SOME CURIOUS KOREAN CUSTOMS.
It is difficult to decide how to attack the study of a people of whom
one knows practically nothing, and to whom one cannot have personal
access.
There are two classes of travellers—of people who travel for
self-gratification, and not on business or of necessity.
The traveller belonging to the first class diligently studies a whole
library of guide books and other volumes of more or less tabulated, and
more or less reliable information. He learns the country to which he
intends journeying as he might learn his catechism or his “twelve times
twelve.” He buys a ticket for the land of his destination. He knows
where he is going, and he goes there. He sees everything he expected to
see, all he intended to see, which is all he wishes to see, and, on my
word of honour, he sees no more! I know, for I have travelled with him
often, oh, so often! Having worked out his own petty educational
salvation, he goes home again almost as wise as when he started for
abroad: just a little hazed, perhaps (unless he be a globe-trotter of
the ultra rigidly-minded, blind-eyed type), for things as they really
are often give in so pronounced a way the lie to things as we have read
of them, that the difference between fact and fiction must shock all but
the densest of tourists.
The traveller belonging to the second class starts with a not too
definite intention of seeing Venezuela. He arrives there; unless _en
route_ he stumbles upon the borders of some, to him, even more
interesting country, and turns aside like the free man he is. He rambles
from town to village, and with a mind not so crammed with information
that it has room for no more. He learns his new country on the spot. He
sees the people. He eats their food. He drinks their wine. He watches
them at work, and at play. He learns their language, and some of the
thousand secrets which only language can teach. He looks into their
eyes, and perchance he gets some passing glimpse into their souls. He
goes home. Then he begins to read his guide books. Then he begins to
study the history and the ancient literature of the people among whom he
has been. And then, and not till then, is he fit to study that history:
for we can only read a history with full intelligence if we are familiar
with the people of whose ancestors it is written.
I trust that no one will think that I am decrying the study of history
in our school-days, or the life-long study of those places we may not
visit. I am not that mad. The study of history is invaluable as a means
of mental discipline and of personal culture. But we can only get the
utmost of delight, the utmost mental nourishment from history, when we
are more or less (and the more the better) _en rapport_ with the race
whose past it chronicles.
Let us then go into Korea after the method of the second traveller, the
happy-go-lucky, seemingly systemless fellow. Let us look at the Koreans
of to-day. Let us peep into their houses, watch their amusements, ponder
over the most characteristic of their many curious customs, and study
their institutions. Then we may spend an hour or more over Korea’s
history, not as a duty, but a treat. Our appetites will be keen, and we
shall relish what would, I am thinking, seem to us but a boredom of
incomprehensible dumb dates and endless iteration of meaningless facts,
were we to, after the approved style, plunge into it now!
The Koreans are, in all probability, the children of Japanese stock, but
China has been for centuries their wet nurse, and their schoolmistress.
No two Oriental peoples are more essentially unlike than are the Chinese
and the Japanese. And the Koreans, a race of Japanese, or kindred blood,
living under conditions largely Chinese, and deeply imbued with Chinese
ideas, present a picture peculiarly quaint, even in the quaintest part
of the world.
They have Japanese faces, Chinese customs, and a manner of their own.
But into their Chinese-like customs some little Japanese habit has crept
now and again. And the Koreans have even ventured, once in a while, to
invent a custom of their own.
Every Korean house has a cellar; not for the storing of wine, but for
the storing of heat. The cellar is called a khan—its mouth, through
which it is fed, is some distance from the house. On a cold night you
will see one or more seemingly white-clad figures cramming the khan’s
mouth, as fast as they can, with twigs, branches, and other combustible
food. But once well fed, the furnace burns for hours, and keeps the
house warm all night. So the attendants of the fire are not kept out in
the cold over long; and while they are there, their hands are full of
work that suffices to keep their blood at a decided tingle. A Korean
house heated at sunset keeps warm all night, because the fire built is
invariably huge, because the floors through which the heat permeates are
made of oil-paper, and because the furnace itself is largely a mass of
wooden and of stone intestines, pipes, and flues that retain and give
out heat. With almost no exceptions the houses in Korea are one-storied.
So simple a scheme of domestic architecture enables so simple a scheme
of house-heating to be thoroughly efficacious.
Europeans sleeping for the first time in a Korean house, usually
complain that in the middle of the night the heat is too intense, the
atmosphere insupportable, and that toward the chill hours of early
morning, when the fire has died, and the pipes at last grown cold, the
room is most disagreeably cold. But these are minor matters, and far too
trivial to disturb Korean slumber.
Next to the Eskimos, the Koreans are the heartiest eaters in the world.
So, naturally enough, they sleep profoundly. They seem to be always
eating. And nothing short of a royal edict, or a bursting bomb-shell,
will interrupt a Korean feast. I regret to say that the flesh of young
dogs is their favourite viand. Japanese beer is their favourite
beverage. And for this let me commend them. For never in Milwaukee,
never in Vienna, have I drank beer so good as that which is made at the
Imperial brewery in Tokio. Like all other Orientals, they devour
incredible quantities of fish; herrings for a first choice. The herrings
are caught in December, and are not eaten until March. Water-melons are
the fruit most plentiful and most perfect in Korea. They are superb.
Potatoes were in disgrace, under the ban of a royal edict, when Ja Hong
Ting took Helen to Korea. They had been introduced into the country
shortly before the Q’s. themselves. And their general use might have
done much to alleviate the horrible famines which visit Korea with a
horrible regularity. But their use and their culture were forbidden.
Only in the less disciplined outskirts of the peninsula were they to be
had. The mandarin used to send many miles for potatoes, and then they
ate them in safety, only because of the flag that sheltered their house
from the too scorching rays of the Korean sun. And it was so at all the
legations.
But about the sign-posts in Korea. They are quaint, if you like! Each
sign-post is shaped like an old-fashioned English coffin, and it is
topped by a face; a very grotesquely painted, a very Korean, a very
grinning, but for all that, a very human face. They used to rather
startle Helen at first when she came round the corner of a country road,
and found them smirking at her in the gruesome moonlight. But she grew
used to them. For they were all alike. They all wore the countenance of
Chang Sun, a great Korean soldier. Chang Sun lived one thousand, more or
less, years ago. His life was devoted to the opening up of his country
to the feet of his countrymen. He intersected the hills of Korea with
pathways, and to-day he beams upon every Korean wayfarer from every
sign-post. Beneath his beaming face you may (if you are learned enough)
read his name. Beneath his name you may read to where the road or roads
lead; how far the next settlement, or the next rest-house is, and one or
two other items that are presumably of general interest to the Korean
travelling public.
There are no inns nor hotels in Korea. But the rest-houses are neither
few nor far between. A Korean rest-house is a species of dâk bungalow.
It does not fill our jaded European ideas of luxury. But it answers the
purpose of the Korean traveller fairly well. He can cook there; he can
eat there; he can sleep there; he can buy Japanese beer there. The
average Korean is a sensible fellow, and wants nothing more. No, I am
wrong; he wants two things more: he wants to compose poetry, and to
paint pictures. The Koreans are a nation of poets, and of painters.
Every fairly educated Korean writes poems and paints pictures. But there
is nothing to prevent him from doing either, or both, inside or outside
the Korean rest-house. The majority of well-to-do Koreans are highly
educated, as Korean education goes; and in many ways it goes very far
indeed.
In Korea, as in China, a man’s social position depends upon the prestige
he can establish for himself at competitive examinations. In Korea, as
in every other normal quarter of the globe, a woman’s social position
depends upon the social position of her husband.
The results of the Korean competitive examinations are said to be
bribable and corruptible. Very possibly. Most human institutions are
fallible. Even Achilles, you know, had a heel. But certainly Korea has
been for centuries and centuries a country where scholarship took
precedence of everything but kingship; a country where education was
esteemed above common-sense.
All the Korean animals are very strong, but very strange. The peninsula
abounds in tigers, bears, cows, horses, swine, deer, dogs, cats, wild
boars, alligators, crocodiles, snakes, swans, geese, eagles, pheasants,
lapwings, storks, herons, falcons, ducks, pigeons, kites, magpies,
woodcocks, and larks. Hens are plentiful, and the eggs are delicious.
But the natives do not make half the use one would expect of all this
feathered plenty.
Goats may be reared by no one but the king, and are exclusively used for
religious sacrificial purposes.
The Koreans are good to their children, and to all animals. Snakes and
serpents are, perhaps, treated by them with more veneration and
tenderness than any other form of animal life. No Korean ever kills a
snake. He feeds it, and does everything else he can to conduce to its
comfort. The poorest and hungriest Korean will share his evening meal
with the reptiles that sneak and crawl about the rocks that bound his
garden.
Ancestral fire is a very important thing in Korea. In every Korean house
burns a perpetual fire, which is sacred to the dead ancestors of the
household. To tend that fire, to see that it never runs the least risk
of going out, is the first, the most important duty of every Korean
housewife. In Korea, as in China, ancestor-worship is the real religion.
Confucianism is the avowed religion of the country. But, like the
Chinese, the Koreans hold dogmatic religions in considerable,
good-natured contempt.
Fortune-tellers and astrologers are as many and as prosperous in Korea
as in China.
Like the Japanese, the Koreans have found a special and profitable
vocation for their blind. In Japan, the needy blind invariably practise
shampooing. In Korea, the blind exorcise devils, and, in analogous ways,
make themselves generally useful. Their dealings with evil spirits are
summary and thorough. The gifted blind man frightens the devil to death
by means of noise more diabolical than any Satan ever heard, or catches
the devil in a bottle, and carries it in triumph to a place of safety,
where devils cease from troubling, and afflicted Koreans are at rest.
The laws of Korea are explicit concerning high treason. They smite it
hip and thigh. They exterminate it root and branch. If a Korean is found
guilty of high treason he dies, and his entire family dies with him. In
this custom the Koreans are again Chinese and not altogether
un-Japanese.
The constitution of the Korean Home Office is based upon the Japanese
system. The Foreign Office is modelled on the Chinese Foreign Office. At
the head of the War Office is the Pan Sö, or decisive signature, an
official of very great power. Under him are several lesser officials
called Cham Pan, or help to decide. Under these are men called Cham Wi,
or help to discuss, and again under these are a number of secretaries.
But alas! in the present Oriental imbroglio (although Korea is nominally
the _causa belli_), the Korean War Department is playing a part so
insignificant, that we do not even hear of it.
The Korean army, as estimated by the Korean War Office, represents a
goodly number of men, and European writers of note have put down the
militant force of the country at a million and more. But even,
numerically speaking, this statement should be taken with a whole cellar
of salt, and martially speaking, exaggeration could not decently go
farther. The Korean army is but the shadow of an army, the harmless
phantom of a force that once drove the invading Japanese armies from the
shores of Chosön, and made the warriors of an American iron-clad pay
dearly for their intrusion.
But if the prowess of the Korean soldiery is gone, its picturesqueness
remains, and in its very inefficiency it speaks to us of the days—now
probably gone for ever—when weapons at which we smile to-day were
formidable indeed, the days when warfare which would excite the scorn of
our school-boys was warfare grim and earnest. And as we watch that
martial mockery—the army of Korea—we may realize that the yesterday of
Chosön was midway between the copiously equipped to-day of our modern,
European civilization, and that primeval time when there were no
implements, the days when women used thorns for needles, and men used
thorns for fish-hooks.
Korea deals with crime as rigorously as China does, but her methods of
punishment—especially the most cruel ones—have been borrowed from
Japan, or borrowed by Japan from Korea. In China, Japan, and Korea we
constantly find the same ideas, the same methods of life, with only the
slightest local differentiations, but more often than not it is
impossible for the most erudite scholar—not to mention the casual
European wayfarer—to determine in which of the three countries the
common idea or custom was born.
Some of the customary Korean punishments would make, I think, too
painful reading: this, I am sure, they would make too painful writing. I
must refer the reader who is curious to Hamel; for Hamel details them
with considerable gusto, even the most horrible: the punishment that
used to be meted out to Korean murderers. Happily, even in Korea, time
cures some ills, and of later years, particularly under the rule of the
present king, a good, wise, and gentle man, the Korean criminal code, if
it has not assimilated some fraction of that quality which “is an
attribute to God Himself,” has at least ceased to be the thing of horrid
cruelty it was; and if the laws of Chosön are more pitiless than the
laws of Draco, still they disgrace the humanity of Korea far less than
they did two thousand years ago. I know of no other respect in which
Korea has changed more.
Here are two examples of Korean law—two laws that for centuries were so
rigidly carried out that their enforcement became national customs.
“If a woman murder her husband she is to be taken to a highway on which
many people pass, and she shall be buried up to her shoulders. Beside
her an axe shall be laid, and with that axe all who pass by her, unless
they be noble, must strike her on the head, and this none, save the
noble, must fail to do, until she be dead.”
There are no bankruptcy courts in Korea. A Korean who once contracts a
debt can never escape from it. Here is the law:—
“One who owes money, and at the promised time fails to pay it, whether
the debt be to his Majesty the King, or to another person or other
persons, shall be beaten two or three times a month on the shin, and
this punishment shall be continued until the debt is discharged. If a
man die in debt, his relations must pay that debt, or be beaten two or
three times a month on the shin.”
This old law, slightly modified, still holds in Korea, I believe. Of
course it works both ways. It makes it very hard for the debtor to
escape payment; it makes it almost impossible for the creditor to lose
any part of his substance.