CHAPTER I

WANDERING IN

NORTHERN CHINA

[Illustration:

A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies on foot,

passed up and down the sacred stairway

]

WANDERING IN NORTHERN CHINA

BY

HARRY A. FRANCK

Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around the World,” “Roaming Through the

West Indies,” “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” “Working North from

Patagonia,” etc., etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH 171 UNUSUAL

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

WITH A MAP SHOWING HIS ROUTE

[Illustration]

THE CENTURY CO.

NEW YORK & LONDON

Copyright, 1923, by

THE CENTURY CO.

Printed in U. S. A.

To

KATHARINE LATTA FRANCK

WHO CHOSE THIS PARTICULAR WANDER-YEAR TO JOIN OUR FAMILY CIRCLE

FOREWORD

There is no particular plan to this book. I found my interest turning

toward the Far East, and as I am not one of those fortunate persons who

can scamper through a country in a few weeks and know all about it, I

set out on a leisurely jaunt to wherever new clues to interest led me.

It merely happened that this will-o’-the-wisp drew me on through

everything that was once China, north of about the thirty-fourth

parallel of latitude. The man who spends a year or two in China and then

attacks the problem of telling all he saw, heard, felt, or smelled there

is like the small boy who was ordered by the teacher to write on two

neat pages all about his visit to the museum. It simply can’t be done.

Hence I have merely set down in the following pages, in the same

leisurely wandering way as I have traveled, the things that most

interested me, often things that others seem to have missed, or

considered unimportant, in the hope that some of them may also interest

others. Impressions are unlike statistics, however, in that they cannot

be corrected to a fraction, and I decline to be held responsible for the

exact truth of every presumption I have recorded. If I have fallen into

the common error of generalizing, I hereby apologize, for I know well

that details in local customs differ even between neighboring villages

in China. What I say can at most be true of the north, for as yet I know

nothing of southern China. On the other hand, there may be much

repetition of customs and the like, but that goes to show how unchanging

is life among the masses in China even as a republic.

Lafcadio Hearn said that the longer he remained in the East the less he

knew of what was going on in the Oriental mind. An “old China hand” has

put the same thing in more popular language: “You can easily tell how

long a man has been in China by how much he doesn’t know about it. If he

knows almost everything, he has just recently arrived; if he is in

doubt, he has been here a few years; if he admits that he really knows

nothing whatever about the Chinese people or their probable future, you

may take it for granted that he has been out a very long time.”

But as I have said before, the “old-timer” will seldom sit down to tell

even what he has seen, and in many cases he has long since lost his way

through the woods because of the trees. Or he may have other and more

important things to do. Hence it is up to those of us who have nothing

else on hand to pick up and preserve such crumbs of information as we

can; for surely to know as much of the truth about our foreign neighbors

as possible is important, above all in this new age. In our own land

there are many very false ideas about China; false ideas that in some

cases are due to deliberate Chinese propaganda abroad. While I was out

in the far interior I received a clipping outlining the remarks of a

Chinese lecturing through our Middle West, and his résumé left the

impression that bound feet and opium had all but completely disappeared

from China, and that in the matter of schools and the like the

“republic” is making enormous strides. No sooner did the Lincheng affair

attract the world’s attention than American papers began to run yarns,

visibly inspired, about the marvelous advances which the Chinese have

recently accomplished. Such men as Alfred Sze are often mistaken in the

United States as samples of China. Unfortunately they are nothing of the

kind; in fact, they are too often hopelessly out of touch with their

native land. There has been progress in China, but nothing like the

amount of it which we have been coaxed or lulled into believing, and

some of it is of a kind that raises serious doubts as to its direction.

For all the telephones, airplanes, and foreign clothes in the coast

cities, the great mass of the Chinese have been affected barely at all

by this urge toward modernity and Westernism—if that is synonymous with

progress. As some one has just put it, “the Chinese still wear the

pigtail on their minds, though they have largely cut it off their

heads.” How great must be the misinformation at home which causes our

late President to say that all China really needs is more loans, thereby

making himself, and by extension his nation, the laughing-stock of any

one with the rudiments of intelligence who has spent an hour studying

the situation on the spot. England is a little better informed on the

subject than we, because she is less idealistic, more likely to look

facts in the face instead of trying to make facts fit preconceived

notions of essential human perfection. China may need more credits, but

any fool knows that you should stop the hole in the bottom of a tub

before you pour more water into it. At times, too, it is laughable to

think of us children among nations worrying about this one, thousands of

years old, which has so often “come back,” and may still be ambling her

own way long after we have again disappeared from the face of the earth.

Though it is impossible to leave out the omnipresent entirely, I have

said comparatively little about politics. My own interest in what we

lump together under that word reaches only so far as it affects the

every-day life of the people, of the mudsill of society, toward which,

no doubt by some queer quirk in my make-up, I find my attention

habitually focusing. I have tried, therefore, to show in some detail

their lives, slowly changing perhaps yet little changed, and to let

others conclude whether “politics” has done all that it should for them.

Besides, the Far East swarms with writers on politics, men who have been

out here for years or decades and have given their attention almost

entirely to that popular subject; and even these disagree like doctors.

Some of us, I know, are frankly tired of politics, at least for a space,

important as they are; moreover, political changes are so rapid,

especially in the “never changing” East, that it is impossible to keep

abreast of the times in anything less than a daily newspaper.

At home there are numbers of young men, five or ten years out of

college, who can tell you just what is the matter with the world, and

exactly how to remedy it. I am more or less ready to agree with them

that the world is going to the dogs. What of it? You have only to step

outdoors on any clear night to see that there are hundreds of other

worlds, which may be arranging their lives in a more intelligent manner.

The most striking thing about these young political and sociological

geniuses sitting in their suburban gardens or their city flats is that

while they can toss off a recipe guaranteed to cure our own sick world

overnight, if only some one can get it down its throat, they seldom seem

to have influence enough in their own cozy little corner of it to drive

out one grafting ward-heeler. In other words, if you must know what is

to be the future of China, I regret that I have not been vouchsafed the

gift of prophecy and cannot tell you.

In the minor matter of Chinese words and names, I have deliberately not

tried to follow the usual Romanization, but rather to cause the reader

to pronounce them as nearly like what they are on the spot as is

possible with our mere twenty-six letters. Of course I could not follow

this rule entirely or I must have called the capital of China

“Bay-jing,” have spoken of the evacuation of “Shahn-doong,” and so on;

so that in the case of names already more or less familiar to the West I

have used the most modern and most widely accepted forms, as they have

survived on the ground. At that I cannot imagine what ailed the men who

Romanized the Chinese language, but that is another story.

HARRY A. FRANCK.

Kuling, China,

August 16, 1923.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I IN THE LAND WE CALL KOREA 3

II SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS 23

III JAPANESE AND MISSIONARIES IN KOREA 36

IV OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN CHO-SEN 53

V UP AND DOWN MANCHURIA 71

VI THROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA 82

VII SPEEDING ACROSS THE GOBI 108

VIII IN “RED” MONGOLIA 124

IX HOLY URGA 135

X EVERY ONE HIS OWN DIPLOMAT 160

XI AT HOME UNDER THE TARTAR WALL 174

XII JOGGING ABOUT PEKING 195

XIII A JOURNEY TO JEHOL 230

XIV A JAUNT INTO PEACEFUL SHANSI 252

XV RAMBLES IN THE PROVINCE OF CONFUCIUS 265

XVI ITINERATING IN SHANTUNG 288

XVII EASTWARD TO TSINGTAO 308

XVIII IN BANDIT-RIDDEN HONAN 330

XIX WESTWARD THROUGH LOESS CAÑONS 349

XX ON TO SIAN-FU 366

XXI ONWARD THROUGH SHENSI 387

XXII CHINA’S FAR WEST 405

XXIII WHERE THE FISH WAGGED HIS TAIL 423

XXIV IN MOHAMMEDAN CHINA 447

XXV TRAILING THE YELLOW RIVER HOMEWARD 468

XXVI COMPLETING THE CIRCLE 485

ILLUSTRATIONS

A constant stream of pilgrims, largely blue-clad coolies

on foot, passed up and down the sacred stairway _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Map of the author’s route 12

Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of

Heaven is now a smoking-room in a Japanese hotel

garden 16

The interior of a Korean house 16

Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter 17

At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a

little oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his

precious horsehair hat 17

Some of the figures, in the gaudiest of colors,

surrounding the Golden Buddha in a Korean temple 32

The famous “White Buddha,” carved, and painted in white,

on a great boulder in the outskirts of Seoul 32

One day, descending the hills toward Seoul, we heard a

great jangling hubbub, and found two sorceresses in

full swing in a native house, where people come to

have their children “cured” 33

The _yang-ban_, or loafing upper class of Korea, go in

for archery, which is about fitted to their

temperament, speed, and initiative 33

The Korean method of ironing, the rhythmic _rat-a-tat_

of which may be heard day and night almost anywhere in

the peninsula 40

Winding thread before one of the many little

machine-knit stocking factories in Ping Yang 40

The graves of Korea cover hundreds of her hillsides with

their green mounds, usually unmarked, but carefully

tended by the superstitious descendants 41

A chicken peddler in Seoul 48

A full load 48

The plowman homeward wends his weary way—in Korean

fashion, always carrying the plow and driving his

unburdened ox or bull before him. One of the most

common sights of Korea 49

The biblical “watch-tower in a cucumber patch” is in

evidence all over Korea in the summer, when crops

begin to ripen. Whole families often sleep in them

during this season, when they spring up all over the

country, and often afford the only cool breeze 49

A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper

in his high hat at the rear 64

The interior of a native Korean school of the old

type,—dark, dirty, swarming with flies, and loud with

a constant chorus 64

In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea 65

The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean

cooking 65

One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa 68

This great cliff-carved Buddha, fifty feet high and

thirty broad, was done by Chinese artists centuries

ago. Note my carrier, a full-sized man, squatting at

the lower left-hand corner 68

The carved Buddhas of Sam-pul-gam, at the entrance to

the gorge of the Inner Kongo, were chiseled by a

famous Korean monk five hundred years ago 69

The camera can at best give only a suggestion of the

sheer white rock walls of Shin Man-mul-cho, perhaps

the most marvelous bit of scenery in the Far East 69

Two ladies in the station waiting-room of Antung, just

across the Yalu from Korea, proudly comparing the

relative inadequacy of their crippled feet 76

The Japanese have made Dairen, southern terminus of

Manchuria and once the Russian Dalny, one of the most

modern cities of the Far East 76

A ruined gallery in the famous North Fort of the

Russians at Port Arthur. Hundreds of such war

memorials are preserved by the Japanese on the sites

of their first victory over the white race 77

The empty Manchu throne of Mukden 77

The Russian so loves a uniform, even after the land it

represents has gone to pot, that even school-boys in

Vladivostok usually wear them,—red bands, khaki, black

trousers, purple epaulets 80

A Manchu woman in her national head-dress, bargaining

with a street vender of Mukden for a cup of tea 80

A common sight in Harbin,—a Russian refugee, in this

case a blind boy, begging in the street of passing

Chinese 81

A Russian in Harbin—evidently not a Bolshevik or he

would be living in affluence in Russia 81

The grain of the _kaoliang_, one of the most important

crops of North China. It grows from ten to fifteen

feet high and makes the finest of hiding-places for

bandits 96

A daily sight in Vladivostok,—a group of youths

suspected of opinions contrary to those of the

Government, rounded up and trotted off to prison 96

A refugee Russian priest, of whom there were many in

Harbin 97

Types of this kind swarm along the Chinese Eastern

Railway of Manchuria, many of them volunteers in the

Chinese army or railway police 97

One of the Russian churches in Harbin, a creamy gray,

with green domes and golden crosses, with much gaudy

trimming 100

A policeman of Vladivostok, where shaving is looked down

upon 100

Two former officers in the czar’s army, now bootblacks

in the “thieves” market of Harbin—when they catch any

one who can afford to be blacked 101

Scores of booths in Harbin, Manchuli, and Vladivostok,

selling second-hand hardware of every description,

suggest why the factories and trains of Bolshevik

Russia have difficulty in running 101

The human freight horses of Tientsin, who toil ten or

more hours a day for twenty coppers, about six cents

in our money 108

Part of the pass above Kalgan is so steep that no

automobile can climb to the great Mongolian plateau

unassisted 108

Some of the camel caravans we passed on the Gobi seemed

endless. This one had thirty dozen loaded camels and

more than a dozen outriders 109

But cattle caravans also cross the Gobi, drawing

home-made two-wheeled carts, often with a flag,

sometimes the Stars and Stripes, flying at the head 109

The Mongol would not be himself without his horse,

though to us this would usually seem only a pony 112

Mongol authorities examining our papers, which Vilner is

showing, at Ude. Robes blue, purple, dull red, etc.

Biggest Chinaman on left 113

A group of Mongols and stray Chinese watching our

arrival at the first _yamen_ of Urga 113

The frontier post of Ude, fifty miles beyond the

uninhabited frontier between Inner and Outer Mongolia,

where Mongol authorities examine passports and very

often turn travelers back 128

Chinese travelers on their way to Urga. It is

unbelievable how many muffled Chinamen and their

multifarious junk one “Dodge” will carry 128

The Mongol of the Gobi lives in a _yourt_ made of heavy

felt over a light wooden framework, which can be taken

down and packed in less than an hour when the spirit

of the nomad strikes him 129

Mongol women make the felt used as houses, mainly by

pouring water on sheep’s wool 129

The upper town of Urga, entirely inhabited by lamas, has

the temple of Ganden, containing a colossal standing

Buddha, rising high above all else. It is in Tibetan

style and much of its superstructure is covered with

pure gold 144

Red lamas leaving the “school” in which hundreds of them

squat tightly together all day long, droning through

their litany. They are of all ages, equally filthy and

heavily booted. Over the gateway of the typical Urga

palisade is a text in Tibetan, and the cylinders at

the upper corners are covered with gleaming gold 144

High class lamas, in their brilliant red or yellow

robes, great ribbons streaming from their strange

hats, are constantly riding in and out of Urga. Note

the bent-knee style of horsemanship 145

A high lama dignitary on his travels, free from the gaze

of the curious, and escorted by mounted lamas of the

middle class 145

A youthful lama turning one of the myriad

prayer-cylinders of Urga. Many written prayers are

pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent to saying

all of them 152

The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on

the extreme left is not what it looks like, for they

have no such in Urga, but it houses a prayer-cylinder 152

Women, whose crippled feet make going to the shops

difficult, do much of their shopping from the

two-boxes-on-a-pole type of merchant, constant

processions of whom tramp the highways of China 153

An itinerant blacksmith-shop, with the box-bellows

worked by a stick handle widely used by craftsmen and

cooks in China 153

Pious Mongol men and women worshiping before the

residence of the “Living Buddha” of Urga, some by

throwing themselves down scores of times on the

prostrating-boards placed for that purpose, one by

making many circuits of the place, now and again

measuring his length on the ground 160

The Mongols of Urga disposed of their dead by throwing

the bodies out on the hillsides, where they are

quickly devoured by the savage black dogs that roam

everywhere 160

Mongol women in full war-paint 161

Though it was still only September, our return from Urga

was not unlike a polar expedition 161

Our home in Peking was close under the great East Wall

of the Tartar City 176

The indispensable staff of Peking housekeeping consists

of (left to right) ama, rickshaw-man, “boy,” coolie,

and cook 176

A chat with neighbors on the way to the daily stroll on

the wall 177

Street venders were constantly crying their wares in our

quarter 177

At Chinese New Year the streets of Peking were gay with

all manner of things for sale, such as these

brilliantly colored paintings of native artists 192

A rich man died in our street, and among other things

burned at his grave, so that he would have them in

after-life, were this “automobile” and two

“chauffeurs” 192

A neighbor who gave his birds a daily airing 193

Just above us on the Tartar Wall were the ancient

astronomical instruments looted by the Germans in 1900

and recently returned, in accordance with a clause in

the Treaty of Versailles 193

Preparing for a devil dance at the lama temple in Peking 208

The devil dancers are usually Chinese street urchins

hired for the occasion by the languid Mongol lamas of

Peking 208

The street sprinklers of Peking work in pairs, with a

bucket and a wooden dipper. This is the principal

street of the Chinese City “outside Ch’ien-men” 209

The Forbidden City is for the most part no longer that,

but open in more than half its extent to the

ticket-buying public 209

In the vast compound of the Altar of Heaven 224

Mei Lan-fang, most famous of Chinese actors, who, like

his father and grandfather before him, plays only

female parts 224

Over the wall from our house boats plied on the moat

separating us from the Chinese City 225

Just outside the Tartar Wall of Peking the night soil of

the city, brought in wheelbarrows, is dried for use as

fertilizer 225

For three thousands miles the Great Wall clambers over

the mountains between China and Mongolia 240

One of the mammoth stone figures flanking the road to

the Ming Tombs of North China, each of a single piece

of granite 240

Another glimpse of the Great Wall 241

The twin pagodas of Taiyüan, capital of Shansi Province 241

The three _p’ai-lous_ of Hsi Ling, the Western Tombs 248

In Shansi four men often work at as many windlasses over

a single well to irrigate the fields 249

Prisoners grinding grain in the “model prison” of

Taiyüan 249

A few of the 508 Buddhas in one of the lama temples of

Jehol 256

The youngest, but most important—since she has borne him

a son—of the wives of a Manchu chief of one of the

tomb-tending towns of Tung Ling 256

Interior of the notorious Empress Dowager’s tomb at Tung

Ling, with her cloth-covered chair of state and colors

to dazzle the stoutest eye 257

The Potalá of Jehol, said to be a copy, even in details,

of that of Lhasa. The windows are false and the great

building at the top is merely a roofless one enclosing

the chief temple 257

Behind Tung Ling the great forest reserve which once

“protected” the tombs from the evil spirits that

always come from the north was recently opened to

settlers, and frontier conditions long since forgotten

in the rest of China prevail 260

Much of the plowing in the newly opened tract is done in

this primitive fashion 260

The face of the mammoth Buddha of Jehol, forty-three

feet high and with forty-two hands. It fills a

four-story building, and is the largest in China

proper, being identical, according to the lamas, with

those of Urga and Lhasa 261

A Chinese inn, with its heated _k’ang_, may not be the

last word in comfort, but it is many degrees in

advance of the earth floors of Indian huts along the

Andes 261

The upper half of the ascent of Tai-shan is by a stone

stairway which ends at the “South Gate of Heaven,”

here seen in the upper right-hand corner 268

One of the countless beggar women who squat in the

center of the stairway to Tai-shan, expecting every

pilgrim to drop at least a “cash” into each basket 268

Wash-day in the moat outside the city wall of Tzinan,

capital of Shantung 269

A traveler by chair nearing the top of Tai-shan, most

sacred of the five holy peaks of China 269

A priest of the Temple of Confucius 272

The grave of Confucius is noted for its simplicity 272

The sanctum of the Temple of Confucius, with the statue

and spirit—tablet of the sage, before which millions

of Chinese burn joss-sticks annually 273

Making two Chinese elders of a Shantung village over

into Presbyterians 288

Messrs. Kung and Meng, two of the many descendants of

Confucius in Shantung flanking one of those of Mencius 288

Some of the worst cases still out of bed in the American

leper-home of Tenghsien, Shantung, were still full of

laughter 289

Off on an “itinerating” trip with an American missionary

in Shantung, by a conveyance long in vogue there.

Behind, one of the towers by which messages were sent,

by smoke or fire, to all corners of the old Celestial

Empire 289

On the way home I changed places with one of our three

wheelbarrow coolies, and found that the contrivance

did not run so hard as I might otherwise have believed 304

The men who use the roads of China make no protest at

their being dug up every spring and turned into fields 304

Sons are a great asset to the wheelbarrowing coolies of

Shantung 305

A private carriage, Shantung style 320

Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair-nets for the

American market 320

School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien,

Shantung 321

The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills

carefully reforested by the Germans, followed by the

Japanese, has now been returned to the Chinese after a

quarter of a century of foreign rule 321

Chinese farming methods include a stone roller, drawn by

man, boy, or beast, to break up the clods of dry earth 336

Kaifeng, capital of Honan Province, has among its

population some two hundred Chinese Jews, descendants

of immigrants of centuries ago 336

A cave-built blacksmith and carpenter-shop in

Kwanyintang where the Lunghai railway ends at present

in favor of more laborious means of transportation 337

An illustrated lecture in China takes place outdoors in

a village street, two men pushing brightly colored

pictures along a two-row panel while they chant some

ancient story 337

In the Protestant Mission compound of Honanfu the

missionaries had tied up this thief to stew in the sun

for a few days, rather than turn him over to the

authorities, who would have lopped off his head 344

Over a city gate in western Honan two crated heads of

bandits were festering in the sun and feeding swarms

of flies 344

A village in the loess country, which breaks up into

fantastic formations as the stoneless soil is worn

away by the rains and blown away by the winds 345

I take my turn at leading our procession of mule litters

and let my companions swallow its dust for a while 352

The road down into Shensi. Once through the great

arch-gate that marks the provincial boundary, the road

sinks down into the loess again, and beggars line the

way into Tungkwan 352

Hwa-shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China 353

An example of Chinese military transportation 353

Coal is plentiful and cheap in Shensi, and comes to

market in Sian-fu in wheelbarrows, there to await

purchasers 360

The holy of holies of the principal Sian-fu mosque has a

simplicity in striking contrast to the demon-crowded

interiors of purely Chinese temples 360

Our carts crossing a branch of the Yellow River fifty

_li_ west of the Shensi capital 361

Women and girls do much of the grinding of grain with

the familiar stone roller of China, in spite of their

bound feet 361

An old tablet in the compound of the chief mosque at

Sian-fu, purely Chinese in form, except that the base

has lost its likeness to a turtle and the writing is

in Arabic 368

This famous old portrait of Confucius, cut on black

stone, in Sian-fu is said to be the most authentic one

in existence 368

A large town of cave-dwellers in the loess country, and

the terraced fields which support it 369

Samson and Delilah. This blind boy, grinding grain all

day long, marches round and round his stone mill with

the same high lifted feet and bobbing head of the late

Caruso in the opera of that name 369

The East Gate of Sian-fu, by which we entered the

capital of Shensi, rises like an apartment-house above

the flat horizon 384

All manner of aids to the man behind the wheelbarrow are

used in his long journey in bringing wheat to market,

some of them not very economical 384

The Western Gate of Sian-fu, through which we continued

our journey to Kansu 385

A “Hwei-Hwei,” or Chinese Mohammedan, keeper of an

outdoor restaurant 385

In the Mohammedan section of Sian-fu there are men who,

but for their Chinese garb and habits, might pass for

Turks in Damascus or Constantinople 400

Our chief cartman eating dinner in his favorite posture,

and holding in one hand the string of “cash,” one

thousand strong and worth about an American quarter,

which served him as money 400

A bit of cliff-dwelling town in the loess country, where

any other color than a yellowish brown is extremely

rare 401

A corner of a wayside village, topped by a temple 401

The Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed about once a

month by the itinerant barber. This one is just in the

act of adding a switch. Note the wooden comb at the

back of the head 408

An old countryman having dinner at an outdoor restaurant

in town on market day has his own way of using chairs

or benches 408

A Chinese soldier and his mount, not to mention his

worldly possessions 409

Mongol women on a joy-ride 409

Two blind minstrels entertaining a village by

singsonging interminable national ballads and legends,

to which they keep time by beating together resonant

sticks of hard wood 416

The boys and girls of western China are “toughened” by

wearing nothing below the waist and only one ragged

garment above it, even in midwinter 416

The “fast mail” of interior China is carried by a pair

of coolies, in relays of about twenty miles each, made

at a jog-trot with about eighty pounds of mail apiece.

They travel night and day and get five or six American

dollars a month 417

A bit of the main street of Taing-Ning, showing the

damage wrought by the earthquake of two years before

to the “devil screen” in front of the local

magistrate’s _yamen_ 417

This begging old ragamuffin is a Taoist priest 436

A local magistrate sent this squad of “soldiers” to

escort us through the earthquake district, though

whether for fear of bandits, out of mere respect for

our high rank, or because the “soldiers” needed a few

coppers which he could not give them himself, was not

clear 436

Where the “mountain walked” and overwhelmed the old

tree-lined highway. In places this was covered

hundreds of feet deep for miles, in others it had been

carried bodily, trees and all, a quarter-mile or more

away 437

In the earthquake district of western China whole

terraced mountain-sides came down and covered whole

villages. In the foreground is a typical Kansu farm 437

Kansu earlaps are very gaily embroidered in colored

designs of birds, flowers, and the like. Pipes are

smaller than their “ivory” mouthpieces 444

It is a common sight in some parts of Kansu to see men

knitting, and still more so to meet little girls whose

feet are already beginning to be bound 444

The village scholar displays his wisdom by reading where

all can see him—through spectacles of pure plate-glass 445

A Kirghiz in the streets of Lanchow, where many races of

Central Asia meet 445

An _ahong_, or Chinese Mohammedan mullah of Lanchow 448

Mohammedan school-girls, whose garments were a riot of

color 448

A glimpse of Lanchow, capital of China’s westernmost

province, from across the Yellow River 449

Looking down the valley of Lanchow, across several

groups of temples at the base of the hills, to the

four forts built against another Mohammedan rebellion 449

A Kansu vista near Lanchow, where the hills are no

longer terraced, but where towns are numerous and much

alike 464

This method of grinding up red peppers and the like is

wide-spread in China. Both trough and wheel are of

solid iron 464

Oil is floated down the Yellow River to Lanchow in whole

ox-hides that quiver at a touch as if they were alive 465

The Yellow River at Lanchow, with a water-wheel and the

American bridge which is the only one that crosses it

in the west 465

The Chinese protect their boys from evil spirits (the

girls do not matter) by having a chain and padlock put

about their necks at some religious ceremony, which

deceives the spirits into believing that they belong

to the temple. Earlaps embroidered in gay colors are

widely used in Kansu in winter 480

Many of the faces seen in Western China hardly seem

Chinese 480

A dead man on the way to his ancestral home for burial,

a trip that may last for weeks. Over the heavy

unpainted wooden coffin were brown bags of fodder for

the animals, surmounted by the inevitable rooster 481

Our party on the return from Lanchow,—the major and

myself flanked by our “boys” and cook respectively,

these in turn by the two cart-drivers, with our

alleged _mafu_, or groom for our riding animals, at

the right 481

A typical farm hamlet of the Yellow River valley in the

far west where some of the farm-yards are surrounded

by mud walls so mighty that they look like great

armories 496

The usual kitchen and heating-plant of a Chinese inn,

and the kind on which our cook competed with hungry

coolies in preparing our dinners 496

The midwinter third-class coach in which I returned to

Peking 497

No wonder I was mistaken for a Bolshevik and caused

family tears when I turned up in Peking from the west 497

The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. Edwin S.

Mills of Peking, China, for the use of the pictures of Urga.

WANDERING IN

NORTHERN CHINA

CHAPTER I

IN THE LAND WE CALL KOREA

The traveler from Japan to the peninsula still known to the Western

world as Korea has a sense of being wafted on some magic carpet

thousands of miles while he slept, a sensation which the splendid

steamers bridging the Straits of Tsushima several times a day do not

dispel. It is surprising how different two lands separated only by a few

hours on the sea can be. A fortnight on a Nippon Yusen Kaisha liner and

six weeks of wandering from end to end of the Island Empire gave us a

Japanese background against which many of the problems of the Far East

stood out more clearly, but it did very little to prepare us for the

physical aspects of the “Cho-sen” over which the banner of the rising

sun now waves. Those who have listened to the long and heated

controversy over the adding of this large slice of mainland to the

mikado’s realm must often have heard the apologists’ assertion that the

two peoples, Japanese and Koreans, are so nearly alike as to be

virtually the same. Perhaps they are; but if so, all the outward

evidences the casual visitor must depend upon to form an opinion are

deceiving. Superficially, at least, Japan and Korea are as different as

two Oriental lands and races could well be. In landscape, customs,

costumes, point of view, general characteristics, even in the details of

personal appearance, the two shores of the Sea of Japan strike the

new-comer as having very little in common.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Korea, to any one newly arrived

from Japan, is her treelessness. The lack of forests is, with the

possible exception of exclamations of incredulity over her extraordinary

costumes, almost certain to be the subject of any Occidental’s first

paragraph of Korean notes. In our own case this denuded aspect of the

peninsula was emphasized by the blazing, cloudless sunshine that beat

relentlessly down during all our first day of travel northward to the

old capital, and on many another to follow. The bare and sun-scorched

landscape suggested some victim of barbarian cruelty, who, stripped of

his garments, was being tortured to death by slow roasting. Possibly we

should have been prepared for this, but we were not. We had heard much

of the doings of Japan in Korea; we knew something of the opera-bouffe

hats of the men and the startlingly short waists of the women, but no

one had ever told us of the curiously pure and molten sunshine of

“Cho-sen,” of the vividness of its shadows and the filtered transparency

of its air, nor, for that matter, of the incessant heat we must endure

because chance allotted us from June to August in what was once the

Hermit Kingdom.

Trees as sparse as the hairs of a Korean beard stood out in lonely

isolation across the more or less flat lands of all that first day’s

journey; beyond these, usually rather near at hand, rose scarred and

repulsive hillsides as unsightly as the faces of those countless

inhabitants along the way who had been visited by the “honorable spirit”

of smallpox. It was not merely the barrenness of a naturally treeless

country, a barrenness as dreary as those upper reaches of the Andes to

which real vegetation never attains, but one which, like the denuded

plains of Spain, visibly complains of the wanton violence of man. To be

sure, many of the rocky hills that sometimes rose to be almost mountains

were here and there thinly covered with evergreen shrubs which might

some day be trees, and even forests. But these, travelers are informed

with what becomes tiresome persistency, were planted by the new

Government. The Japanese policy of reforestation, we were eventually to

know, has already done excellent things for Korea, and that not merely,

as those who resent the rape of the peninsula assert, where it will

attract the passing tourist’s eye, and it promises in time to accomplish

something worth while; but it is an unfortunate Japanese trait to fear

that good deeds will not speak loudly enough for themselves.

The reducing of a once well wooded land to its present nude state is

characteristic of the Korean, we were to learn, suggestive of his

general point of view. In the olden days the people were often driven to

the hills by their savage or demented rulers, and as the rigorous

winters that contrast with the tropical summers came on, they not only

burned the trees, but as roots make excellent charcoal they dug up even

these, leaving nothing that might by any chance sprout again. To replant

in better times, to take any serious thought for the morrow, would have

been un-Korean. The Korean even of to-day who covets the half-dozen

cherries or plums on a limb does not usually take the trouble to pick

them; he breaks off the branch and goes his way munching the fruit, with

never a thought of next year. Translate this improvidence, this almost

complete lack of foresight, into all the details of daily life, and the

condition and the final fate of Korea become understandable, in fact

inevitable.

Woods survive to any great extent in Korea only in two places—about

royal tombs and up along the Yalu River which forms the northern

frontier. Elsewhere in the peninsula, with minor exceptions, there are

only groups of trees planted by foreign missionaries, and rows of pine

shrubs set out directly by the Japanese Government, or by local

authorities, school children, or private individuals, under Japanese

influence. This treelessness is not the unimportant detail many may

think; it is the wanton destruction of her forests of long ago that

gives the Korea of to-day her mainly mud houses, much of her filth,

dust, and swarming flies, and those devastating floods of the rainy

season which sweep roads, bridges, fields, and even villages before

them.

There were many other things which gave the Korean landscape its

strikingly un-Japanese aspect. Fewer people were working in the larger

and less garden-like fields; the village roofs thatched with rice-straw

had a flatter, smoother look than the homes of Japanese peasants; the

towns themselves seemed to huddle together as closely and

inconspicuously as possible, as if to escape, or join in resisting, the

rapacious tax-gatherers of the olden days that are not forgotten.

Koreans in white, their inevitable color, so rare in Japan, were

everywhere, though more often in the shade of villages or rare wayside

trees or huts than out in the baking sunshine. The suggestion forced

itself upon us that perhaps the fields were larger because the people

could not coax themselves to work alone. In Japan it had been unusual to

see more than a peasant and his wife in the same field; here work seemed

to be done almost entirely by gangs. In spite of the general aridness of

the landscape, there were many flooded rice-fields, and in nearly all of

them waded a soldier-like line of often a dozen laborers, as many women

as men among them. Much of the country showed no signs of the languid

hand of man, yet even in the drier sections scattered rows of these

peasants, their garments still almost snow-white at a distance, gleamed

forth in the otherwise mainly reddish landscape.

Similar groups stood in semicircles on earth threshing-floors flailing

grain in a way that is familiar to the Western world, but which we had

never seen in Japan. Nor were there any reminders of the Island Empire

in the clusters of women kneeling at the edge of every bit of a stream

or mud-hole paddling clothes with a sort of cricket-bat. The ways of

life, the very architecture, were strangely reminiscent of lands

inhabited by negroes.

The most primitive of plows, drawn by bulls, dragged their way to and

fro in a field here and there. Along what passed for roads others of

these lumbering animals plodded almost hidden under loads of new-cut

grain or brushwood, at a pace which seemed to fit the languid

temperament of the country. In places a highway, constructed by the new

rulers, tried to preserve an unbroken march; but wherever a bridge

should have been they almost invariably pitched headlong down into the

bed of a stream as waterless as those of summer-time Spain. Even the

Japanese, we were to learn before leaving the peninsula, are poor

bridge-builders, while the Korean remains true to his natural

improvidence in constructing flimsy things of branches and earth, with

totally inadequate abutments, which the first dash of the rainy season

down the treeless hillsides converts into scattered masses of rubbish.

All the day long the scene varied little from these first few glimpses.

There was a certain rough beauty in the tawny hillsides and the broad

stretches of sun-flooded rice lands, but of a similarity that grew

monotonous, while the ways of the people, until opportunity should come

to see them in closer detail, were such as the fleeting tourist is wont

to sum up under the outworn word “picturesque” and quickly lose from

between the pages of memory. Korea has often been called a land of

villages, and in all the two hundred and eighty miles from the southern

point of the peninsula to Seoul there was little more than a frequent

succession of smooth-thatched, closely snuggled towns varying, outwardly

at least, only in size. Not until later on, and by more primitive means

of travel, were we to know of the remnants of bygone civilization, the

pine-grove tombs of royalty, the ruined palaces of fallen dynasties, and

the welter of modern problems with which the peninsula teems.

The Korean wardrobe has so little in common with that of the Occident,

and includes so many startling absurdities, that it merits a few words

in detail, even though some of its more striking features are fairly

familiar to those interested in foreign lands. To begin with the basis

of all wardrobes, there is that ingenious contrivance with which the

Korean gentleman protects his other garments from perspiration during

the blazing months of summer. A missionary who carried home a set of

these and offered them to any one in his native parish who could

identify them recorded forty-two guesses, all equally wide of the mark,

which was the simple phrase “summer underwear.” Out of their environment

these useful garments look more like primitive bird-cages or light

baskets than what they really are. In their entirety they consist of a

kind of waistcoat, a high collar of the Elizabethan period, and cuffs so

long as to be almost sleeves—all made of small strips of ratan very

loosely woven together. That they are effective in allowing the free

circulation of air, and at the same time preserve the cloth garments

from contact with the perspiring body, one is willing to grant without

the evidence of actual personal experience. Now and again one runs

across a Japanese petty official who, in an effort to mitigate his

midsummer sufferings, has adopted at least the cuffs; but on the whole

this ingenious contribution is likely to suffer the common fate of never

finding appreciation beyond its native habitat.

Over his ratan skin-protectors the Korean gentleman wears a kind of

waistcoat-shirt, trousers (if so commonplace a term may be used for so

uncommonplace a garment) which are more than voluminous even in use and,

when hung out to dry, suggest the mainsails of a wind-jammer, and

finally a _turamaggie_, an overcoat reaching to the calves and tied

together with a bow over the right breast. All these articles are

snow-white, and in summer are made of a vegetable fiber so thin as to

suggest starched cheese-cloth. The mainsail trousers are fastened

tightly about the ankles with a winding of cloth, which also supports

the carefully foot-shaped and curiously thick white socks, which are

thrust into low slippers cut well away at the instep, slippers formerly

of leather richly embroidered or otherwise decorated, but now rapidly

giving way to the white or reddish rubber ones made in Japan which are

ruining the feet of Korea. The crowning glory and absurdity of this _de

rigueur_ costume, however, is the head-dress. About the brow is bound,

so tightly as to cause violent headaches when first adopted and to leave

lifelong marks, a black band about four inches wide and reaching well up

over the curve of the head. On top of this sits a brimless cap shaped

like a fez with an L-shaped indentation in its front, and finally over

all else reigns an uncollapsible opera-hat. Both the hat and the cap

beneath it are made of horsehair, or cheap imitations thereof, and are

so loosely woven and screen-like in their transparency that facetious

and unkindly foreigners are wont to refer to them as “fly-traps.” This

term is as unwarranted as it is offensive, for the one place in Korea

which is free from flies in season is the hat-protected crown of the

adult Korean male. One need not take the word of “old-timers,” but will

find ample evidence in photographs of a decade or more ago that the

opera-bouffe contraption with which the Korean gentleman tops himself

off once had brim enough to do duty almost as a real hat. Such

utilitarian days are past, however; perhaps it is that universal bugbear

of the human family, the high cost of living, which has reduced the brim

to little more than a ledge. The fact remains that a fly must walk with

caution now in making a circuit which in the good old days he might

safely have accomplished after sipping long and generously at the edge

of a bowl of _sool_. However, let there be no misapprehension, no

uncalled for sympathy under the impression that this shrinking has

worked hardship upon the wearer. The Korean hat was not designed to be a

protection for the head and a shade for the face. Its purpose in life is

far more serious and is concentrated on one single object,—to protect

from evil spirits the precious topknot which is the badge of full Korean

manhood. Hence its duty is not merely an outdoor one; wicked beings of

the invisible world have no compunction in taking unfair advantage of

their victims, so that to this day it is a common practice for the

Korean man to lay him down to sleep—on his bare papered floor, using a

hardwood brick as a pillow—with his precious top-hat still in place.

However, we have not yet completely garbed our _yang-ban_, our gentleman

of the Land of Morning Calm. His hat, being light, almost ethereal, in

fact, must be held in place, whether in sleep or in the slightest

breeze, for which purpose a black ribbon under the chin serves the

ordinary man and a string of amber beads his haughtier fellow-citizen.

Add to this the unfailing collapsible fan, and a pipe as long and heavy

as a cane, with a bowl the size of the end of the thumb, and you may

vizualize in his entirety the proud gentleman who sallies forth from his

mud hut and picks his way leisurely between the mud-holes and

offal-heaps of any town or city street. The fan is rarely inactive, now

dispensing a breeze to the copper-tinted face of its owner, now shading

it from the direct rays of a burning sun. The pipe, bowl down, swings

with the jaunty aggressiveness of an Englishman’s “stick”; above all

else the features remain fixed and unalterable in their serenity, for in

the code of the genuine Korean gentleman of the old school there is no

greater vulgarity than to show in public either mirth, anger, curiosity,

or annoyance. Nothing could be more specklessly white than this

dignified apparition, for do not his servant-wives spend their days, and

no small portion of their nights, in preparing his garments for the

daily sortie and mingling with his fellows? Behold him, then, as he

joins the latter, in a shop-door or on a shaded street-corner, where he

squats with them in that fashion which has caused a row of Korean males

to be likened to penguins, letting his spotless starched _turamaggie_

spread out on the unswept earth with a carelessness which seems a boast

of his ability to command unlimited female labor.

We must come back again, however, to the incredible hat, as the eyes and

the attention constantly will as long as one remains in Korea. If the

Japanese are commonplace and unoriginal in their head-dress, certainly

their newly captured fellow-subjects make up for it. Set usually at a

jaunty angle, whether by design, breeze, or cranial malformation, a

jauntiness enhanced by its scarcity of brim, the “fly-trap” hat

furnishes Korea half its picturesqueness. Graduates of modern mission or

Japanese government schools, self-complacent young men who have been

abroad, native Christian pastors, may wear the Panama or the felt of the

West above their otherwise national white garb, but the “fly-trap” is

still the prevailing head-dress throughout the length, breadth, and

social strata of the peninsula. Far and wide, in city or village, in

crowded marts or on lonely country roads, indoors or out, awake or

asleep, the high hat is seldom missing. It persists to the very edge of

the frontier, then disappears as suddenly as it had sprung up at the

other extremity of the country. After one has weathered the first shock

it does not look so greatly out of place on your city gentleman, but I

never learned to behold it with proper equanimity on the heads of

porters, plasterers, and peasants. Even the workman without it, however,

is still conspicuous. Tattered, soiled, and sun-scorched men wandering

across the country with a kind of tramp’s pack on their backs wear the

horsehair bird-cage on their heads; perhaps the most incongruous sight

of all is to behold a battered old man of the rice-fields solemnly

squatting on a garbage-heap in his mud hamlet, with his opera hat

perched on guard above his gray and scanty topknot.

Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the light-brown hat formerly worn

by all men about to be married, or to add a new wife to their collection

of servants; once the custom was wide-spread of painting the hat white

in sign of mourning, but to-day black is almost universal, and an

excellent foil to the otherwise white garb. Bridegrooms no longer feel

compelled publicly to announce their happy status, and there is another

and more effective means of showing grief at bereavement,—a mourner’s

hat like a large, finely woven, inverted basket with scalloped edges,

which completely hides the afflicted face of the wearer. As he ambles

along under this ample protection instead of blistering beneath a

horsehair cage, surely a feeling of gratitude toward the departed

relative must pervade the thoughts of the bereaved, particularly as the

Korean term of mourning lasts for three years. There is a still more

enormous, very coarsely woven, sunshade worn by peasants in the

midsummer months, while Buddhist priests, otherwise indistinguishable

from layman tramps and beggars, wear a smaller hat of similar shape to

that of the mourners, but raised on bamboo stilts well above the head.

The horsehair hat is costly, by Korean standards, the better ones even

by our own, and, being put together with glue, is frail and perishable.

Water is particularly fatal to it. Let the first drop of a shower fall,

therefore, and from within the garments of every Korean man appears a

hat-umbrella, a little cone-shaped cover of oiled paper or silk, like a

miniature Japanese parasol, which is quickly opened and slipped over the

precious hat. As to the rest of the male garb, no damage is possible

which cannot be repaired by the return of sunshine or a few hours’ labor

by the women at home. Thus on a rainy day the black heads above white

bodies characteristic of all Korea turn to drenched cheese-cloth

surmounted by oily yellow clowns’ caps.

It is fitting that the wardrobe of the insignificant sex should be

simpler, and more easily described. Except that anything in the way of

head-dress is denied them, lest they compete with the decorative male,

the garb of the Korean women is in the main a crude replica of that of

the men. All reasonably available evidence goes to show that the women

are never permitted the luxury of wickerwork undergarments. Trousers,

socks, and slippers are similar to those worn by the male; above these

is the thinnest and slightest of garments, which barely covers the

shoulders, and over the trousers is worn a white skirt fastened well up

above the floating ribs. In summer at least that is all, except in a few

old-fashioned communities, where a muffling white cloak covering

everything except the eyes and the feet is still occasionally seen.

That, I repeat, is all, and from our puritanical point of view it is not

enough. For the Korean woman insists that the waistline is at the

armpits, and makes no provision to have the upper and lower garments

contiguous, with the result that she displays to the public gaze exactly

that portion of the torso which the women of most nations take pains to

conceal. Missionaries, who are as prone as the rest of us to lose their

native point of view through long contact with other races, assure us

that Korean women are extremely modest. In general deportment the

statement holds water; but a married lady of Korea, marching down the

main thoroughfare of one of our cities in her native garb, would be

granted anything but modesty. One might fancy that the costume was

prescribed by some lascivious tyrant of olden days; those who have

looked deeply into the matter, however, assure us that it is due to the

pride of motherhood. The fact remains that, though the precept and

example of Western nations have tended to lengthen the upper garment

among better-class women of the cities, and particularly among those who

have attended modern schools, the great majority of the adult female sex

in Korea still wear their breasts outside their clothing. Sun-browned

and leather-textured as the face, the plumpness of matrons or the

withered rags of age are almost always in plain, not to say insistent,

evidence. In fact neither the men nor the women of the masses often

succeed in making both garments meet; males below the _turamaggie_ class

as habitually display their navels as their wives do their bosoms.

White is as universally the color of Korean garments in winter as in

summer; the only difference is that they thicken from cheese-cloth to

cotton-padded ones as the cold season advances. The incongruous sight of

skaters in what looks like tropical garb, of whole towns of people

wading through the snow from which they are barely distinguishable,

provokes the wonder of winter visitors. The whiteness of a Korean crowd

can be duplicated nowhere on earth. Within the lifetime of any one

capable of reading these lines the glimpse of a figure in dark or

colored garments anywhere in the peninsula betrayed it at once as that

of a foreigner. The first record of any variation from this rule was

when, a decade ago, the upper classmen of a mission school in Seoul

agreed by resolution to adopt dark European trousers, in order to spare

their wives or mothers some of their incessant washing and ironing.

The sounds of these two occupations are never silent in Korea. Stand on

an eminence above any town or city of the land, and to the ears will be

borne the similar yet easily distinguishable _rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat_ of a

hundred housewives busy with one or the other of their two principal

duties. How they attain the snowy whiteness required by their

unaffectionate masters by paddling their garments at the edge of any

mud-hole or trickle of sewage is one of the mysteries of the East; yet

not a roadside puddle or a hollowed rock but is turned into a wash-tub,

and never is the visible result outwardly anything but spotless purity.

In contrast to the dull _plump-a-plump_ of washing paddles is this

falsetto tone of ironing, prolonged far into every night. Nay, wake up

at any hour and it will be strange if you do not catch the sound of some

distant housewife putting the finishing touches on the garments in which

her lord will strut forth into the world in the morning. For in Korea

the hot iron is not in vogue, except a tiny one used along the sewed or

pasted seams. Instead, the clothing is folded over a hardwood cylinder

and beaten with two miniature baseball-bats, beaten with an endless

persistency that suggests an unsuspected durability in the apparently

flimsy material, and with a rhythm that has grown almost musical with

centuries of practice.

Children are often dressed in colors, and unmarried maidens may wear

garments of a green or bluish tinge; but all soon succumb to the

omnipresent white. Huge hats not unlike those of men in mourning were

once universally required for young women not yet sentenced to the

servitude of a husband, that their faces might not be disclosed to the

male sex. Missionaries by no means gray in the service recall how

half-acres of these basket-hats used to lie stacked up before native

churches on days of service. But the old order passes, even in the once

Hermit Kingdom, and one may travel far afield now and still perhaps look

in vain for any survival of this long prevalent custom. As in Japan, the

head-dress of the women of Korea is now a matter of hair, in this case

drawn smoothly and tightly down over the scalp, like a cap of oily black

velvet, and tied in a compact little knot behind, decorated perhaps with

a red cloth rosette and thrust through with what looks almost like one

of our new-fashioned nickel-plated lead-pencils.

The Koreans have never been reduced to any such crude expedient as a

bachelor-tax to keep up their marriage-rate. Until very recent years all

boys wore their hair in a long braid up to the day they took a wife.

Even now this custom survives in some outlying districts, though none

yielded more swiftly to the influx of foreign influence. As long as a

man wore a braid he was rated a minor; when he approached manhood he

became more and more a community butt, and shame and ridicule rarely

failed to drive him into an early marriage. Girls, too, had powerful

reasons for not long persisting in the dreadful condition of maidenhood,

not the least among which was the custom, still widely practised, of

burying the body of an unmarried woman in the public highway, to the

everlasting shame of her family to its remotest branches. Moreover, a

Korean woman is not given a name of her own until she has borne a son,

after which she is forever known as “Mother of So-and-So.” Before that

her title, even to her husband, is “_Yea!_” or the slightly more

honorable “_Yea-bo!_” which correspond fairly closely to our

affectionate “Heh!” or “Heh, you!”

[Illustration:

CHINA

AND

JAPAN

]

When the happy day comes that is to put an end to the ridicule of his

fellows and the shame of his parents, the youth transforms his braid

into a topknot, a tightly braided, twisted, and doubled mass of hair an

inch in diameter and about three inches high, standing bolt upright in

the center of his head, and transfixed with a nickeled or silver

ornament similar to that worn by the women. Unlike the cue of the

Chinese, forced upon them as a sign of alien subjection, the topknot is

the Korean’s badge of manhood, his proudest and most precious

possession. Thenceforth one of his most serious problems in life is to

protect it from the powers of evil. About his brow is placed the

painfully tight band that he is seldom again to be seen without this

side of the grave, and he sallies forth under his gleaming new horsehair

hat with the masterly air that befits a man of family cares and

advantages. To its wearers the Korean top-hat must have become, as even

the worst eyesores of human costume will with long use, a thing of

beauty; for though many are the men, and myriad the youths, who now cut

their hair in Western fashion, numbers even of these still cling to the

native hat, while shopkeepers with close-cropped heads, or those whom

the evil spirits have outwitted and left bald, may be seen squatting

among their wares virtually without clothing but with the discredited

head-gear precariously perched upon their bare heads.

Once in a dog’s age even now a country youth turns up at a government or

a mission school wearing the braid that not long ago was universal among

unmarried males, or, since early marriages are still in vogue, with a

topknot; but it is seldom that the end of the first week does not find

his fashion changed. Pseudo-pathetic stories still come in from the

outlying districts of mothers who wept their eyes red at the cutting of

a son’s braid, or of conservative old fathers wrathfully driving from

home youths who have sacrificed the topknot that stands for manhood. But

the shearing goes steadily on, and thus is passing one of Korea’s most

conspicuous idiosyncrasies. The bachelor braid down the back yielded

swiftly to foreign influence; a generation hence the topknot, perhaps

even the stovepipe screen that surmounts it, may be as unknown in the

peninsula as the pre-Meiji male head-dress is now in Japan.

If one takes heed not to carry the likeness too far, the Korean might be

described as a cross between the Japanese and the Chinese. Some of his

traits and customs resemble those of one or the other of his immediate

neighbors, but a still greater number seem to be peculiar to himself

alone. He builds his house, for example, somewhat like those of Japan;

he heats it somewhat after the fashion in China, yet in neither case is

the similarity more than approximate. Certainly he is content with as

few comforts as any race, with the possible exception of the Chinese,

that ever reached the degree of civilization to which he once attained.

This, of course, is partly due to the centuries of atrocious misrule

under which he lived, when it was unsafe for even the wealthiest of men

to attract the ravenous tax-gatherers, turned loose upon the kingdom in

rival bands by both king and court, by living in anything more than a

thatched mud hovel.

Thus it is that even the larger Korean cities are little more than

numerous clusters of such hovels, huddled together along haphazard

alleyways of dust or mud, except where the hand of the new rulers of the

peninsula, or of those Westerners who have been striving for more than

three decades to Christianize it, show themselves. The typical Korean

house, whether of country or town, is made of adobe bricks or odds and

ends of stone completely plastered over, inside and out, with mud. Thus

the walls remain, until they crumble or wash away, for neither paint nor

whitewash is used to disguise their milk-and-coffee tint. Except in rare

cases, or a few special localities, a rice-straw roof covers them, a

roof so smooth and almost glossy, so low and nearly flat, that a village

suggests a cluster of dead mushrooms. The accepted shape of the dwelling

is that of the half of a square, though in its poorer form it may be

merely a hut somewhat longer than it is wide, and in the more

pretentious cases it sometimes completes the whole square. Whether it

does or not, it must be wholly shut off from the outside world, usually

by a wall or screen of woven straw as high as the eaves and enclosing a

wholly untended dust-bin of a yard between the two ells. The well built

and spick and span servants’ houses erected by a missionary community

near Seoul were unpopular with the domestics because they looked off

across a pretty valley to the mountains, instead of being shut in by the

customary mat-fence.

The outside of the half-square has no openings whatever, but presents to

the world a perfectly blank face. The inside, on the other hand, is

little else than openings, across which may be pushed paper walls or

doors somewhat similar to those of Japan. Like the Japanese, the Koreans

are squatters rather than sitters, so that the three living-rooms of the

average dwelling are barely six feet high, and not much more than that

in their other dimensions. The floors are raised somewhat above the

level of the ground outside, and are made of stone and mud, like the

walls, covered with plaster, or sometimes wood, and this in turn by a

heavy, yellow-brown native paper of a consistency between cardboard and

oil-cloth. None of the thick soft mats of the Japanese, nor of his

cushions or padded quilts, soften life by night or day in a Korean home.

When sleep suggests itself, the inmates merely stretch out on the floor

on which they have been squatting, thrust a convenient oak brick under

their heads, and drift into slumber. Rarely do they make any change of

clothing at retiring or rising, the men, as I have said before, often

wearing their top-hats all night. Shoes, or, more exactly, slippers, are

dropped as the wearers come indoors as unfailingly as in Japan on the

ledge of polished wood which forms a cross between a porch and a step

along the front of the house. To the Western eye the lack both of space

and furniture is surprising. In the center of the house, and usually

wide open, is a kind of parlor or sitting-room, at most ten or twelve

feet long, flanked at either end by two little living-rooms no longer

than they are wide, and the house nowhere has a width much greater than

the height of the average Western man. Eating, sleeping, the whole

domestic life, in fact, is carried on in a constant proximity exceeding

that of our most crowded tenements. It looks more like “playing house,”

like a building meant for children to amuse their dolls in, than like

the actual lifelong residence of human beings. This impression is

enhanced by the miniature furniture, usually as scarce as it is small.

There are, of course, no chairs, and no tables unless the little tray

with six-inch legs on which food is served be counted as one. If there

is a student in the family, or the father is engaged in business, there

may be a little writing-desk without legs set flat on the floor;

probably there is a _chang_, or legless chest of drawers, and one of the

famous Korean chests, both more than generously bound in brass, or even

silver if the family is more prosperous than the exterior of the

building ever suggests. That is usually about all, except perhaps a

little sewing-machine run by hand, and the few trinkets and

inconspicuous odds and ends which the women and children gather about

them.

In the ell, flanking one of the little square living-rooms, is the

kitchen, with earth floor and the crudest of stone-and-plaster stoves

and implements. Next to this, or perhaps across the dusty, sun-baked

yard in the other right-angled extension, is a rough store-room, which

commonly alternates in location with an indispensable chamber offering

much less privacy and convenience than a Westerner could wish. The walls

of the floored rooms are usually covered with plain paper, white or

cream-colored, though sometimes figured in a way that recalls both Japan

and China. In the yard sit half a dozen or more enormous earthenware

jars of the color of chocolate. In one or two of these water is kept;

others are filled with preserved or pickled food, particularly the

Korean’s favorite delicacy, _kimshee_, a kind of sauer-kraut of cabbage

and turnips generously treated with salt and time and rarely missing

from the native menu except in the hot months when it is perforce out of

season.

When it comes to heating his house the Korean takes complete leave of

his island neighbor and turns his face westward. Under the stone floor

runs a large flue, the entire length of the house, connected with the

kitchen at one end and springing out of the ground in the form of a

crude chimney or stovepipe at the other. None of this shivering over a

_hibachi_ filled with a few glowing coals for the otherwise

comfort-scorning Korean; he will have his dwelling well heated from end

to end, not merely his _k’ang_, or stone bed, after the Chinese fashion,

but every nook and corner within doors. While the cooking is going on he

may lie on the papered floor and toast himself to his heart’s content;

or a bundle of brushwood—almost the only fuel left him in his deforested

land—thrust into the business end of the flue in the morning and another

at night makes winter a mere laughing matter. It is an ingenious scheme,

yet not without its drawbacks. In the blazing summer-time, for instance,

there is no way of shutting off the kitchen heat, and the house-warming

goes as merrily on as in January. Not that the native seems to mind; he

is as immune to a hot bed as to a hard one. But many is the foreign

itinerant missionary who, having found lodging on a frosty night with

hosts who would outdo themselves in hospitality, has gratefully

stretched out on a nicely warmed floor and fallen luxuriously asleep—to

awaken half an hour later dripping with perspiration, and toss the night

through in a vain effort to shake off the nightmare impression of having

brought up in that very section of the after-world which all his earthly

efforts had been designed to avoid.

[Illustration:

Our first view of Seoul, in which the former Temple of Heaven is now a

smoking-room in a Japanese hotel garden

]

[Illustration:

The interior of a Korean house

]

[Illustration:

Close-up of a Korean “jicky-coon,” or street porter

]

[Illustration:

At the first suggestion of rain the Korean pulls out a little

oiled-paper umbrella that fits over his precious horsehair hat

]

Like his neighbors, the Korean eats with chop-sticks, but he uses a flat

metal spoon with his rice. This grain is the basis of the better-class

meal, but is not so highly polished as in Japan; and it is too costly

for the common people, who replace it with cheaper grains, especially

millet. What may seem a hardship is really a blessing. The poverty which

denies them some of the refinements of the table imposes upon the people

of Korea a more healthful diet than that of their island neighbors; in

the mass they are more sturdily built; if all other signs are

insufficient one can usually distinguish a Korean from a Japanese by the

excellence of his teeth. Besides his beloved _kimshee_, no Korean meal

is complete without a pungent sauce made from beans pressed together

into what looks like a grindstone and then soaked in brine, a sauce into

which at least every other mouthful is dipped. Meat is more often eaten

than in Japan; fish, as generally. But tea is not widely used; in its

place the average Korean uses plain water, or the water in which barley

or millet has been cooked, or, best of all, _sool_, cousin of the fiery

_sake_ or _samshu_ of the neighboring lands. Then come a dozen little

side-dishes,—pickled vegetables, some strange, some familiar to us,

cucumbers cut up rind and all, green onions, and some distant member of

the celery family, all immersed in vinegar-and-oil baths, slices of hot

red peppers, tiny pieces of some hardy tuber, brittle sheets of seaweed

cooked in oil until they look as if they had been varnished, a jet-black

kind of lettuce, and other odds and ends for which there are no

equivalents in our language. Sugar is hardly used at all, and the

adaptable traveler who learns to be otherwise satisfied with a native

dinner usually rises to his feet with a longing for a bit of chocolate

or some similar delicacy.

It is curious how geographical names often persist in our languages of

the West long after they have become antiquated and even unknown in the

places to which we apply them. The name “Korea,” for instance, means

nothing to those who live in the peninsula we call by that term; nor for

that matter did the word “Korai” from which we took it ever refer to

more than a third of the country, and that long centuries ago. Ever

since they absorbed the former kingdom the Japanese have striven to get

the world to adopt the native name “Cho-sen” (the “s” is soft), a word

already legitimized by several hundred years of use. But the world is

notoriously backward in making such changes; perhaps it is suspicious of

the motives of Japan, and a bit resentful at her attempt to render whole

pages of our geographies out of date. Yet there is nothing mysterious or

tricky in the wholesale alterations in nomenclature which she has

wrought in her new possession, though there is often irksome annoyance.

Every province, every city, almost every slightest hamlet has been given

a new name; but this has come about as naturally as the Frenchman’s

persistent obstinacy in calling a horse a _cheval_. It is a mere matter

of pronunciation. A given Chinese ideograph stands, and has stood for

centuries, for a given town or village of Korea. The Korean looks at the

character and pronounces it, let us say, “Wonju”; the Japanese knows as

well as we know the word “cat” that the proper pronunciation is

“Genshu”—and there you are. It is hardly a dispute, but it is at least a

new means of harassing the traveler. If he is American or English, or

even French or German, for that matter, he will find that nearly all his

fellow-countrymen resident in the country, mainly missionaries, have

lived there, or been trained by those who have, since before the

Japanese took possession, and that they know only the Korean names. If

he has a guide-book, which is rather essential, it is almost certainly

concocted by the new rulers or under their influence, and insists on

using the Japanese names. So do the railway time-tables, all government

documents, and the like. Thus he discovers that it is almost impossible

to talk with his own people, at least on geographical matters.

“Have you ever been in Heijo?” he begins, with the purpose of pumping a

compatriot for information on that second city of the peninsula.

“Never heard of it,” replies the old resident, with a puzzled air,

whereupon the new-comer gives him up as a hopeless recluse and goes his

way, perhaps to learn a few days later that this very man was for ten

years the most influential foreigner in that very city, but that to him

it has always been, and still is, “Ping Yang.” Thus it goes, throughout

the length and breadth of the peninsula, so that the man who would

mingle with both sides must know that “Kaijo” is “Song-do,” that

“Chemulpo” is “Jinsen,” that what the guide-book and time-table call

“Kanko” has always been “Ham-hung” to the missionaries, that every last

handful of huts in Korea is known by two separate and distinct names,

though the erratic slashes with a weazel-hair brush which stands for it

in the ridiculous calligraphy of the East never varies. Long before his

education has reached this fine point the traveler will have completely

forgotten his resentment at finding, as he rumbles into it at the end of

a long summer day, that the city he has known since has early

school-days as “Seoul” is now officially called “Keijo.”

It doesn’t greatly matter, however, for the chances are that he has

always spoken of it as “Sool,” which is the native fire-water, instead

of using the proper pronunciation of “Sow-ohl”; and to learn the new

name is easier than to change the old. Our own impressions of what was

for more than five centuries the capital of Ch’ao-Hsien, the Land of

Morning Calm, and is still the seat of the Government-General of

Cho-sen, started at delight, sank very near to keen disappointment, then

gradually climbed to somewhere in the neighborhood of calm enjoyment.

Seen from afar, the jagged rows of mountain peaks that surround it

should quicken the pulse even of the jaded wanderer. The promise that

here at last he will find that spell of the ancient East which romancers

have enticed him to seek, in the face of his cold better judgment, seems

to rise in almost palpable waves from among them. Then he descends at a

railway station that might be found in any prairie burg of our central

West, and is bumped away by Ford into a city that is flat and mean in

its superficial aspect, commonplace in form, and swirling with a fine

brown dust. But next morning, or within a day or two of random

wandering, according to the pace at which his moods are geared, interest

reawakens from its lethargy, and something akin to romance and youthful

enthusiasm grows up out of the details of the strange life about him.

There are, of course, almost no real streets, in the American sense, in

the Far East; hence only those wholly unfamiliar with that region will

be greatly surprised to find that the “many broad avenues” of Seoul,

emphasized by semi-propagandist scribblers, are rather few in number

and, with one or two exceptions, are sun-scorched stretches of dust

which the rainy season of July and August will turn to oozing mud. But

the eye will soon be caught by the queer little shops crowded tightly

together along most of them, particularly by the haphazard byways that

lead off from them into the maze of mushroom hovels that make up the

native city. From out of these dirty alleys comes jogging now and then a

gaudy red and gold palanquin in which squats concealed some lady of

quality, though these conveyances now are almost confined to weddings

and funerals; the miserable little mud hovels disgorge haughty gentlemen

in spotless white who would be incredible did not the falsetto

_rat-a-tat_ of ironing and the groups of women kneeling along the banks

of every slightest stream explain them. There is constant movement in

the streets of Keijo, a movement that might almost be called

kaleidoscopic, were it not for the whiteness of Korean dress; but it

strikes one as rather an aimless movement, a leisurely if constant going

to and fro that rarely seems to get anywhere. Dignified _yangbans_, that

still numerous class of Korea, and especially of the capital, which in

the olden days was rated just below the nobility, strut past in their

amber beads and their huge tortoise-shell goggles as if they were really

going somewhere; but if one takes the trouble to follow them he will

probably find them doubling back on their tracks without having reached

any objective. In the olden days they could at least go to the

government offices where they pretended to do something for their

salaries; since Japan has taken away their sinecures without removing

the pride that forbids them to work, there is little else than this

random strolling left for them to do.

In contrast to this numerous gentry, outdistanced by modern changes,

there are sweating coolies lugging this or that, bulls hidden under

mounds of brown-red brushwood from some far-off hillside, sleek-haired

women slinking by with an almost apologetic air, many of them with the

uncovered, sun-browned breasts somewhat less general in the capital than

elsewhere, here and there a Korean pony, cantankerous with his full

malehood, all streaming to and fro between an unbroken gauntlet of

languid shopkeepers in their fly-trap “household” caps, of mangy dogs

and dirty children. “Old-timers” will tell you that this was not so long

ago all there was to Seoul, except inside the several big palace

compounds, now so uninhabited; that walking, still much in vogue among

the Koreans, was for the overwhelming majority the only means of getting

about the city. Then there were no rickshaws, not over-numerous even

to-day after twelve years of wholly Japanese rule; then none of the

little dust- or mud-floored tram-cars, now so crowded, bumped along the

principal avenues; certainly no battered and raucous-voiced automobiles

scattered terror among the placid foot-going population. It is not

difficult to picture the comparative silence of that bygone Seoul, with

slipper-clad footsteps pattering noiselessly through the dust, or the

mild clumping of that cross between the Dutch wooden shoe and the

Japanese _geta_ still worn in muddy weather, punctuated now and then by

the booming of a mammoth bell, the mild hubbub of passing royalty

surrounded by shrieking out-runners, and the incessant accompaniment of

the falsetto _rat-a-tat_ of ironing.

With the definite coming of the Japanese much of that ancient Seoul has

departed. The great wall that enclosed the city has been largely

leveled, for the Koreans, according to their new rulers, can only fight

behind walls. Only a pair of the imposing city gates remain, and these

as mere monuments instead of entrances and exits. The Independence Arch

built to celebrate the end of paying tribute to Peking stands shabby,

cracked, and blistered in a bed of sand in the ragged outskirts. Rubbish

and worse litter the dark, wooden-slatted enclosure in which the mighty

bell that once transmitted royal commands sits drunkenly and dejected on

the ground. Vagabonds build their nests beneath the Oriental roof that

shelters the stone-turtle monument of which the city was once so proud;

the magnificent Altar of Heaven has become a garden ornament within the

grounds of the principal hotel, and is generously furnished with

Japanese settees and capacious cuspidors bearing the railway-hotel

insignia. Of the three principal palaces one is a mere wilderness of

weeds and vacant-eyed edifices; another houses the weak-minded remnant

of the once royal family and has bequeathed most of its grounds to

museum, botanical, and zoölogical purposes; the third, and most

historic, is being completely hidden from the city by a mammoth modern

building designed to become the headquarters of the Governor-General.

One might almost assume that a policy of blotting out the visible

reminders of the old independent Korea had been adopted by the new

rulers. Yet it is hardly that, I fancy, but mainly the utilitarian sense

of modern improvement which is showing such small respect for the

monuments of bygone Cho-sen. The Japanese are ardent in their efforts to

make Seoul a city in the modern sense—the modern Western sense, I could

have said, for their new structures are hardly copied from Japan.

Imposing buildings that might have been transported from our own large

cities are growing up for the housing of banks and important firms and

government offices. There is already one genuinely asphalted street; new

parks have been laid out where only wilderness or rubbish heaps were

before. Besides the big central one there are adequate branch

post-offices in every section of the city; police stations at every turn

keep a watchful eye out for new candidates to the mammoth new

penitentiary, built on the latest approved model, out near the “Peking

Pass.” After their lights the new rulers are steadily improving the

material aspect of the city, as of the whole peninsula. It would be too

much to expect them to improve certain personal habits and domestic

customs beyond the point which the Japanese themselves have reached, so

that some forms of uncleanliness and undress, for instance, which a new

American colony would quickly be forced to eradicate, have been given no

attention.

The new rulers once planned even greater changes in the old city. They

set about with the apparent intention of virtually moving it, or at

least the commercial center of it, down nearer the River Han, in a

section they called Ryuzan. There they built the railway headquarters

and blocks of brick residences for the employees. A stone palace for the

mikado’s viceroy was erected, streets laid out, and improvements

impossible in the crowded portion of the city were projected. But

commerce has a way of choosing its own localities; the Koreans are

nothing if not conservative; local gossip has it that when Prince Ito

was taken down to see his new residence he remarked to his well meaning

subordinates that they might live down there in the swamp if they

wished, but that he for one would stay in town. The prince is well known

to have been no recluse and hermit who would deny himself the soft

pleasures of cities. In the end his choice proved wise, for it is a rare

rainy season that does not wipe out scores of native huts down along the

Han and encroach upon the unused and isolated palace he rejected. The

railway headquarters, residences, and school remain, and trains halt for

an exasperatingly long time at Ryuzan station, so near that of Nandaimon

to which most travelers are bound, almost as if the officials would vent

their pique at having their will thwarted; but even the Japanese

residents have preferred the old city. Along its southern edge, under

the brow of Nansan Hill, dwell and trade that quarter of the fourth of a

million of population which wears kimonos and _getas_, and the stroller

down “Honmachidori” and its adjacent streets, narrow, crowded, busy, and

colorful as a thoroughfare of old Japan, could easily imagine himself

back in the Island Empire, far from the languid, white-clad throngs of

the Land of Morning Calm.