OFF THE BEATEN TRACK IN CHO-SEN
Perhaps it is because I was properly “Japalacked” that I was able to
wander at will about Korea by train, steamer, Ford, rickshaw, and on
foot without the annoyance of that constant police supervision and the
incessant showing of my passport of which many other travelers have
complained. Once, long ago, when the Japanese were at war with Russia, I
was arrested forty-eight times during thirty-six days of wandering
through Japan, and while the experience was much more amusing than
serious, there was nothing to be gained by repeating it. So I took the
trouble this time to satisfy Japanese inquisitiveness at headquarters
beforehand, and while I may have been, and probably was, under more or
less surveillance during my six weeks in Korea, I am sure that many of
my jaunts were known so shortly in advance even to myself that no
detective could have kept constant track of me. Certainly no visible
attempt was made to keep me from going when and where I chose, and
talking with whomever I wished.
A missionary Ford carried me off once to the gaunt hills to the east of
Seoul. Even the “great roads” in the interior of Korea are much like the
_caminos reales_ of Spanish America—“great” or “royal” only in the name
they bear. In places there are what the Japanese call “highways,” but
even these seldom have bridges worthy the name, some being mere
sod-covered logs, others dirt-and-branch foundations under concrete, or
nothing at all but the crudest of ferries. In the rainy season whole
treeless hillsides wash away and force traveling missionaries to sell
their Fords and walk home. Though the weather of Korea is on the whole
much better than that of Japan, the floods of summer are naturally
severe in a mountainous and deforested country. In Seoul it rained
incessantly day after day during much of July and August, sometimes with
barely half an hour of cloudy clearness from dawn till dark. Many
villages and some thirty miles of railroad were under water, and
countless bridges were made at least temporarily impassable. Men waded
waist-deep in the flooded rice-fields, raking out the duckweed with
which these were covered, and which would choke the rice when the water
subsided. Clothing and shoes molded overnight. In other parts of the
country, such as Ping Yang district, there was less rain than the
peasants asked for, though the almost tropical heat was everywhere and
incessantly in evidence.
Even one of the most fair-minded of guide-book writers speaks of the
Koreans as “incredibly lazy”—proof that he saw much more of the old
capital and its vacant-minded _yangbans_ than of the country districts.
If he had ever toiled for a day in the blazing rice-fields, even driven
a bull knee-deep in mud through them, or carried a “jiggy” load along
the narrow paths between them, he might have been of a different
opinion. In a land where agriculture is the national industry, where
four-fifths of the population still remain living among and tilling the
hills of their forefathers, their horizon bounded by their own narrow
valley and the nearest market town, there can scarcely be general
indolence. The Koreans in the mass are not lazy; but life means to them
something more than incessant exertion merely for exertion’s sake, and
they amble along even at work as if there were never any hurry to do
anything or get anywhere, quite the antithesis of the busy little
Japanese. With some such foot-note as this to one accusation against
them, it is easy to agree with the man who put it so well, that the
Koreans “are garrulous yet inarticulate, stolid yet excitable, frugal
yet improvident, lazy yet lashed by necessity to strenuous efforts.” A
childlike people on the whole, one is likely to conclude from weeks of
wandering among them, happy-go-lucky, with little tendency of laying up
for a rainy day, a trait in which they are widely at variance with their
present rulers.
In June the peasants were still spreading over the fields the decomposed
oak-leaves used as fertilizer, but by early July the transplanting of
rice began, soon to be followed by the weeding. Gangs pull up the
closely grown seedlings and tie them in bundles, which they throw out
across the fields to be planted with an expertness which reminds one
that their national pastime, at least in pre-Japanese days, was
stone-throwing. The earth-laden roots being much the heavier end, the
bundles unfailingly land upright just where the thrower chooses to place
them. A line of six to a dozen men and women move slowly across each
flooded field, replanting the grasses one by one, and everywhere the
green, low, flat country is dotted with hundreds of near-white figures
rooting in the soft, flooded earth. That no space may be wasted, beans
are often planted on the tops of the dikes between the paddy-fields.
Frogs sing their lugubrious chorus far and wide, little realizing the
unwisdom of betraying themselves to the beautiful ibis which feed upon
them. At weeding-time whole villages join together in great gangs, with
drums, fifes, brass cans, and all manner of native noise-producers, to
make a festival of the task, singing as they weed. The men, stripped to
the waist and burned a permanent brown, display leathery skins that
glisten red-brown in the sunshine, like a well polished russet shoe. Yet
many a peasant uses a yellow fan as he works. Where irrigation calls for
the lifting of water from a ditch to the fields, a man leisurely swings
all day long an enormous wooden spoon suspended in a little framework.
If the work calls for shoveling, one man holds the handle of the
implement and two or three others lift it by the ropes attached to the
shaft, precisely like the people of the Lebanon far across on the
opposite edge of Asia. The Korean is famed for his kindness to his
bulls, almost his only draft-animals now that his savage little stallion
ponies have become so scarce, and it is the commonest of sights to meet
a peasant lugging his wooden plow on his own broad back while the bull
strolls lazily homeward before him.
Korea is a land of villages, not of cities, nor yet of isolated peasant
houses, so that the broad flooded country is usually unbroken clear to
the foot-hills of distant ranges, unless a town, its thatched roofs
slicked down to the women’s hair, intervenes. Here stands a stone
monument with a roof over it to commemorate the wife who died of grief
for her departed husband, or at least refused resolutely to remarry, a
noble example, by Oriental standards, to all her sex. Farther on several
upright granite slabs flanking the road announce themselves as erected
by grateful citizens in honor of departed magistrates, though the
deep-cut Chinese characters upon them usually express anything but the
real public sentiment toward these village looters. Babies suckling like
shotes mothers stretched out on the floors of open houses, babies eating
great green cucumbers, skin and all, babies wailing as one seldom hears
them in Japan, are among the most constant details of any Korean village
landscape. Among the fixed customs of the country is the burning off of
the hair over the soft spot of an infant’s head, and most Koreans
preserve this little round bald place throughout their lives.
In July lettuce and green onions are everywhere, adding a still greener
tinge to the landscape. Men sleep anywhere in the middle of the day, on
the narrow paddy dikes, at the roadside, in the road itself, naked to
the waist but with their ridiculous horsehair hats still in place. You
will find them still working at dusk, however, and before the mists
begin to rise under the morning sun. Koreans of the masses never seem to
sleep, or to eat, all at once. The children have no fixed hours of going
to bed, nor beds to go to for that matter, so that they grow up able to
doze off anywhere at any time. Like the Japanese, the race shows the
effects of poor beds and piecemeal, catch-as-catch-can slumber. One by
one each member of the family lies down, still fully clothed, on the
brown-paper floor of the house as the whim strikes him, and drifts away
into more or less sound slumber, while all the domestic life steps in
and out among and over the sleepers. No matter at what hour of the night
one passes through a village some of its people will be squatting on
their porches or chattering inside. As crops approach the ripening
stage, little watch-towers, like thatched dove-cotes, rise high on their
pole legs all over the country, and by night he who comes strolling
along almost any road will hear some or all the family within beating
the little elevated shack with a stick or singing some weird old song as
a protection against the myriad evil spirits which roam the darkness.
I have said that the national pastime of Korea was—for it seems now
almost to have died out—the throwing of stones. In Cho-sen this game
more or less took the place of jiu-jitsu in Japan, and in the olden days
whole villages lined up on opposite sides, led by their chief bullies
and most expert throwers, the women often piling up stones within easy
reach of the warriors, and the festivities did not end until several
were badly injured, if not actually killed. Koreans still have the
reputation of being the most accurate stone-throwers in the world, as
more than one unwelcome stranger has learned to his dismay during some
dispute with a group of villagers. Under the influence of both Japanese
and American residents this faculty is being turned to another account,
and Korean baseball teams have already beaten more than once the best
aggregations which our countrymen in the peninsula can muster.
One has moments of doubt in Korea about the accuracy of the “survival of
the fittest” theory. The Koreans are superior to their rulers in mental
quickness, certainly in physique, and probably in some moral qualities.
This straighter, stronger-looking race seem big men beside the pushing
little dwarfs who have subjected them—though I found that the largest
native socks and shoes were nearly two inches too short for my own by no
means oversize Caucasian foot. That they are brighter, or at least of
swifter mental processes, than the Japanese, I am personally convinced
by numerous little episodes within my own experience. There was the
guide I had in the Diamond Mountains, for instance, only to cite one of
many similar examples. He was just an ordinary _jiggy-coom_, a porter
with the Korean carry-all on his back; yet though neither of us knew a
word of the same language, we had not the least difficulty in exchanging
all the thoughts we needed to during a four-day journey, by signs and
gestures. I have yet to see the Japanese who would not have failed
dismally under similar circumstances, and not merely because gestures
mean nothing to the people of Japan. We arrived one evening at a
temple-housed hotel run by the government railways, and the Japanese in
charge, though he had much more education than my guide, and spoke
considerable more or less English, displayed his racial density to such
a degree that I was forced to call in the Korean carrier as an
interpreter. Entirely in the language of signs and a few monosyllabic
place-names he caught the idea perfectly, and passed it on, in one tenth
the time I had already spent trying to drive it through the skull of the
son of Nippon.
But while many Koreans possess an alert mentality, this is often offset
by superstitions, prejudices, conceit, and the lack of initiative and
perseverance. They seem to have been slaves to clan or village opinion
for so long that they can seldom assert themselves individually. They
learn elementary things quickly, but they are prone to run out of steam
in the higher reaches. One gets the impression that they have less
self-control, that they are undisciplined, both by training and
temperament, compared to the Japanese. Unlike the Chinese, they will
fight upon slight provocation, which may be another proof of a lack of
self-control as well as of manliness. Such things as school strikes
against missionaries who have given them long and unselfish service to
the full extent of their resources indicate but little sense of
gratitude. Even their most friendly foreign teachers admit that almost
any of them will cheat at examinations if given the opportunity. Their
cruelty, or at least indifference to the suffering of others, is perhaps
as much an Oriental as merely a Korean trait. In the village just over
the hills from Seoul near which we made our Korean headquarters an old
man was found ill and half starved in a straw hut in the outskirts. If
the foreign gentry who pass that way almost every day take no notice of
him, the villagers evidently asked themselves, why should we? But the
first information the foreigners had of the invalid or his condition was
when our host happened one day to see him lying all but naked beside a
muddy stream, apparently trying to drink, his skin mere parchment
stretched tightly over his bones. The American gave the villagers a note
to the mission hospital and paid some of them to carry the old man there
on an improvised stretcher. Next morning nothing had been done. Called
to account, the villagers explained that they had decided not to take
him to the hospital, because he would only die soon anyway, and if they
buried him themselves it would cost less, they thought, than if the
hospital did so and then made the village pay for it.
It seems to be Japanese policy to keep deformity out of sight, but
Korean instinct and custom work to the same end. The native teachers of
a mission school vociferously objected to admitting a particularly
brilliant candidate—because he had only one eye! “If this thing goes
on,” one of the teachers raged, “we’ll be nothing but a collection of
cripples,” and to illustrate the point he sprang up and humped himself
across the floor like a paralytic, with the dramatic effect at which the
Koreans are adepts. Whatever his opinion of the Japanese in that
respect, no one would accuse the Koreans of having no sense of humor,
though they are much more solemn of demeanor than the Chinese. An
American resident who carries a massive old watch that once belonged to
his grandfather drew it out one day as he was leaving a railway
station—whereupon a Korean boy wearing the _jiggy_ of the porter’s
calling promptly backed up to the watch and solemnly asked if he should
transport it. There is less curiosity, or at least less child- or
monkey-like inquisitiveness about the Koreans than their immediate
neighbors either to the east or west display, more personal dignity, one
feels, and the stranger does not collect a following half as easily as
even in Japan. It is true, however, that villagers poke holes in the
paper walls of any inn-room housing foreigners, and missionary ladies
are obliged to carry a complete curtain-room with them on their travels
in the interior. Superstitions are still rife, for all the outside
influence, and some of them take quaint forms. As in Haiti, it is a
common thing to have a pedestrian dash across the road in front of a
moving automobile just as it seems to be upon him, the idea being to get
rid of the evil spirit which dogs his heels like his shadow, either by
having it crushed beneath the wheels or attaching itself to the
motorist. In fact, there are many little suggestions of the black man’s
republic of the West Indies about Korea—Napoleon beards, little pipes,
thatched market-stalls and the tiny transactions they are willing to
make, the custom of sleeping peacefully at the roadside or in the
roadway wherever the whim overtakes them, the same swing of the women
carrying burdens on their heads, a similar carelessness about exposure
of the person.
It is still an ordinary experience for a Korean bride to discover when
she enters her future home that she is only her husband’s “Number 3”
wife—yet all the children she may bear him are considered as belonging
to Wife Number 1. Nine-tenths of the suspensions from the church, at
least among Protestant converts, are for concubinage; most of the rest
are for marrying “heathen.” I have already mentioned that the
missionaries insist that Korean women are very modest, particularly as
compared to their Japanese sisters. They seem not to consider the public
display of breasts immodest, for missionaries, just like ordinary
people, appear to get used to things which must at first have struck
them as “dreadful.” They do not like to have them photographed, however;
people at home would “misunderstand.” Women still come to church
flaunting this open proof of motherhood, just as men do in their
horsehair hats. Yet when Japanese women came into public baths already
occupied by Korean men there was so much talk that the authorities were
forced to modify a time-honored custom of Japan and order a division of
the tubs by sexes. Less than two decades ago no Korean woman of the
better class appeared on the streets even of Seoul in the daytime, and
servant-girls compelled to do so covered their faces. After ten at night
no men were expected to be abroad, for then the women, usually in sedan
chairs, with lantern-bearers and followers, came out to pay their calls.
In those days young men never smoked in the presence of their elders—at
least of the male persuasion. No decent woman could read, but only
sorceresses and _keesang_, the geisha of Korea. To-day things are so
changed in some circles that the sewing-woman of a missionary family
sent her girls to school first, saying that the boys could take care of
themselves; with the result that her daughter became the wife of a
vice-consul in Manchuria while her son was still a _jiggy-coom_, waiting
at the station for a job of carrying. Points of view differ, of course,
and what we of the West consider quite proper may strike the Korean as
highly immodest, as well as vice versa. I remember once coming upon a
group of Korean servants in a foreign house all gazing with great
curiosity at the cover of one of our cheap high-priced magazines,
decorated with a silly, but from our point of view harmless, picture,
after the stereotyped manner of our “popular” illustrators, of a boy and
girl kissing. The servant who had worked longest for foreigners was
explaining to his scandalized fellows that they often did that, and held
hands, too—which last dreadful vice he demonstrated by taking a hand of
one of the others, by the wrist!
One should keep in mind, in considering the recent swift changes in
Korea, that it was closed to the outside world much longer, tighter, and
later than Japan. Yet the quaint old scholar’s cap is now as rare as the
old learning. The new generation seems to have lost the poise of the
old, and so far to have gotten nothing in its place. The rather flippant
youths of the new schools cannot read the classics—for there is a
splendid old Korean literature which is forbidden by the Japanese, so
that the younger generation is growing up without it—and thus far they
are not at home in the modern world that has so suddenly burst upon the
ancient peninsula. One of the demands of the thirty-three men who signed
the Korean “declaration of independence” a few years ago—the finest
types of Koreans, according to the missionaries, and the first of whom
were just being released, yellow and thin, when we were in the
country—was the freedom to study things Korean, including their history.
The idea of an education as the road to a government job and a lifetime
of loafing still carries over from the days that are gone. Four fifths
of the population is still reported illiterate, too, and even of those
eager to go to school hardly one in three can get inside one. The rest
can go to—well, to a Korean school of the old type, for instance. Frowsy
old men keep them privately, and a dozen or a score of boys come at
dawn, seven days a week, to squat on the floor of some dark and
miserable little room in a back alley, their slippers in a row along the
porch, and rock back and forth all day long shouting incessantly in what
would be a chorus if it were not also a chaos of individual noises more
often without than with meaning. Not until night falls do they unfold
their legs and stumble homeward, and all the day through, as they
“study,” the “teacher” in his special form of horsehair hat dozes on his
knees at the head of the room, and flies beyond computation in numbers
flit hour after hour from boy to boy. The Japanese officials of Korea
pay a bounty on flies by the pint, but they do not seem to have done
much toward wiping out their breeding-places. Yet, one recalls, while
gazing in upon one of these old-fashioned schools, much of the
civilization of Japan came from Korea—its culture, writing, Buddhism,
pottery—and its smallpox.
A Korean church service, too, is a sight worth going to church to see.
There are no seats, except perhaps a bench along one of the walls near
the pulpit, for the missionaries. All others sit or squat on the floor,
covered with straw matting, all in white except some of the smaller
children, mainly dressed in pink. Many of the men still wear topknots,
and some their “fly-trap” hats, for by Korean standards it is impolite
to take these off except in one unmentionable place, where it is
imperative. The sunburned breasts of women are also somewhat in
evidence, though the great majority of the average congregation have
adopted Western styles now in both these particulars. There may be a
rare man in foreign dress, but even the native pastors almost all wisely
cling to the flowing native garb of snow-white grass-cloth, so much more
comfortable and becoming to Koreans. The men squat on one side, the
women on the other, with the children in front between them, and seldom
do they rise at all during the service, but merely bow their heads to
the floor to pray. Now and again they sing one of our old familiar hymn
tunes, with Korean words, in loud, metallic voices. Dozens of children
of from two to six wriggle and talk and race about. From time to time a
“Bible woman” squirms out of her place, picks up a few of the eel-like
urchins, and returns them to their respective mothers, ordering them to
be nursed forthwith, then wriggles back into her place again. There may
be quiet during the infant dinner-hour, but the whole act is sure to be
repeated several times before the service is over and the snow-white
throng pours out between two unnecessarily stern-faced, sharp-eyed men
in plain clothes whose habitat is the police station.
There can be no doubt of the many difficulties of mission work in a
country where everything is so different from the home-land that an
expression sounding almost exactly like “Come on!” means “Stop!” Among
the dreadful stories one hears of missionary hardships is that of a man
still in the field, who in his early days wished to preach a sermon on
the text “_Tam naji mara_,” which is Korean for “Thou shalt not covet.”
But as his command of the language was still somewhat faulty, he made
the slight error of giving the text as “_Dam naji mara_.” Now while
“_tam_” means “to covet,” “_dam_” means “to sweat,” and when the long
service was over a little old Korean lady came up to say timidly to the
youthful pastor, “I loved your sermon, dear teacher, but please tell me,
how can we help sweating when it is so hot?”
Northward from Seoul by the railways which, broken only at the Straits
of Tsushima, reach from Tokyo to Peking and beyond, lies much the same
Korea as to the southward. Kaijo, or Song-do, reminds one that the
ancient rulers of Cho-sen knew how to pick beautiful mountain sites for
their capitals, for the landscape there rivals that about Seoul, alias
Keijo. The first unification of the whole peninsula took place under the
Korai—hence the name the West still uses—dynasty, which made its
headquarters at Song-do and ruled for more than four centuries. When it
was overthrown by one of the king’s generals, just a hundred years
before the discovery of America, a new capital was established at Seoul
and an ancient name for the country was restored—“Ch’ao Hsien,” roughly
the “Land of Morning Calm.” The Chinese still call it Koli. Remnants of
the groundwork of what must have been imposing buildings lie scattered
to the west of the present Kaijo, and a great wall still climbs along
the side of the mountain range that shuts it in. But the Song-do of
to-day is little more than a large and very compact vista of smooth
thatched roofs close beside the railway but an appreciable distance from
the station. It has an American mission school famous for the ginghams
made by students earning their way—un-Oriental as that may sound—in a
factory in charge of a man from South Carolina; and some of the old
customs have survived longer than in Seoul, the muffling from head to
heels in a white sheet, for instance, of some of the women who glide
through the narrow, unpaved streets.
Then, too, Kaijo is the center of the _gin-seng_ industry of Korea. The
root of this plant is credited with miraculous curative powers by the
credulous Orientals and reaches prices verging on the fabulous. Cases
are scarcely rare of wealthy invalids, particularly Chinese, paying as
much as two hundred dollars for a single root no larger than a little
forked carrot at most three inches long, though it is the wild
mountain-growing species of this originally Manchurian weed that reaches
such heights; the cultivated variety is much less esteemed. Throughout
the Far East there is hardly a native drug-shop without its carefully
hidden supply of this precious tonic, which is said to have some real
value for old and weak persons, at least of the Orient; even Chinese
physicians admit that it is too heating for Westerners, already too hot
by temperament, according to their view. No doubt its celebrity is
largely due, like that of many another commodity, to its absurdly high
price. One might fancy that the growing of _gin-seng_ would fit the
Korean temperament, for it takes seven years to mature, after which the
land must lie fallow, or at least free from the same crop, an equal
length of time. The fern-like plant dies in the sun; so for a
considerable distance along the way through Song-do district there are
big brown patches on the landscape which on closer inspection prove to
be fields of _gin-seng_ in rows of little beds, each protected by reed
or woven-leaf mats forming a north wall and inclining slightly to the
south. Here, under the watchful eye of the government monopoly bureau,
this delicate aristocrat of the vegetable kingdom is tended with far
greater care than the babies of Korea, and at last is hidden away in the
form of yellow-brown dried roots in the safest places known to native
drug-venders.
Farther north are red uplands waving with corn and millet, and at some
of the stations mammoth bales of silk cocoons, the worms within which
are doomed to die a wriggling death in boiling water as their precious
houses are disentangled into skeins in the thatched huts among which
they will be scattered, the monopolistic eye of the alien government
upon them also. Heijo, which to Koreans and missionaries is Ping Yang,
has a somewhat less picturesque location than its two principal
successors as capitals, and it bristles now with smoking factory
chimneys. Indeed, it is quickly evident that this second city of the
peninsula is more industrious than Seoul. Knitting-machines clash
incessantly in hundreds of huts; _yangbans_ and high hats and spotless
white garments seem conspicuously rare to the traveler still having the
capital in mind, and everywhere are evidences that here life has not
been for centuries a holiday broken only by occasional languishing in
government offices. Then, too, the eighteen thousand Chinese with which
official statistics credit Korea are somewhat concentrated in Ping Yang
and the north, and the Celestial adds to the industrious aspect of any
land. These bigger and more rational-looking men do much of the hard
work of Korea, such as stone-cutting and the building either of
Christian schools or temples to the ancient gods. The latter seem to be
losing some of their popularity in Ping Yang, for Christians are so
numerous that the clatter of bells for Wednesday night prayer-meetings
is as wide-spread as the sermons of Korean preachers are endless. Yet it
is barely fifty years since Ping Yang went down to the river in a body
and killed the foreigners who had dared to come in a Chinese junk into
the Forbidden Kingdom.
In this metropolis of the north even topknots are rare and clipped heads
the rule. It seems to be inevitable with the coming of Christianity to
lose the picturesque; but usually the crasser superstitions go with it,
and one should not, perhaps, regret the passing of anything which takes
these also. Besides, there remain the roofs peculiar to Ping Yang and
its region, with their high-flaring corners made of six to eight
superimposed tiles, now required by law in place of combustible thatch;
and the complicated cobweb of streets in the Korean section still teems
with the ancient weazel-hair brushes working from ink-slabs and sounds
with the busy, insistent, incessant _rat-a-tat_ of ironing.
It is striking how completely Korean Cho-sen remains to its very
borders. Even in Yuki, where the coasting-steamer that brought me down
from Vladivostok stopped to load logs, town and people were quite the
same in appearance, manner, and customs as in Seoul or Fusan—and Japan
had just as firm a grip. One might have suspected, from the long array
of flags out through the little frontier village, that nearly all the
inhabitants were Japanese, but it turned out that all shops, in honor of
some mikado-ordained holiday, had been required to put up the rising—or
is it the setting?—sun.
Seishin, a more important port farther southward along the coast, is
picturesquely placed among foot-hills, and even has a railway, though
this begins miles away behind it. There are no rickshaws for weak-legged
passengers either, though little hand-run flat-cars operate on a tiny
track, the spinning along on which on the edge of the bay by moonlight
is delightful. Few thatched roofs are to be seen along the isolated
little segment of the Korean Railways between Seishin and the garrisoned
border town of Kainei, but tiled, Chinese-looking houses set down almost
out of sight in patches of corn, and many mountains and tunnels, though
also some fair valleys. Big chimneys made of hollowed logs of wood
sprayed at the top by the fire that sometimes reaches them stand high
above every mud-stuccoed dwelling in this region. Even there the
landscape is almost treeless, except for a certain growth of small
evergreens in patches here and there, though it is not far beyond to the
great forests of the upper Yalu. Among them rises the rarely uncovered
head of the Ever-White Mountain, and there are genuine tigers of Bengal
and other game worthy the best sportsman’s skill in the wooded labyrinth
of mountains about it. Kainei itself is quite a large town with many
Japanese, thanks largely to the great barracks that seemed to swarm with
soldiers. Part of an unambitious wall crawling along the foot of the
hills not far north of it marks the ancient boundary between Korea and
Manchuria, and in this midsummer season the town was hot beyond
description in its pocket among the mountains. There were many little
straw-built watch-towers standing stork-legged at the edges of the
ripening crops, and up a hillside at the edge of town was a pathetic
little Shinto shrine trying to force its way into the life of the
people.
[Illustration:
A village blacksmith of Korea. Note the bellows-pumper in his high hat
at the rear
]
[Illustration:
The interior of a native Korean school of the old type,—dark, dirty,
swarming with flies, and loud with a constant chorus
]
[Illustration:
In Kongo-san, the “Diamond Mountains” of eastern Korea
]
[Illustration:
The monastery kitchen of Yu-jom-sa, typical of Korean cooking
]
Much of the east coast of Korea is a mountainous wilderness, culminating
in one truly Alpine cluster which the Japanese, quite justly, are
striving to make better known to the outside world. If there is anywhere
in eastern Asia a more marvelous bit of scenery, or a finer place in
which to wander away a few summer days or weeks, than Kongo-san,
beginning to be known among foreigners as the Diamond Mountains, I have
overlooked it. One might enthuse for pages over the cathedral spires,
the colossal cliffs, the magnificent evergreen forests clinging by
incredible footholds to the gray rock even of mighty precipices, and a
hundred other unnamed beauties of this compact little scenic paradise
without giving more than a faint hint of the charms it encloses.
From Gensan, railway terminus of the branch northeastward from Seoul and
principal port on the east coast, a small steamer hobbles southward for
half a day to a blistering little town called Chozen, swaps passengers
with a diminutive wharf, and hurries away again as if the evil spirits
of the mountains were after it. One can walk, rickshaw, or Ford it to
Onseiri, five miles inland, where the Japanese have built a modern hotel
lacking nothing but freedom from Japanese prices, and where there are
several Korean inns which house virtually all visitors. Or, one may
leave the train from Seoul long before reaching Gensan, and cover the
eighty-eight miles from Heiko to Choan-ji Temple, one of the buildings
of which the same Japanese have made over into a pleasant little
hostelry, by a highway that will carry even full-grown automobiles
whenever the rainy season does not suddenly and bodily wipe out great
sections of it. For that matter there are sixty-four miles of a road
similar in capacity and subject to the same lapses along a beautiful
coast-line from Gensan to Onseiri direct. Everything so far mentioned,
however, functions only in the summer season, for from October onward
Kongo-san is snow-bound and its monks and simple mountaineers drift back
into the bucolic existence they and their forerunners enjoyed for
centuries before the noisy, hurrying outside world discovered their
enchanted retreat.
If the Diamond Mountains were in China, chair-bearers would humor the
lazy in their indolence and carry them around the circuit for a most
inadequate compensation. Fortunately the Koreans are not so ready to
take up the burdens of others, with the result that Kongo-san is spared
the sight of the mere tourist, incapable of depending for a few days on
his own legs and head. A _jiggy-coom_, of whose intelligence I have
already spoken elsewhere, and whose sturdiness, unfailing good cheer,
and knowledge of the mountain paths were on a par with his other good
qualities, kept my indispensable belongings within constant reach in
spite of the swift pace circumstances forced me to set; otherwise my own
feet paid the toll for whatever my eyes feasted upon. In fact, we made
the circuit in three days, and saw in four everything that other
visitors have considered worth making an exertion to see, which is
reputed to be a record. But I admit this not in pride, but in
contrition, for not to linger, to stroll, to camp for weeks hither and
yon among the towering peaks, beside the torrential ravines, away in the
scented recesses of the virgin forests of Kongo-san is to commit a
sacrilege and to deny oneself one of the good things of life.
There are trails that pant upward for hours more steeply than any
stairway built by man, revealing constantly changing vistas of
fantastically carved rock pinnacles, of combinations of mountain and
forest rarely seen even in the Alps, and, high enough up, glimpses of
the sea itself, down into which Kongo-san comes tumbling in mighty
cliffs, sheer as the walls of sky-scrapers. There are trails that wander
hour after hour down great rock gorges where streams too clear to be
described in words leap from pool to blue-green pool, and where the
world rears up on either side so swiftly that only an eagle could escape
from the ravine except by its natural exit. There are places which only
the feet of intrepid and ardent lovers of nature have ever trodden, or,
what is still better, ever will, and pinnacles of sharpened rock from
the all but unattainable points of which myriads of others like them,
yet each utterly different, stretch away in an endless forest of white
granite spires among which sunshine and rain and the often swirling
mists make new beauties each more beautiful than the last.
But we are wasting ink. The most expert weaver of words could not spin a
pattern that would be more than a faint and caricature-like resemblance
to the reality, even in some of the milder corners and aspects of the
Diamond Mountains. Let us acknowledge plain impossibility at once
therefore and see what hints can be conveyed by the matter-of-fact
pigments at our disposal.
It is about fifty miles around the base of Kongo-san and the whole
playground of nature covers only an area of seventy-five square miles,
but not even in the Andes has the builder of mountains so nearly outdone
himself within so limited a compass. A range over which no one has yet
found a way divides this into what is called the Inner and the Outer
Kongo, each with its endless variety of peerless scenic features. In
places the trails crawl along the face of granite precipices by
causeways or stairs of logs laid corduroy fashion and held in place by
big iron spikes driven into the solid rock. In others there are huge
chains by which to drag oneself to the top of some all but inaccessible
summit that repays a hundredfold all the exertion of reaching it. Twice
we had to wade and swim Bambakudo (the “Cañon of Myriad Cascades”) where
man-built aids of chiseled rock or chained logs failed us, and where no
human legs would have been frog-like enough to carry us from boulder to
boulder across the foaming stream. To see the best of the region needs
often hands as well as feet, and there are many times when the agility
and steel nerves of the steeple-jack and the endurance of the Marathon
runner are indispensable to the man who cannot bear the shame of turning
back from an attempted undertaking.
If its delicious sylvan isolation and its marvelous scenery were all
Kongo-san had to offer, it would be well worthy of world-wide fame; but
to these are added about twoscore of Buddhist temples and monasteries so
old and so withdrawn from the world that they alone would be worth
climbing far to see. Ever since the introduction of Buddhism into Korea,
some four centuries after Christ, this chaotic cluster of peaks and
abysses has been a kind of holy land of that faith. Converted kings
outdid each other in aiding the priests and monks who retired to this
secluded region, sending workmen and sculptors to build them temples and
cloisters in many and strange places, to chisel images of Buddha in
isolated gorges on the faces of immense cliffs, ordering the laymen
roundabout the mountains to furnish the recluses sustenance in
perpetuity. Tradition has it that there were at one time a hundred and
eight separate religious establishments scattered among these compact
mountains; but it came to be the kingly custom toward the end of the
fifteenth century to persecute Buddhism, and many of the retreats were
burned or fell into ruin, while the rest cut themselves off from the
outside world as completely as possible. After they were rediscovered,
so to speak, some thirty years ago by, strangely enough, an English
woman, their almost utter solitude of centuries began to be more and
more broken by visitors of the nature-loving rather than the purely
pious turn of mind.
The largest of the temples of Kongo-san is Yu-jom-sa, in which we spent
the night following the perpendicular climb into the Inner Kongo, and it
is quite typical of the others. A log bridge led across the acrobatic
stream we had been trailing from near the summit, to a cluster of a
dozen or more buildings, widely varying in size but all in the rather
gaudy yet not unpleasing flare-roofed style common to Korean temples,
and more or less so to those of Japan and China. Built of wood
throughout, they had a dark and venerable aspect, even though they are
credited since their establishment with having been destroyed more than
forty times by fire—an extremely common affliction to the monkish
residents of Kongo-san. Of the multicolored bogies and painted wooden
gods within the temples, of the colorful wall scenes which give these
background, even of the dainty pagoda rising slenderly as high as the
highest roof, with tinkling little bells at each corner of its many
stories, I need say nothing in particular, for these are things to be
found in any Korean sanctuary. What was less familiar were the great
kitchens from which the big establishment and its visitors are fed, or
the wooden trough that brings the finest of mountain water down from
miles away to a series of huge hollowed logs ranged closely side by side
on the slightly sloping space between the two clusters of buildings.
Those who wished to drink dipped with a quaint little wooden dipper from
the upper logs, those supplying the kitchen took water from a little
farther down; hands and faces were washed lower still, and finally came
the reservoirs in which kitchen utensils and the like might be rinsed.
To say that these descending orders of use were strictly obeyed either
by visitors or the monks themselves, however, would be to overdraw any
Korean picture.
Most of the temples and monasteries of Kongo-san supply food, and many
of them sleeping-quarters, to all who apply for them, as there are
neither inns nor the suggestion of shops or laymen venders in the
mountains. A novice met us at the temple end of the bridge and assigned
me a room, quite bare until it came time for boys to bring the little
table on which I was served in a squatting position, but with the usual
brown-paper floor of Korean dwellings. Cleanliness, at least as far as
anything came to my eyes, was quite general. We had arrived before
sunset, and there was time to see something of the daily life of the
place before it retired early for the night. Big piles of cord-wood and
brush in back courts testified to quite different weather than this
delightful August evening at many hundred feet elevation. Numbers of the
younger inmates were playing a medieval kind of cross between tennis and
handball when we came; on the edge of the graveled temple terrace that
served as court were two crude gymnastic turning-bars on which some of
the priests and novices did tolerably difficult feats. A roar of
laughter went up when, having been jokingly invited to join in this
sport, I had almost to duck my head to pass under the bars that most of
the others could only reach by jumping. They trotted out the tallest man
in the establishment, and roared again when he proved to be several
inches shorter than I; and I am sure I lost the reputation for veracity
among them because I asserted that, as people of my country go, I am not
particularly tall. There were many boys about the place, but I saw no
signs of women, though the recluses of Kongo-san are reputed to obey
their vows of celibacy much more in the breach than in the observance.
The yellow robe which makes the Buddhist priest so picturesque a figure
in some other lands had no counterpart here, at least in their outdoor,
every-day wear. They wore almost the ordinary Korean male costume, in
most cases of sackcloth, like men in mourning, though there were some
white and others with a bluish tint. Heads of course were cropped, and
there were no head-dresses of any kind in evidence.
[Illustration:
One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa
]
[Illustration:
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
]
[Illustration:
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
]
[Illustration:
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
]
The booming of a great bell struck by the end of a suspended log called
for gayer and more elaborate garments in which monks and novices sat and
rocked as they chanted through the evening service on the papered floors
of several of the main buildings. Meanwhile I had been called back to my
room and served supper. There must have been at least twenty courses,
or, rather, different dishes, to the meal, including no meat, but with
more examples of the really excellent performances of the Korean cook
than I had ever tasted elsewhere. Even tea was served, though up to
quite recent years Koreans never drank it. Best of all, the attendants
and idlers did not come to sit and watch me eat, like some wild animal
in a cage, but withdrew when I had been served and did not intrude again
until I lighted my evening cigar. Then a group of us strolled down to
the bridge across the brawling stony river and chatted in the language
of signs until night blotted out the evergreen wooded mountains that
pile up close on every hand above this delightful refuge from the silly
babble of the world.
It is true that a quartet of Japanese noisily smoked and gambled most of
the night away on the other side of a thin partition, but these are
afflictions against which Koreans have no effective weapons. My
attendants actually left the door open all night; but, oh, the
unspeakable hardness of a Korean floor serving as a bed! Breakfast was
almost as generous as the evening meal, yet as I recall it I paid, at a
roundabout suggestion from my hosts, only two or three _yen_ for the
full accommodations of myself and guide.
Sometime during that morning we came upon the mightiest of the carved
Buddhas in the Diamond Mountains, in a wild and utterly uninhabited
ravine through which we were descending from another slowly attained
summit covered with reeking wet half-jungle. The image was cut in deep
relief on the face of a cliff, and is so mammoth that my companion,
squatting at a corner of it, looks like a fly-speck on the picture I
took. At noon we were the guests of the score of monks of Makayun-an,
the largest of the cloisters, as Yu-jom-sa is of the temples. A useless,
perhaps, but certainly a gentle life these sturdy white-clad fellows
with the shaven heads lead at the sheer foot of one of the most
perpendicular peaks of the Inner Kongo. There are other cloisters far
more inaccessible, some which almost never see visitors. One, I recall,
on that afternoon down the magnificent Gorge of the Thousand Cascades,
was set so sheer on the vertical mountain-side that a post, which seemed
to be of iron and was surely a hundred feet long, under a corner of the
building was all that kept it from pitching headlong into the abyss
along which we scrambled our way far below.
I have said enough, no doubt, but no visitor to the Diamond Mountains
should hurry back to drab reality until he has climbed by finger-nails
and eyelids into that maze of white granite crags, like a hundred
gigantic Woolworth Buildings designed by no earthly architect, which the
Koreans call Shin Man-mul-cho. It rained more or less all the time we
were risking our lives and all but bursting our lungs to reach even some
of the slighter elevations of this fairy-land, but it would have been a
strange offshoot of the human race who would have considered a mere
soaking and the day’s toil of a galley-slave a high price to pay for the
sights that were conferred upon us. My coolie carrier himself, though he
had been there more than once before, was as averse to turning back,
even long after it would have been wisdom to do so, as was the
bedraggled and ragged Westerner who accompanied him.
Then, if there is time enough left after throwing away the tatters to
which any proper excursion into Kongo-san will reduce the stoutest
garments endurable there in summer, and the substitution of something
less exposing, one should have a glimpse of the Sea Kongo, where islands
that are like peaks of the fantastic mountains farther inland dot the
route over which ply in the summer season crude conveyances that in real
life are fishing-boats.