity of
the earnings of labor and by the exactions of officials, and that the
Korean fisherman does not care to earn money of which he will surely be
deprived on any or no pretence, and that, along with the members of the
industrial classes generally, he seeks the protection of poverty.
The fish taken on this coast, when salted and dried, find their way
by boat to Wön-san, and from thence over central Korea, but in winter
pedlars carry them directly inland from the fishing villages. Salterns
on the plan of those often seen in China occur frequently near the
villages. The operation of making salt from sea water is absolutely
primitive, and so rough and dirty that the whiteness of the coarse
product which results is an astonishment. In spite of heavy losses and
heavier “squeezings,” this industry, which is carried on from May to
October, is a profitable one.
The road beyond that noisome halting-place traverses picturesque
country for many miles, being cut out of the sides of noble cliffs,
or crosses basaltic spurs by arrangements resembling rock ladders,
keeping perforce always close to the sea, now on dizzy precipices,
then descending to firm hard stretches of golden sand, or winding just
above high-water mark among colossal boulders which are completely
covered with the _Ampelopsis Veitchiana_, the creeper _par excellence_
of Korea. The sea was green and violet near the shore and a vivid blue
in the distance, and on its rippleless surface fishing boats with gray
hulls and brown sails lay motionless, for the rush and swirl of tides,
rising and falling as they do on the west coast from 25 to 38 feet, are
unknown on the east coast, the variation between high and low water
being within 18 inches.
It was the hottest day of the year, and it was fortunate that the
prettily situated market-place of Syo-im had a new and clean inn, in
which it was possible to prolong the noonday halt, and to get a good
dinner of fresh and salt fish, vegetables, herbs, sauces, and rice, for
the sum of two cents gold. There also, being the market-day, Mr. Miller
succeeded in obtaining _cash_ for four silver _yen_ from the pedlars.
After passing over a tedious sandy plain with a reserve of fine firs,
under which the countless dead of ages lie under great sand mounds held
together by nets or branches of trees, we reached at sunset my ideal,
a clean, exquisitely situated village of nine houses, of which one was
an inn where, contrary to the general rule, we were made cordially
welcome.[20] The nine families at Chin-pul possessed seven good-sized
fishing boats.
That inn is of unusual construction. There is a broad mud platform of
which fireplaces and utensils for cooking for man and beast occupy one
half, and the other is matted for sleeping and eating. My room, which
had no window, but was clean and plastered, opened on this, and as
the mercury was at 111° until 3 A.M. owing to the heated floor, I sat
at the door nearly all night, so the dawn and an early start, and the
coolness of the green and violet shades of the almost rippleless ocean,
which laved its varied shore of bays, promontories, and lofty cliffs,
were very welcome.
A valley opening on the sea which it took five hours to skirt and
cross, covered with grain and newly planted rice, is literally fringed
with villages, which look comfortably prosperous in spite of exactions.
A smaller valley contains about 3,000 acres of rice land only, and
on the slopes surrounding all these are rich lands, bearing heavy
crops of wheat, millet, barley, cotton, tobacco, castor oil, sesamum,
oats, turnips, peas, beans, and potatoes. The ponies are larger and
better kept in that region, and the red bulls are of immense size.
The black pig, however, is as small and mean as ever. The crops were
clean, and the rice dykes and irrigation channels well kept. Good and
honest government would create as happy and prosperous a people as the
traveller finds in Japan, the soil being very similar, while Korea has
a far better climate.
During the land journey from Chang-an Sa to Wön-san I had better
opportunities of seeing the agricultural methods of the Koreans than
in the valleys of the Han. As compared with the exquisite neatness
of the Japanese and the diligent thriftiness of the Chinese, Korean
agriculture is to some extent wasteful and untidy. Weeds are not kept
down in the summer as they ought to be, stones are often left on the
ground, and there is a raggedness about the margins of fields and dykes
and a dilapidation about stone walls which is unpleasing to the eye.
The paths through the fields are apt to be much worn and fringed with
weeds, and the furrows are not so straight as they might be. Yet on the
whole the cultivation is much better and the majority of the crops far
cleaner than I had been led to expect. Domestic animals are very few,
and very little fertilizing material is applied to the ground except
in the neighborhood of Seoul and other cities, a fact which makes its
exceeding fertility very noteworthy.
The rainfall is abundant but not excessive, and the desolating floods
which afflict Korea’s opposite neighbor, Japan, are as unknown as
earthquakes. Irrigation is only necessary for rice, which is the staple
of Korea. Except on certain rice lands, two crops a year are raised
throughout central and southern Korea, the rice being planted in June,
or rather transplanted from the nurseries in which it is sown in May,
and is harvested early in October, when the ground is ploughed and
barley or rye is sown, which ripens in May or early June of the next
year, after which water is let in, the field is again ploughed while
flooded, and the rice plants are set out in rows of “clumps,” two or
four or even six plants in a “clump.” Where only one crop is raised,
the rice field lies fallow from the end of October till the following
May. In wheat, barley, or rye fields the sowing is in October, and the
harvest in May or June, after which beans, peas, and other vegetables
are sown. Along the “great roads,” as the crops approach ripeness,
elevated watch-sheds are erected in the fields as safeguards against
depredations. The crops, on the whole, are very fine, and would be
immense were it not for the paucity of fertilizing material.
Agricultural implements are rude and few. A wooden ploughshare with a
removable iron shoe is used which turns the furrows the reverse way to
ours. A wooden spade, also shod with iron, is largely used for heavy
work. This, which excites the ridicule of foreigners as a gratuitous
waste of man power, is furnished with several ropes attached to the
blade, each of which is jerked by a man while another man guides the
blade into the ground by its long handle. The other implements are the
same sort of sharp-pointed sharp hoe which is in use in China, and
which in the hands of the eastern peasant fills the place of shovel,
hoe, and spade, a reaping hook, a short knife, a barrow, and a bamboo
rake which is largely used in the denudation of the hills.
Grain, peas, and beans are threshed out with flails as often as not in
the roadway of a village, while the grinding of flour and the hulling
of rice are accomplished by the stone quern, and the stone or wooden
mortar, with an iron pestle worked by hand or foot, the “_pang-a_,” or,
as has been previously described, by a “_mul_,” or water “_pang-a_.”
Rice is threshed by beating the ears over a board, and all grain is
winnowed by being thrown up in the wind.
The pony is not used in agriculture. Ploughing is done by the powerful,
noble, tractable, Korean bull, a cane ring placed in his nostrils
when young rendering him manageable even by a young child. He is four
years in attaining maturity, and is now worth from £3 to £4, his value
having been enhanced by the late war and the prevalence of rinderpest
in recent years. Milk is not an article of diet. In some districts
ox-sleds of very simple construction are used for bringing down fuel
from the hills and produce from the fields, and at Seoul and a few
other cities rude carts are to be seen; but ponies, men, and bulls are
the means of transport for produce and goods, the loads being adjusted
evenly on wooden pack saddles, or in the case of small articles in
panniers of plaited straw or netted rope. In the latter, ingeniously
made to open at the bottom and discharge their contents, manure is
carried to the fields. Both bulls and ponies are shod with iron. The
pony carries from 160 to 200 lbs. Sore backs are lamentably common.
The breed of pigs is very small. Pigs are always black and loathsome.
Their bristles stand up along their backs, and they are lean, active,
and of specially revolting habits. The dogs are big, usually buff,
long-haired, and cowardly, and caricature the Scotch collie in their
aspect. The fowls are plebeian, and for wildness, activity, and powers
of flight are unequalled in my experience. Ducks are not very common,
and geese are kept chiefly as guards, and for presentation at weddings
as emblems of fidelity. The few sheep bred in Korea are reserved for
Royal sacrifices. I have occasionally seen mutton on tables in Seoul,
but it has been imported from Chefoo. The villages which make their
living altogether by agriculture are usually off the high roads, those
which the hasty traveller passes through depending as much on the
entertaining of wayfarers as on the cultivation of the land. In these,
nearly every house has a covered shelf in front at which food can be
obtained, but lodging is not provided, and the villages which can
feed and lodge beasts as well as men are few. The fact that the large
farming villages are off the road gives an incorrect notion of the
population of Korea.
On the slope of a hillside above a pleasant valley lies the town of
An-byöng, once, judging from the extent of its decaying walls and
fortifications, and the height of its canopied but ruinous gate towers,
a large city. The _yamen_ and other Government buildings are well kept,
and being in good repair, are in striking contrast to those previously
seen on the route. The “main street” is, however, nothing but a dirty
alley. The town has a diminishing population, and though it makes some
paper from the _Brousonettia Papyrifera_, and has several schools,
and exchanges rice and beans for foreign cottons at Wön-san, it has a
singularly decaying look, and is altogether unworthy of its position as
being one of the chief places in the province of Ham-gyöng. Outside of
it the road crosses a remarkably broad river bed by a bridge 720 feet
long, so dilapidated that the ponies put their feet through its rotten
sods several times.
From An-byöng to Ta-ri-mak, a short distance from Nam-San on the
main road from Seoul to Wön-san, is a long and tedious ride through
thinly peopled country and pine woods full of graves. We spent two
nights there at a very noisy and disagreeable inn, in which privacy
was unattainable and the vermin were appalling. There the host was
specially unwilling to take in foreigners, on the ground that we
should not pay, a suspicion which irritated our friendly _mapu_,
who vociferated at the top of their voices that we paid “even for
the smallest things we got.” The swinging season was at hand, each
amusement having its definite date for beginning and ending, and in
every village swings were being erected on tall straight poles. Wong
could never resist the temptation of taking a swing, which always
amused the people.
At this inn there were some musical performers who made both night and
day wearisome to me, but gave great pleasure to others. I have not
previously mentioned my sufferings on the Han from the sounds produced
by itinerant musicians, and by the _mu-tang_ or sorceress and her
coadjutors; but, as has been forcibly brought out in a paper on Korean
music by Mr. Hulbert in the _Korean Repository_,[21] the sounds are
peculiar and unpleasing, because we neither know nor feel what they
are intended to express, and we bring to Korean music not the Korean
temperament and training but the Western, which demands “time” as an
essential. It may be added that the Koreans, like their neighbors the
Japanese, love our music as little as we love theirs, and for the same
reason, that the ideas we express by it are unfamiliar to them.
One reason of the afflictive and discordant sounds is that the gamut
of Korea differs from the musical scale of European countries, with
the result that whenever music seems to be trembling on the verge
of a harmony, a discord assails the ear. The musical instruments
are many, but they are not carefully finished. Among instruments of
percussion are drums, cymbals, gongs, and a species of castanet.
For wind instruments there are unkeyed bugles, flutes, and long and
short trumpets; and the stringed instruments are a large guitar, a
twenty-five stringed guitar, a mandolin, and a five-stringed violin.
The discord produced by a concert of several of these instruments is
heard in perfection at the opening and closing of the gates of cities.
There are three classes of Korean vocal music, the first being the
_Si-jo_ or “classical” style, _andante tremuloso_, and “punctuated with
drums,” the drum accompaniment consisting mainly of a drum beat from
time to time as an indication to the vocalist that she has quavered
long enough upon one note. The _Si-jo_ is a slow process, and is said
by the Koreans to require such long and patient practise that only the
dancing girls can excel in it, as they alone have leisure to cultivate
it. One branch of it deals with convivial songs, of one of which I
give a translation from the gifted pen of the Rev. H. B. Hulbert of
Seoul.[22]
The Korean, prisoned during the winter in his small, dark, dirty, and
malodorous rooms, with neither a glowing fireside nor brilliant lamp
to mitigate the gloom, welcomes spring with lively excitement, and
demands music and song as its natural accompaniment--song that shall
express the emancipation, breathing space, and unalloyed physical
pleasure which have no counterpart in our English feelings. Thus a
classical song runs:--
The willow catkin bears the vernal blush of summer’s dawn
When winter’s night is done;
The oriole, who preens herself aloft on swaying bough,
Is summer’s harbinger;
The butterfly, with noiseless _ful-ful_ of her pulsing wing,
Marks off the summer hour.
Quick, boy, thy zither! Do its strings accord? ’Tis well.
Strike up! _I must have song._
The second style of Korean vocal music is the _Ha Ch’i_ or popular. The
most conspicuous song in this class is the _A-ra-rüng_, of 782 verses.
It is said that the _A-ra-rüng_ holds to the Korean in music the same
place that rice does in his food--all else being a mere appendage. The
tune, but with the trills and quavers, of which there are one or two to
each note, left out, is given here, though Mr. Hulbert, to whom I am
greatly indebted, calls it “a very weak attempt to score it.”
[Illustration: A-ra-rüng a-ra-rüng a-ra-ri-o--- a-ra-rüng
öl--sa pai ddi-ö-ra. Mun-gyung sai-chai pak-tala-n.
mu---hong-do-kai pang-maing-i ta na-kan-da.]
The chorus of _A-ra-rüng_ is invariable, but the verses which are sung
in connection with it take a wide range through the fields of lyrics,
epics, and didactics.
There is a third style, which is between the classical and the popular,
but which hardly deserves mention.
To my thinking, the melancholy which seems the _motif_ of most Oriental
music becomes an extreme plaintiveness in that of Korea, partly due
probably to the unlimited quavering on one note. While what may be
called concerted music is torture to a Western ear, solos on the
flute ofttimes combine a singular sweetness with their mournfulness
and suggest “Far-off Melodies.” Love songs are popular, and there is
a tender grace about some of them, as well as an occasional glint
of humor, as indicated by the last line of the third stanza of one
translated by Mr. Gale.[23] The allusions to Nature generally show
a quick and sympathetic insight into her beauties, and occasional
stanzas, of which the one cited is among several translated by Mr.
Hulbert, have a delicacy of touch not unworthy of an Elizabethan
poet.[24] The _Korean Repository_ is doing a good work in making Korean
poetry accessible to English readers.
There was not, however, any flute music at Ta-ri-mak. There were
classical songs, with a direful drum accompaniment, and a wearisome
repetition of the _A-ra-rüng_, continuing all day and late into the hot
night.
A few pedlars passed by, selling tobacco, necessaries, and children’s
toys, the latter rudely made, and only attractive in a country in which
artistic feeling appears dead. There are shops in Seoul, Phyöng-yang,
and other cities devoted to the sale of such toys, painted in staring
colors, and illustrative chiefly of adult life. There are also monkeys,
puppies, and tigers on wheels, all for boys, and soldiers in European
uniforms have appeared during the recent military craze, and boys are
very early taught to look forward to official life by representations
of mandarins’ chairs, red-tasselled umbrellas, and fringed hats. Girls
being of comparatively small account, toys specially suited to them are
not many.
Japanese lucifer matches, which, when of the cheap sort, seem only
slightly inflammable, as I have several times used a whole box without
igniting one, were in the stock of the pedlars, and are making rapid
headway in the towns, but even so near Wön-san as Ta-ri-mak is, the
people were still using flint and steel to light chips of wood dipped
in sulphur, though the cheap and smoky kerosene lamp has displaced the
tall, upright candlestick and the old-fashioned dish lamps there and in
very many other country places.
From the high-road from Seoul to Wön-san we diverged at Nam-San to
visit the large monastery of Sök-wang Sa, famous as being the place
where, in the palmy days of Korean Buddhism, Atai-jo, the first king of
the present dynasty, was educated and lived. The monastery itself, with
its temples, was erected by this king to mark the spot where, 504 years
ago, he received that supernatural message to rule in virtue of which
his descendant occupies the Korean throne to-day. In this singularly
beautiful spot Atai-jo’s early years were spent in religious exercises,
study, and preparation, and many of the superb trees which adorn the
grand mountain clefts in which Sök-wang Sa is situated are said to
have been planted by his hands. His regalia and robes of state are
preserved in a building by themselves, which no one is allowed to enter
except the duly appointed attendant. A bridle track alongside of a
clear mountain stream leads through very pretty and prosperous-looking
country, and over wooded foothills for some miles to the base of a
fine mountain range. We passed for a length of time through rich and
heavily-timbered monastic property, then the beautiful valley narrowed,
and by a “Red Arrow Gate” we entered on a smooth broad road, on which
the sun glinted here and there through the heavy foliage of an avenue
of noble pines, a gap now and then giving entrancing glimpses of the
deep delicious blue of the summer sky, of a grand gorge dark with
pines, firs, and the exotic _Cleyera Japonica_ and zelkawa, brightened
by the tender green of maples and other deciduous trees, and by flashes
of foam from a torrent booming among great moss-covered boulders.
Then came bridges with decorative roofs, abbots’ tombstones under
carved and painted canopies, inscribed stone tablets, glorious views
of a peaked, forest-clothed mountain barring the gorge, and as the
pines of the avenue fell into groups at its close, and magnificent
zelkawas, from whose spreading branches white roses hung in graceful
festoons, overarched the road, a long irregular line of temples and
monastic buildings appeared, clinging in singular picturesqueness to
the sides of the ravine, which there ascends somewhat rapidly towards
the mountain, which closes it.
An abbot, framed in the doorway of a quaint building, and looking like
a picture of a portly, jolly, mediæval friar, welcomed us, and he and
his monks regaled us with honey water in the large guest hall, but
simultaneously produced a visitors’ book and asked us how much we were
going to pay, the sum being duly recorded. The grasping ways of these
monks, who fleeced the _mapu_ so badly as to make them say they “had
fallen among thieves,” contrast with the friendly hospitality of their
brethren of the Diamond Mountain, and can only be accounted for by the
contaminating influences of a treaty port, from which they are distant
only a long day’s journey!
“See the sights first and then pay,” they said, the glorious views and
the quaint picturesqueness of the monastic buildings clustering on the
crags above the cataracts being the sight _par excellence_. It was
refreshing to turn from the contemplation of the sensual, acquisitive,
greedy faces of most of the monks to Nature at her freshest and
fairest, on one of the loveliest days of early June.
The interiors of the temples are shabby and dirty, the paint is scaling
off the roofs, and the floors and even the altars were hidden under
layers of herbs drying for kitchen use. Besides the tablet to the
first king of the present dynasty in a handsome tablet-house, the
noteworthy “sight” to be seen is a small temple dedicated to the “Five
Hundred Disciples.” Sök-wang Sa is not a holy place, and the artist who
caricatured the devout and ascetic followers of the ascetic Sakymuni
has bequeathed a legacy of unhallowed suggestion to its inmates!
The “Five Hundred” are stone images not a foot in height, arranged
round the dusty temple in several tiers, each one with a silk cap
on, worn with more or less of a jaunty air on one side of the head
or falling over the brow. The variety of features and expression is
wonderful; all Eastern nationalities are represented, and there are not
two faces or attitudes alike. The whole display shows genius, though
not of a high order.
Among the infinite variety, one figure has deeply set eyes, an aquiline
nose, and thin lips; another a pug nose, squinting eyes, and a broad
grinning mouth; one is Mongolian, another Caucasian, and another
approximates to the Negro type. Here is a stout, jolly fellow, with a
leer and a broad grin suggestive of casks of porter and the archaic
London drayman; there is an idiot with drooping head, receding brow
and chin, and a vacant stare; here again is a dark stage villain, with
red cheeks and a cap drawn low over his forehead; then Mr. Pecksniff
confronts one with an air of sanctimoniousness obviously difficult to
retain; Falstaff outdoes his legendary jollity; and priests and monks
of all nations leer at the beholders from under their jaunty caps. It
is an exhibition of unsanctified genius. Nearly all the figures look
worse for drink, and fatuous smiles, drunken leers, and farcical grins
are the rule, the effect of all being aggravated by the varied and
absurd arrangements of the caps. The grotesqueness is indescribable,
and altogether “unedifying.”
It was a great change to get on the broad main road to Wön-san, and to
see telegraph poles once more. There was plenty of goods and passenger
traffic across the fine plain covered with rice and grain, margined by
bluffs, and dotted with what have obviously once been islands, near
which Wön-san is situated.
Where the road is broad, a high heap of hardened mud runs along the
centre, with hardened mud corrugations on either side; where narrow, it
is merely the top of a rice dyke. The bridges are specially infamous;
in fact, they were so rotten that the _mapu_ would not trust their
ponies upon them, and we forded all the streams. Yet this road, which
I found equally bad at the three points at which I touched it, is one
of the leading thoroughfares by which goods pass from the east to the
west coast and _vice versa_,--tobacco, copper, salt fish, seaweed,
galena, and hides from the east, and foreign shirtings, watches, and
miscellaneous native and foreign articles from the west.
The heat of the sun was but poorly indicated by a shade temperature
of 84°, and it was in his full noontide fierceness that we reached
the huddle of foul and narrow alleys and irregular rows of thatched
shops along the high-road which make up the busy and growing Korean
town of Wön-san, which, with an estimated population of 15,000 people,
lies along a strip of beach below a pine-clothed bluff and ranges of
mountains, then green to their summits, but which I saw in December
of the same year in the majesty of the snow which covers them from
November to May. The smells were fearful, the dirt abominable, and the
quantity of wretched dogs and of pieces of bleeding meat blackening
in the sun perfectly sickening. This aspect of meat, produced by the
mode of killing it, has made foreigners entirely dependent on the
Japanese butchers in Seoul and elsewhere. The Koreans cut the throat
of the animal and insert a peg in the opening. Then the butcher takes
a hatchet and beats the animal on the rump until it dies. The process
takes about an hour, and the beast suffers agonies of terror and
pain before it loses consciousness. Very little blood is lost during
the operation; the beef is full of it, and its heavier weight in
consequence is to the advantage of the vendor.
Then came a level stretch of about a mile, much planted with potatoes,
glimpses of American Protestant mission-houses in conspicuous and
eligible positions (eligible, that is, for everything but mission
work), and the uneven Korean road glided imperceptibly into a broad
gravel road, fringed on both sides with neat wooden houses standing in
gardens, which gradually thickened into the neatest, trimmest, and most
attractive town in all Korea, the Japanese settlement of the treaty
port of Wön-san, opened to Japanese trade in 1880 and to foreign trade
generally in 1883.
Broad and well-kept streets, neat wharves, trim and fairly
substantial houses, showing the interior dollishness and daintiness
characteristic of Japan, a large and very prominent Japanese Consulate
in Anglo-Japanese style, the offices of the “N.Y.K.,” the Japan Mail
Steamship Company (an abbreviation as familiar to residents in the
Far East as “P. & O.”), a Japanese Bank of solid reputation, Customs’
buildings, of which a neat reading-room forms a part, neat Japanese
shops where European articles can be bought at moderate prices, a large
schoolhouse, with a teacher in European dress, and active manikins and
hobbling but graceful women, neither veiled nor muffled up, are the
features of this pleasant Japanese colony, which is so fortunate as to
have no history, its progress, though not rapid, having been placid
and peaceful, not marred by friction either with Koreans or foreigners
of other nationalities; and even the recent war, though it led to the
removal of the Chinese consul and his countrymen, an insignificant
fraction of the population, had left no special traces, except that the
enormous wages paid to transport coolies by the Japanese had enabled
them to gamble with _yen_ instead of _cash_!
I was most hospitably received by Mr. and Mrs. Gale of the American
Presbyterian Mission. Mr. Gale’s work was the important one of the
preparation of a dictionary of the Korean language in Korean, Chinese,
and English, which was published in 1897.
During the twelve days which I spent at Wön-san I made a junk excursion
in Yung-hing or Broughton Bay, in the southwest corner of which the
port is situated. It is a superb bay, with an area of fully 40 square
miles, a depth of from 6 to 12 fathoms, with good holding ground, never
freezes in winter, is sheltered by promontories and mountains from the
winds of every quarter, and its entrance is protected by islands. To
English readers it is probable that the sole interest of this fine
bay lies in the fact that its northern arm, Port Lazareff, which was
the object of my cruise, is the harbor which Russia is credited with
desiring to gain possession of for the terminus of her Trans-Siberian
Railway. Whether this be so or no, or whether Port Shestakoff, on the
same coast, but 60 miles farther north, is more defensible and better
adapted for a naval as well as a terminal port, the time has gone by
for grudging to Russia an outlet on the Pacific, and I for one should
prefer it on the coast of eastern Korea than on the northern shore of
the Yellow Sea.
The head of Port Lazareff is about 16 miles from Wön-san, and is formed
by the swampy outlets of the river Dun-gan, among the many branches of
which lie inhabited, low-lying islands. There are rude but extensive
salt works at the shallows in which this noble inlet terminates, after
receiving several streams besides the Dun-gan. Port Lazareff has, in
addition, abundant supplies of water from natural springs. The high
hills which surround the bay are grassy to their summits, but there
is very little wood, and the villages are small and far between. Game
is singularly abundant. Pheasants are nearly as plentiful as sparrows
are with us, the wary turkey bustard abounds, there are snipe in the
late summer, and pigeons, plover, and water-hen are common. In spring
and autumn wild fowl innumerable crowd the waters of every stream and
inlet, swans, teal, geese, and ducks darkening the air, which they rend
with their clamor as the sportsman invades their haunts.
A Korean junk does not impress one by its seaworthiness, and it is not
surprising that the junkmen hug the shore and seek shelter whenever
a good sailing breeze comes on. She is built without nails, iron, or
preservative paint, and looks rather like a temporary and fortuitous
aggregation of beams and planks than a deliberate construction. Two
tall, heavy masts fixed by wedges among the timbers at the bottom of
the boat require frequent attention, as they are always swaying and
threatening to come down. The sails are of matting, with a number of
bamboos running transversely, with a cord attached to each, united into
one sheet, by means of which tacking is effected, or rather might be.
Practically, navigation consists in running before a light breeze, and
dropping the mass of mats and bamboos on the confusion below whenever
it freshens, varying the process by an easy pull at the sweeps, one
at the stern and two working on pins in transverse beams amidships,
which project 3 feet on each side. The junk is fitted with a rudder of
enormous size, which from its position acts as a keel board. The price
is from 60 to 80 dollars. This singular craft sails well before the
wind, but under other circumstances is apt to become unmanageable.
Wön-san has telegraphic communication with Seoul, and chiefly through
the enterprise of the N.Y.K., it is connected by most comfortable
steamers with Korean ports and with Wladivostok, Kobe, and Nagasaki,
Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Chefoo, Newchwang, and Tientsin. Steamers of a
Russian line call there at intervals during the summer season. There
are no Western merchants or Western residents except the missionaries
and the Customs staff, and foreign trade is chiefly in the hands of the
Japanese.
About 60 _li_ from Wön-san are some large grass-covered mounds,
of which the Koreans do not care to speak, as they regard them as
associated with an ancient Korean custom, now looked upon as barbarous.
During the last dynasty, and more than five centuries ago, it was
customary, when people from age and infirmity became burdensome to
their relations, to incarcerate them in the stone cells which these
mounds contain, with a little food and water, and leave them there to
die. In similar mounds, elsewhere in Korea, bowls and jars of coarse
pottery have been found, as well as a few specimens of gray _celadon_.
There is nothing sensational about Wön-san.[25] It has no “booms” in
trade or land, but “keeps the even tenor of its way.” It is to me far
the most attractive of the treaty ports. Its trim Japanese settlement,
from which green hills rise abruptly, backed by fine mountain forms,
dignified by snow for seven months of the year, and above all, the
exquisite caves to the northwest, where the sea murmurs in cool
grottos, and beats the pure white sand into ripples at the feet of
cliffs hidden by flowers, ferns, and grass, and its air of dreamy
repose--“a land where it is always afternoon”--point to its future as
that of a salubrious and popular sanitarium.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] A _kwan-ja_, being an official passport, lays a traveller open to
the suspicion that, like officials, he will take the best of everything
he can get without paying for it, and this dread, added to a natural
distrust of foreigners, led to more or less unwillingness to receive us
in many places, the _mapu_ having to console the people by asseverating
that I paid the full price for all I got, and that even when I tore a
sheet of paper from the window I paid for it!
[21] February, 1896.
[22] I
’Twas years ago that Kim and I
Struck hands and swore, however dry
The lip might be or sad the heart,
The merry wine should have no part
In mitigating sorrow’s blow
Or quenching thirst. ’Twas long ago.
II
And now I’ve reached the flood-tide mark
Of life; the ebb begins, and dark
The future lowers. The tide of wine
Will never ebb. ’Twill aye be mine
To mourn the desecrated fane
Where that lost pledge of youth lies slain.
III
Nay, nay, begone! The jocund bowl
Again shall bolster up my soul
Against itself. What, good-man, hold!
Canst tell me where red wine is sold?
Nay, just beyond that peach tree there?
Good luck be thine, I’ll thither fare.
[23] LOVE SONG
Farewell’s a fire that burns one’s heart,
And tears are rains that quench in part,
But then the winds blow in one’s sighs,
And cause the flames again to rise.
My soul I’ve mixed up with the wine,
And now my love is drinking,
Into his orifices nine
Deep down its spirit’s sinking.
To keep him true to me and mine,
A potent mixture is the wine.
Silvery moon and frosty air,
Eve and dawn are meeting;
Widowed wild goose flying there,
Hear my words of greeting!
On your journey should you see
Him I love so broken-hearted,
Kindly say this word for me,
That it’s death when we are parted.
Flapping off the wild goose clambers,
Says she will if she remembers.
Fill the ink-stone, bring the water,
To my love I’ll write a letter;
Ink and paper soon will see
The one that’s all the world to me,
While the pen and I together,
Left behind, condole each other.
[24]
I asked the spotted butterfly.
To take me on his wing and fly
To yonder mountain’s breezy side.
The trixy tiger moth I’ll ride
As home I come.
[25] In January of 1897, the population of Wön-san was as follows:--
Japanese 1,299
Chinese 39
American 8
German 3
British 2
French 2
Russian 2
Danish 1
Norwegian 1
-----
1,357
Estimated Korean population, 15,000.