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QUAINT KOREA
BY
LOUISE JORDAN MILN
AUTHOR OF “WHEN WE WERE STROLLING PLAYERS IN THE EAST”
LONDON
OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1895
[_All rights reserved_]
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME
TO MY DEAR CHUM AND SON
CRICHTON
_A few of the following pages have appeared in “The London
Times,” “The Pall Mall Gazette,” “The Daily Chronicle,” “The
Pall Mall Budget,” “The Queen,” “The St. James’ Budget,” “St.
Paul’s,” “Black and White,” and “The Lady.” The Editors of these
papers kindly allow me to include those pages in this volume._
_L.J.M._
_London, 1895._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL 1
CHAPTER II.
SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS 20
CHAPTER III.
SÖUL FROM THE CITY WALL 34
CHAPTER IV.
KOREA’S KING 58
CHAPTER V.
KOREAN WOMEN 75
CHAPTER VI.
KOREAN WOMEN (_continued_) 122
CHAPTER VII.
KOREAN ARCHITECTURE 161
CHAPTER VIII.
HOW THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE, AND THE
KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES 189
CHAPTER IX.
A GLANCE AT KOREAN ART 209
CHAPTER X.
KOREA’S IRRELIGION 226
CHAPTER XI.
KOREA’S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL 245
CHAPTER XII.
THE SCOURGES OF CHINA 266
CHAPTER XIII.
JAPAN’S INGRATITUDE 278
GLOSSARY 305
* * * * *
QUAINT KOREA.
CHAPTER I.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT HAMEL.
A spoiled woman, an extremely cross Englishman, who was her husband, and
a smiling mandarin, who was their host, sat on the prow of a Chinese
junk. They were rather a silent trio. The mandarin knew, or pretended he
knew, no English. The Englishman pretended to know considerable Chinese,
but, as a matter of fact, knew almost none. The two men were about
equally fluent in rather bad French, and were wont to use it as the
medium for a good deal of conversation, when they were alone. But
to-night, with the spoiled woman sitting between them, neither seemed to
have a word to say. Perhaps they both felt embarrassed by what to both
of them must have seemed the ridiculousness of the situation.
The junk had left Shanghai a few days before. It was bound for Korea,
where the mandarin was going on business—on business for the Emperor of
China. The party on the boat, not to mention servants and such, included
the mandarin, the mandarin’s wife, the Englishman, the Englishman’s
wife, and a young man named John Stewart-Leigh.
As I have said, his excellency the mandarin was going to Korea on
business. The spoiled woman was going for pleasure; her husband was
going because he thought he ought to, and the mandarin’s wife was going
because she had to. Stewart-Leigh would probably have found it very hard
to tell even himself just why he was on board. “It’s as good a way of
spending my leave as another, since I am too poor to go home just now,”
he had said to a brother subaltern in Hong Kong, “and it will be a
perfect charity to Q.”
Mr. Q., the spoiled woman’s husband, had been stopped by a friend a few
weeks before as he came down the steps of the Shanghai club.
“I say, Q.,” cried the other, “what is this? I hear that you are going
to Korea, and in his junk, with Ja Hong Ting. I say, it isn’t true, is
it?”
“Of course it’s true,” Q. had replied gloomily. “That mad wife of mine
has inveigled the poor old mandarin into inviting her. She insists upon
going, and I am going along to chaperon her.”
The Q.’s had been living in China for almost a year. They had known Ja
Hong Ting when he had been the Chinese minister at one of the European
capitals. Indeed, an uncle of Mrs. Q.’s (she was not unmixedly English)
had been the European secretary of the legation of which Ja Hong Ting
had been the head. The acquaintance that had begun on the continent of
Europe (and which between the then-girl and the Chinaman had been rather
a friendly acquaintance) had developed in Pekin, as friendships between
Chinese and Europeans don’t often develop. Mr. Q., who alternately
laughed and grumbled at his wife’s odd tastes, secretly shared them. He
was a grave, quiet man; as a rule, almost taciturn. He was a deal of a
philosopher, though no one but his wife ever suspected it, and he had
become very much interested in Ja Hong Ting and the glimpses of real
China and of real Chinese life which had been afforded him through his
acquaintance with the mandarin.
When Ja Hong Ting and the Q.’s had first met in the drawing-room of one
of the European Legations at Pekin, Ja Hong Ting had exclaimed, as he
bowed over and over Mrs. Q.’s hand, “I am so glad you are here. Now you
shall know my wife.” (His wife had not been with him in Europe.) “You
shall teach her English, and she shall teach you Chinese. I entreat you
and your husband to come to my yamun to-morrow, and there you and she
shall be made great friends.”
Ja Hong Ting had not spoken in English, of course.
The Q.’s had gone to the yamun the next day, but Ja Hong Ting’s
programme had not been altogether carried out. His wife had been
obedient, as most Chinese wives are, but she had taken a dislike to the
Englishman, and a most violent dislike to the Englishwoman. She was
civil then and afterwards (at least, in the mandarin’s presence), but
she never warmed to her husband’s European friends, most especially not
to the lady. She taught Mrs. Q. no Chinese, at least not voluntarily;
and from Mrs. Q. she learned no English.
Some months after, Ja Hong Ting had called upon the Q.’s in Shanghai. He
stayed to dinner, and as they sat down, said to Mrs. Q., “Do you know
where Korea is?”
“Of course I know where Korea is,” replied his hostess.
“Yes,” interrupted Q., “so do I. It is one of the few places that my
wife has not dragged me to yet.”
“Ah, yes! I forgot,” said the mandarin, turning again to his hostess.
“Yes, I remember, you are a great geographer and a traveller. But I do
not suppose you will ever go to Korea. I should think it the last place
pleasant for you to visit. I have been there a number of times, and I am
going next month. The Emperor is sending me with a message to the King
of Korea.”
Mrs. Q. pushed her plate of untasted soup from her, and cried, “Oh!” Mr.
Q. knitted his brows and sighed. He saw trouble in the distance.
“You pity me,” said the mandarin.
“Pity you!” said the woman. “Ah! don’t you think the Emperor would send
me in your place?”
The Chinaman laughed. “I am sure his Majesty would not care to give you
so much hard work to do.”
“How do you get there, how are you going?” said Q., trying in a blind,
groping way to turn the conversational tide.
“In my junk,” said Ja Hong Ting. “It is one of the biggest junks in
China—a comfortable boat, quite like a floating home, as madame here
would call it, and I always enjoy my sails over to Korea and back very
much more than I enjoy my stay in Korea.”
“Will any of your ladies go with you?” asked Mrs. Q.
The mandarin laughed and shook his head. And then something seemed to
occur to him. He put down the spoon that had been almost to his mouth,
and after a moment’s pause, said, “I could take one or two of them.
There’s room, and there’s comfort in the boat. Would you”—turning to
Q.—“like to come and bring your wife?”
Q. groaned, and said hastily, “Thanks awfully, but I shall have to go to
Calcutta next month.” But as he spoke he knew that he was like a
drowning man catching at a straw. The mandarin’s suggestion was, of all
suggestions in the world, the one to fire Mrs. Q.’s easily fired
imagination.
And so it came about that a month or more afterwards Ja Hong Ting’s junk
had pushed off from Shanghai with “us five in family,” as Mrs. Q.
delightedly called the mandarin, his wife, and their three guests.
The West has conquered the East. Christianity has triumphed. Heathenism
is mangled, and, let us hope, dying. Across the fair, flower-dimpled
back of Asia we have laid the unpicturesque blessing of railroads, and
thoroughly well-made, thoroughly well-kept paths for the men who
consider life a succession of journeys, and the animals who enable such
men to perpetually journey.
Second-sight seems to be, and to have always been, a genuine possession
with the Asiatic peoples. We in the West have, I think, never possessed
second-sight; but that does not altogether prove that there is no such
thing as second-sight. I remember an Æolian harp that used to hang upon
one of the crumbling, wild-flower-wreathed walls of the old castle at
Heidelberg. I remember the love songs that the wind used to sing to that
harp; the love songs with which the harp accepted the wooing of the
wind. If a nice new organ, a parlour organ, bought on time-payment, were
placed beside that Æolian harp (for I suppose the harp is still where I,
in my girlhood, years ago, saw it), the wind would have nothing to say
to that organ. If the wind had, the organ would not hear. I do not for a
moment rank an Æolian harp above a nice, new parlour organ, but I may,
perhaps, prefer the harp to the organ. We all have our secrets.
The Korean mind is, if I at all understand it, an Æolian harp. Compared
with the Oriental mind, the Occidental mind—in many instances at
least—partakes somewhat of the character of the parlour organ. The
peoples of Asia do less than we, but I think that they foresee more. The
wind of prophecy, the wind that prophesied the unavoidable future, swept
the nerve-strung heart of Asiatic sensibility, swept it very many, many
years ago. And Asia, having ears to hear, and, perhaps, eyes to see into
the future, realized that her only safety lay in seclusion. It seems to
me that the sensitive Asiatic mind, the exquisitely-strung Æolian harp
of Oriental existence, sings one eminently, practicable, sensible song
into the moon-lit, star-gemmed Asiatic midnight, and the refrain of the
song is this: “Asia for the Asians. Mangoes for the Chinese and the
Bengalese. Mogree flowers for the nautch-girls; and the Taj Mahal for
the wife who was loved with a love exceeding the love of European men.”
It has, I think, been an instinct, a second-sight, an inspiration, with
the Asiatic peoples to keep our feet from off the flower-made brilliance
of their native sod. But we have conquered Asia, as surely as the music
pumped by the thick, red fingers of the Board-School-taught girl—pumped
from out the well-manufactured depths of the time-payment-bought parlour
organ—would drown the indefinable, soft, methodless, nameless music of
the Æolian harp. Just so well have we subdued Asia, hushed her music,
quenched her light, torn her flowers petal from petal.
I am speaking from the sentimental standpoint, of course. But, in this
utilitarian age of ours, isn’t it worth while to look at things
sentimentally, once in a way, if only for variety? We have conferred the
greatest practical blessings upon Asia; that I admit and maintain. But
we have blurred the picture a bit, and I can’t help being sorry. Only
one country in Asia has, until lately, entirely escaped the blight and
the blessing of our civilizing touch—Korea! Korea has not seemed worth
our shot and powder. And many of us have not really known that there was
such a place as Korea. But the war that is raging in farther Asia now
has quickened our interest in the quaint kingdom of the morning calm.
The following chapters have been largely written from notes that Mrs. Q.
made during the pleasant months she spent in Korea, and from her
memories of those months. But Chosön is too interesting and, to us, too
new a theme to need the fillip of any petty personality; and so, after
these few pages of introduction and of explanation, we may excuse Mrs.
Q., or at least her personality, from our service, and leave her in her
privacy, to congratulate herself upon her good luck in having had the
unique experience of seeing Korea, and of seeing it in company with one
of the best-informed of Tartars, and one of the most intelligent of
Europeans.
I felt impelled to write this explanation of how the material for the
book was gathered, and the manner of woman who gathered it. Helen Q.
lays as little claim to being profound as do I myself, and this is no
volume for those who gloat on statistics, on accurate tables, and insist
upon having over-exact information or no information at all. It is a
peep at Korea as a very average woman saw it, a woman who enjoyed
herself in Korea, and who there jotted down some of her impressions that
they might serve her and another for ‘sweet discourses in their time to
come’—jotted them down with no dream of future publication. I sometimes
think that the half-gossip of such travellers, the honest, unstudied
report of their observations, gives, to the generality of readers, a
more vivid, concrete picture of a strange land than do the more
elaborate, more careful volumes of more accomplished writers, more
professional makers of books.
These pages have had the advantage of being revised both by Mr. Q. and
Ja Hong Ting, both of whom are acute observers, exact thinkers, and
happen to be in Europe now.
The inclusion here of the chapters on China and Japan needs, I think, no
apology. The histories of the three countries have been so interknit
socially, artistically, and scientifically; the people of Korea are so
like the people of Japan, so like the people of China—though so unlike
both—that we shall only even partially see Korea, by keeping one of our
mental eyes on the rival countries between which she lies.
The island of Quelpaert is barely fifty miles long and only half so
wide; but it is big with history, huge with interest, and great with
special claim upon European attention.
In 1653 a Dutch boat was wrecked on the shore of Quelpaert. To that
shipwreck Europe owed her most vivid, if not her first photograph of
Korea; for on the _Sparrow-hawk_ was not only Min Heer Cornelius Lessen,
the governor-elect of Tai-wan, but also a man of genius, a sailor who
had a great gift for narrative writing. That man’s name was Hendrik
Hamel. It is two hundred years and more since he wrote his simple,
straightforward, convincing record of the years he perforce spent in
Korea. Since then some score of books have been written about Korea and
things Korean. None of them are more readable than Hamel’s “Narrative of
an Unlucky Voyage,” and only one of them compares, at all to its
author’s credit, with the quaint old book, written two centuries ago by
the Dutch seaman.
I should like to quote a great deal of Hamel’s own record of the
thirteen years he spent in Korea, and it has been done very much at
length by several eminent writers. Moreover, it would be an entirely
safe thing to do, for the copyright must have long since run out, if the
book ever had a copyright. But I will content myself with a very few
words about this wonderful man and his stay in Chosön, and a few brief
quotations from one of the most interesting books of travel that has
ever been written; a book as fresh and readable to-day as if it had just
come smoking from the printer’s press.
More than half the souls on board the _Sparrow-hawk_ (that is
thirty-six) reached the shore of Korea. They were taken prisoners, and
were held so for thirteen years and more. The history of their captivity
is the history of varying kindnesses and unkindnesses. But, when we
remember the then conditions of Korean life, and when we remember how
little the hermit people of the hilly peninsula desired colonists, when
we remember how they regarded foreigners, and what cause they had to so
regard foreigners, it is more the history of kindness than of
unkindness. Certainly the Hollanders had more to be thankful for than to
complain of during their first years in Chosön—barring, of course, the
facts that there they were and there they had to stay.
Hamel and his fellows were not the first Europeans, not even the first
Hollanders to land, or rather be thrown, upon Korea. But, for all that,
they were enough of rarities to be regarded by the populace as strangely
interesting wild beasts. They were given rice-water to drink. They were
fed. When the need came they were clad. They were sheltered. They
suffered no indignity, and only comparative hardship; and, little as
they dreamed it, the King of Korea was sending to them an interpreter; a
man whose blood was their blood, whose tongue was their tongue.
“The first known entrance of any number of Europeans into Korea,” writes
Griffis, “was that of Hollanders, belonging to the crew of the Dutch
ship _Hollandra_, which was driven ashore in 1627. . . . A big,
blue-eyed, red-bearded, robust Dutchman, named John Wetteree, whose
native town was Rip, in North Holland, volunteered on board the Dutch
ship _Hollandra_ in 1626, in order to get to Japan.”
Now one fine day, when the _Hollandra_ was coasting along Korea,
Wetteree and two of his mates went ashore for fresh water. The natives
caught them, and, as was the custom of the country, detained them. They
were treated with respect, with honour even, attained to positions of
responsibility and trust, and became great among the great men of Korea.
Two of them died in 1635, died fighting for the country of their
enforced adoption when she was invaded by the Manchius. But Wetteree
lived on, and, twenty-seven years after his own capture, he was sent to
interpret between his shipwrecked countrymen and their captors. Alas!
his tongue had forgot its mother cunning, and refused to utter the
language that he had not used for twenty-seven years. Wetteree
remembered but a few words of Dutch. But the mother-tongue, which more
than a quarter of a century had not served to make him quite absolutely
forget, he regained in a month’s intercourse with his countrymen.
Hamel and his comrades experienced many ups and downs. They were treated
with consideration, they were treated with cruelty. They held many
offices. They were set many tasks—that of begging amongst them. They
plied many trades. They lived in many places. They saw the interior of
Korea, the inside of Korean life, as Europeans never saw it before, and,
I fancy, as Europeans have never seen it since.
Once an enterprising governor set them to making pottery with a probable
view of introducing European improvements into Korea’s own wonderful
ceramic art methods. The experiment was a failure. Whether the Dutch
fingers were ill-adapted to the pursuit of Korea’s favourite
art-industry, or whether, as Griffis remarks, it was “manifestly against
the national policy of making no improvements on anything,” history does
not authoritatively tell us. I incline to the first opinion. But the
bulk of the learned Europeans, who have studied Korea, certainly side
with Mr. Griffis. At all events, Hamel and his fellows were not kept
long at the moulding of Korean clay. The Governor was deposed and
physically punished; and the Dutchmen were put to the pulling of grass
from the door-yard of the palace.
Hamel and his comrades did not remain long in Quelpaert. The king sent
for them and they were taken to Söul.
Two paragraphs in Hamel’s long account of their stay are indicative of a
good deal that is to-day as characteristic of two types of Korean
character as it doubtless was two hundred years ago.
“On the 21st, a few days after the shipwreck” (writes Hamel), “the
commander made us understand by signs that he wished to see all we had
saved from our wreck, and that we were to bring it from our tent and lay
it before him. Then he gave orders that it should be sealed up, and it
was so sealed in our presence. While this was being done, some people
were brought before him who had taken iron, hides, and other things that
had drifted ashore from our boat. They were at once punished, and before
our eyes, which showed us that the Korean officials did not mean us to
be robbed of any of our goods. Each thief had thirty or more blows given
him on the soles of his feet with a cudgel thick as a man’s arm and tall
as a man. The punishment was so severe that the toes dropped off the
feet of more than one thief.”
Hamel and his fellows were under the supervision of more than one
governor. They were highly pleased with some, and as highly displeased
with others. Here is Hamel’s description of one:—“It seemed to us that
he was a very sensible man, and we were afterward sure that we had not
been deceived in our first opinion. He was seventy years old, had been
born in Söul, and was greatly esteemed at the court. When we left his
presence he signed to us that he should write to the king and ask what
was to be done with us. It would be some time before the king’s answer
could come, because the distance was great. We begged him that we might
have flesh sometimes, and other things to eat. This he granted, and he
gave us leave that six of us might go abroad every day, to breathe the
air, and wash our linen. This satisfied us greatly, for it was hard and
weary to be shut up, and to subsist on bread and water. He also sent for
us often, and made us write both in Dutch and in Korean. So did we first
begin to understand some words of Korean; and he speaking with us
sometimes and being pleased to provide a little entertainment or
amusement for us, we began to hope that some day we might escape to
Japan. He also,” adds Hamel, “took such care of us when we were sick,
that we may affirm we were better treated by that idolater than we
should have been among Christians.”
Lest the reader should think that Hamel had become a Buddhist or a
Confucist, or had adopted some other shameful form of heathenism; lest
the reader may think that Hamel was altogether partial to the people
among whom he had been thrown, I will add what he wrote of two other
governors. After complaining of one in detail, he adds, “But, God be
praised, an apopletic fit delivered us from him in September following,
which nobody was sorry for, so little was he liked.”
And of another unsatisfactory governor he writes, “He put many more
hardships upon us, but God gave us our revenge.”
These last two quotations ought, I think, to establish Hamel as a highly
civilized, and by no means gushing, historian.
Hamel’s narrative proves two things most conclusively. It proves that of
all the civilized countries the centuries have wrought the least change
upon Korea. Indeed, the geological changes in the peninsula have
scarcely been slower than the changes in the social customs of the
Koreans. It is even more interesting to me that Hamel’s book proves him
one of the most truthful men who ever put pen to paper. He wrote with a
brilliant, vivid pen, but he dipped it in no false colour. And yet in
his own time Hamel was, to put it mildly, called a liar of liars; and
until comparatively recent days his statements have been doubted, and
“exaggerated” has been the least abusive adjective applied to them. But
travellers of our own time, missionaries and statesmen, men whose word
is beyond impugnment, testify that Hamel wrote well within the mark,
that he created nothing, imagined nothing, distorted nothing. It is much
to be regretted that a man who wrote of Korea so simply, so charmingly,
so truthfully, and from so splendidly inside a point of view, did not
write far more about a country of which the fairly well-informed of us
until yesterday knew almost literally nothing; and yet a country a-teem
with interest for all who feel keen interest in humanity, in art, and in
high civilization, a country which threatens to disappear, if not as a
country, why then, as a country apart, and whose magnificent personality
may soon be lost amid the neutral generality of modern civilization, and
the brotherhood (such brotherhood!) of all nations.
The history of Korea we may have always with us; but Korea—Korea of the
lotus ponds and the red-arrow gates—Korea of the big hats and the
devil-traps—Korea of the geisha girls and the omnipotent, red-clad
king!—that we may not have so long. Civilization and war are on the
march, and if ‘smooth success be strewed before their gentle feet,’ why
then, the twentieth century in her youth may see the matrons of Chosön
walk abroad unveiled, and night on the streets of Söul turned into day
by electric light.