SÖUL FROM THE CITY WALL.
Seen from the wall (a most wonderful wall which describes a circuit of
9975 paces), Söul looks like a bed of thriving mushrooms, mushrooms
planted between the surrounding high hills, but grown in many places up
on to those hills. Yes; they look very much like mushrooms, those low,
one-storied houses, with their sloping, Chinese-like roofs, some tiled,
some turfed, and all neutral tinted. The houses of Söul are as alike as
mushrooms are, and as thickly planted.
The wall defines the city with a strange outline. Now it dips into the
tiny valley, now it pulls itself up on to the top of some high hill.
Korea is a most distressingly hilly country. If you elect to go for a
decent stroll, it is a matter of climbing a hill, and when you reach the
summit of the hill it is a matter of tumbling down the other side, to
scramble up another hill, and your path will be just such a succession
of ups and downs, even though you go north until you reach the “Ever
White Mountain,” and, in reaching it, reach the “River of the Duck’s
Green,” which, flowing towards the south, divides Korea from China;
reach the Tu Man Kang which, flowing towards the north-east, divides
Korea from the territory of the Tsar. Up and down it will be, even
though you push east until you reach the purple “Sea of Japan.” Still up
and down you will find it, although you go as far south, or as far west,
as Korea goes, and find yourself on the shores of China’s “Yellow Sea.”
Korea looks like a stage storm-at-sea. Its hills are so many that they
lose their grandeur, as individuality is lost in multitude.
But we must get back on to the wall, the wall of Söul.
The wall, which is purely Chinese in character, is punctuated by eight
gates. All of them have significant names. Several of them are strictly
reserved for very special purposes. The south gate is called “The Gate
of Everlasting Ceremony.” The west gate is “The Gate of Amiability.” The
east gate is “The Gate of Elevated Humanity.” The south-west gate is
“The Gate of the Criminals.” The majority of Korean criminals, who are
condemned to death, are beheaded. But this may not be within the city
walls. The procession of the man about to die passes through the
“Criminals’ Gate.” And that gate is never opened save on the occasions
of such gruesome functions. The south-east gate is “The Gate of the
Dead.” No corpse is interred within the city walls. And no corpse, save
only the corpse of a king, may pass through any other gate than the
“Gate of the Dead.” Any corpse (but the monarch’s) would defile the
gates through which Söul’s humanity is wont to ebb and flow. The “Gate
of the Dead” has another name. It is often called “The Gate of
Drainage,” for by its side the River Hanyang flows out to the Yellow
Sea. The northern gate stands high upon the summit of a peculiarly
shaped hill, which the French missionaries aptly named “Cock’s Comb.”
This gate is never opened save to facilitate the flight of a Korean
king.
The gates differ greatly in size, which adds to the unusual
picturesqueness of the wall.
The Cock’s Comb, up to whose highest ridge the wall of Söul runs, is at
once the most distinct and the most interesting bit of Söul’s
background. It is, among the mountains of the world, so uniquely shaped
that no one who has ever seen it can ever forget it. And it is the altar
of the most sacred of Korea’s national ceremonies.
Although a large portion of this hill is enclosed within Söul’s wall,
Söul itself, climbing city though it is, has not climbed far up the
hill. The summit of the Cock’s Comb is an uninhabited, high suburb of
Söul.
When the night has well fallen, when the “white” clad masses in Söul’s
market-place can no longer see the outlines of the hill, four great
lights break out upon that hill’s crest. To all in Söul those lights cry
out, “All’s well. In all Korea, all’s well.” Each light represents two
of the eight provinces into which Korea is divided. If in any Korean
province or county there is war, or threatening of war, a supplementary
light burns near the light that indicates that province. If the
war-light is placed on the left, war or invasion threatens one province,
if the war light is placed on the right, war or worse threatens another
province.
The bonfire signal service of the Korean War Office is complicated and
elaborated. One extra fire means that an enemy has been sighted off some
part of the sandy Korean coast. Two lights mean that the enemy have
landed; three mean the enemy are moving inland; four mean they are
pushing toward the capital; five—! Well, when five such fires flare up,
the citizens of Söul can only pray—or run and drown themselves in the
rapid rushing river that leaves Söul as the condemned leave it—because
those five bonfires mean that the enemy draw near the city’s gate.
Telegraphy—as Edison knows it—is unknown in Korea. But the Koreans
have a weird but vivid telegraphy of their own.
At short intervals upon their rocky, sandy coast huge cranes are built.
Each crane is tended by a trusted official of the Korean king. When dusk
begins to fall, the attendant of the crane lights in it a great bonfire,
if all is well. That bonfire’s light is seen by the attendant of a fire
some miles more inland—some miles nearer Söul—and so from every pace
of Korea’s boundary, the faithful servants of Korea’s king flash to
Korea’s capital the message, “All is well.” A hundred lines of
message-light meet upon that queer hill, the “Cock’s Comb” of Söul.
Many a night of late, unless the wires have lied to us, there must have
been a great confusion among those signal fires, and vast confusion in
poor frightened Söul.
A certain light will mean “China has pounced upon us.” Another light
will mean “Japan has stabbed us.” And a score of other lights will mean
a score of dire facts which only the heads of the Korean War Department
could translate for us, if they would.
Curfew shall not ring to-night. “Ah! how often,” said Helen, when this
Chino-Japanese war was first declared, “I have seen those four placid
bonfires tell the gentle Koreans that no Lion of England nor of India
had roared, that no Eagle of Russia (not to needlessly mention Austria
or America) had swooped, no dragon of China or Japan had belched
destroying fire! To-night, if those fires burn, they flash a message of
dire distress to Söul’s shrinking, blue-robed men, and hidden, unseen
women, unless happily they are unconscious what an excuse for war their
isolated peninsula has become.”
Poor Korea! what has she done? Nothing unwomanly. But womanlike she has
been unfortunately situated.
China has just suffered a plague.
Japan has just suffered an earthquake. For very many years China and
Japan have thought it expedient to soothe national heart-ache (resultant
upon national disaster) with the potent mustard plaster of war.
The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The
Koreans hate the Japanese and the Chinese, and are hated by both. An
Oriental imbroglio is not hard of conception.
The worst of it is that Korea seems doomed. And Korea, with all her
faults, is one of the few remaining widows of the dead (but not
childless) old world. And she, good purdah-woman that she is, is lying
down with considerable wifely dignity upon the funeral pile, which
civilization has lit to cremate the false, old notions of the past.
One who has lived in Korea can but think it rather a pity that Korea
should cease to be, or be too much remodelled, whoever’s in the
wrong—Japan or China.
Nature has found Korea so nearly perfect, that it seems almost profane
for man (or those combinations of men called nations) to find fault with
her. In Korea there are snows that never melt. In Korea there are
flowers that never cease to bloom.
The land of the morning calm! Poor little peninsula (only twice and a
half the size of Scotland), the soft, rosy Oriental haze is going to be
ripped off of you, and in the cold, clear, brilliant light of
Westernized day you are going to fade away into nothing! But before you
quite fade away let us have a peep at you. You are superior in many ways
to our land. For one thing, you begin your year more sensibly. You ring
the new year in with the birth of the year’s first flowers.
The Korean new year is a month later than ours. The snow is still upon
the ground there in February. But even so, the fruitless plum-trees open
their myriad buds, and long before the cold snow has melted from their
feet, their heads are covered with a warm, tinted, perfumed snow of
bloom. A few weeks later, and the cherry trees are white with a
magnificence of blossom that nowhere in this world cherry-trees can
excel, not even in Japan. Before the cherry blossoms fall the wisteria
breaks into ten thousand clusters of purple loveliness. Then the peonies
flaunt in every fertile and half fertile spot, and mock, like the
impudents they are, the splendour of the sun. But their proud heads fall
ere long, and all Korea is lovely with the iris.
Autumn is the most delightful of the Korean seasons. It is matchless.
Not even on the banks of the Hudson does summer die so splendid a death
as she dies in Korea. The Korean summer, superb and perfumed as she is,
is very like that false Cawdor of whom Malcolm said to Duncan:
“Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.”
Winter in Korea is unqualifiedly cold. The hills are white with snow,
and the rivers are grey with ice. The people huddle into their
over-heated houses. And I believe that the entire nation does not own a
pair of skates. The only sleds, or sleighs, belong to the fishermen who
crack through the ice to catch their finny prey. The fisherman sits upon
the sled as he plies his noiseless industry, and when his day’s work is
done he piles his scaly plunder upon the sled, and so drags it to the
market-place.
But it was summer when Helen first stood upon the wall of Söul. A
parapet crenulates the outer edge of that old wall. It is broken with
loop-holes, and notched with embrasures. And every few yards its broken
outline is broken again by the overhanging branches of flower-heavy
trees, or by the bright blossoms of some vine that has found root in one
of the old wall’s mossy niches.
And within this picturesque wall huddles superlatively picturesque Söul.
The royal palaces are noticeable for their gardens and their size. Big
as they are, and they are very big, they are none too big for the vast
harem that forms a most important part of their household.
Far from the houses of the king stands “The South set Apart Palace.” The
resident Chinese Commissioner lived there. In front of this building
stands one of Söul’s two remarkable “Red Arrow Gates.” Near is the
United States legation.
One of the most interesting features of Söul is its little Japanese
colony. The following description of it was written a few years ago by a
talented American, who was for some months the guest of the king of
Korea:—
“With its back up against the South Mountain stands the building of the
Japanese legation. From a flagstaff above it floats the Japanese ensign,
the red ball on the white field. Here lives the little Japanese colony,
a true bit of transplanted Japan, all alive in an alien land. Some of
the legation have with them their wives, and many children play about
the courtyard.
“It has its own force of soldiers, kept constantly recruited from home;
its doctors, its policeman—all it can need to be sufficient to itself.
The minister is as much a governor as a representative at a foreign
court. Day and night the soldiers stand before the gateway of the
legation building and change guard as if it were a camp; and whenever
the minister goes abroad a certain number of them accompany him as
escort. The soldiers are needed. Twice the legation has had to fight its
way from Söul to the sea.”
In Korea when one dynasty gives way to another (and that is a fairly
frequent occurrence) the newly-throned dynasty abandons the capital of
the old dynasty and establishes for itself, and its heirs for ever, a
new capital. So was Söul established five hundred years ago by the first
crowned ancestor of Korea’s present king.
The city wall was thrown about a very considerable area. And according
to rigid Korean custom, that wall must for ever mark the city’s limits.
But the actual city, the city of the people, has surged far beyond that
wall.
One class of Söul’s inhabitants—a most important class—lives almost in
its entirety outside the city’s gates. The fishermen of Söul live in the
river suburbs. There they ply their trade winter and summer; and, I
might almost add, day and night. They live upon the banks of the river
from which they draw their livelihood. Their quaint low houses fringe
the edge of the land, and their boats fringe the edge of the water.
Fish and rice are the staple foods of the Koreans, save in the north of
the peninsula, where rice will not grow. There fish and millet are the
general food. Fish is the great staple throughout the country. And no
class of men, perhaps, are so important to Söul’s general welfare as the
fishermen who live just beyond the walls, and daily come into her
market-places to sell their slippery spoil. Meat is scarcely eaten in
Korea. Korea is a land of fearful famines. The rice fails. The millet
fails. Everything fails except the fish. Yes; I think that I may
unqualifiedly say, that to Korea no class is so important as the
fishermen—to the very life of the Koreans no class so necessary, so
indispensable.
The women of position are carried through the streets in the closest of
closed palanquins. A woman of the middle class, if obliged to walk
abroad, invariably wraps an ordinary dress about her head and shoulders.
And very far from seductive does she look. The long loose sleeves of the
dress hang from her head like great, ungainly, shapeless ears. And the
folds of the ungraceful garment are held tightly in front of her face by
one determined hand—a hand that never does, and for nothing in the
world would, relax its hold. The women of the very poorest class, the
hewers of wood and drawers of water, are indeed compelled to, with
uncovered heads and unveiled faces, go about the streets. But they move
rapidly. They look neither to the right nor to the left. And they slink
by men with downcast eyes. And men never look at them. Indeed a Korean
gentleman will not, by one single glance, betray that he is aware of the
presence in public of any woman; unless indeed she belong to the geisha,
or “accomplished class.” The geisha girls go about the streets frankly,
and unhiddenly enough. But they are a class aside. In Korean wifehood,
in Korean motherhood, they have no part.
The Koreans take a great deal of medicine—those that can afford it—and
it never seems to do them any harm. For the rich, pills of incredible
size are richly gilded and placed in elaborate boxes. The poor take
smaller pills ungilded, and omit the boxes altogether. Very many Koreans
take medicine at regular intervals without the slightest reference to
their then state of health. These systematic persons do not take
medicine when they are ill, unless the illness has the good taste to
fall upon their duly appointed medicine-day. This is how an old Korean
explained to Helen the philosophy of the medicine-regularly-taken
theory. “On every seventh day you rest whether you are tired or not. And
on all the other days you work, whether you are tired or not. So do we
take our medicine, once in so many weeks, because it is well to observe
system: to be regular.” The old man’s eye twinkled finely as he spoke,
as who should say, “What are you answered now?” And Helen rather felt
that he had her on the hip.
Mr. Percival Lowell says: “In Korea, medicine is an heirloom from hoary
antiquity. An apothecary’s shop there needs not to adorn itself with
external and irrelevant charms, like the beautiful purple jar that so
deceived poor little Rosamond. Upon eminent respectability alone it
bases its claim to custom; and its traditions are certainly convincing.
Painted upon suitable spots along the front of the building runs the
legend, ‘_Sin Nong Yu Öp_,’—that is, ‘the profession left behind by Sin
Nong.’ This eminent person was a ‘spiritual agriculturist,’ the
discoverer of both agriculture and medicine; and the pills sold in the
shops to-day are supposed to be the counterparts of those invented by
him. Worthily to render the legend, we ought to translate it, ‘Jones,
successor to Æsculapius’.”
There are two distinct Koreas, distinct though having much in common:
the Korea of the upper classes, and the Korea of the populace. We have
of late been hearing quite a good deal about the history of Korea, about
the topography of Korea, about the King of Korea, and about the Korea of
the upper classes. But about the lower classes we have heard
comparatively little. The literature at our disposal concerning Korea is
more than meagre. Very little of this literature deals with the
people—the common people of Korea.
The streets of Söul—the streets upon whose edges the people of Söul
live, the streets through which the people of Söul surge—are very wide.
Most of them have, however, the appearance of being very narrow. Wide
streets seem to the Korean mind unnecessary luxuries. The people of Söul
utilize the streets of their city by erecting temporary booths outside
their houses, and beyond the booths they spread their trays and mats of
merchandise. Inch by inch the street disappears beneath the extemporized
shops of the people, until at last just enough room is left for the
interminable procession of humanity to squeeze through. This
encroachment is taken good-naturedly enough by everyone. The people
positively pick their slow way between trays of nuts and mats of grain,
booths of hats and sleds of fish. When the king wishes to take a
promenade or ride through any of the streets of Söul, all the booths are
taken from those streets, and with the trays and mats are tucked out of
sight. The streets are swept and garnished. The next day, or, if it is
not too late, when his Majesty has returned to his palace, the booths
are re-erected, the mats and trays are re-arranged, and the every-day
life of Söul goes placidly on until the sovereign elects to take another
airing.
It is a common blunder to speak of the people of Söul as wearing white
garments; a blunder, or rather a laziness to which I must plead guilty.
Korean garments are invariably of a peculiar, delicate blue, unless the
wearer be a person of much importance: then, indeed, may his garments
brighten into deeper blue, flush into soft and lovely pink, or, if they
chance to be the vestments of the King, blush into proudest scarlet.
Seen from a distance an ordinary Korean appears to be clad in white, the
blue of his dress is so pale; and so, many careless writers—I among
them—have made the mistake of saying that white is the hue of the dress
of the Korean populace.
The Koreans have a passion for rugged scenery—but then, indeed, they
have a passion for every manner of scenery. They call the rocks the
earth’s bones. They call the soil the earth’s flesh. The flowers and the
trees they call her hair. There is no more rugged bit of scenery near
Söul than the Valley of Clothes; and in it stands a picturesque little
temple, which was built, so the Koreans say, to commemorate a battle,
that they once won. It is a very beautiful specimen of Korean
architecture. Indeed, I know no lovelier example of what the
architecture of older Korea has become under the influence of Chinese
thought and Chinese art.
Through the Valley of Clothes runs a long, clear stream, on whose banks
are innumerable large, smooth-topped rocks. Altogether it is an
admirable place for Oriental washing. In the winter every Korean garment
is ripped into all its component parts before it is washed. In summer
the garments are washed each in its entirety. This ripping up of the
clothes before washing them is one of the comparatively few customs
which the Koreans have borrowed from the Japanese. In Japan, however,
all clothes about to be washed are taken to pieces, whether it be winter
or summer.
Nothing could well be simpler than the _modus operandi_ of the Korean
washermen and washerwomen. The clothes are well soaked in the stream.
Then they are well beaten with smooth, heavy, edgeless sticks. Then they
are spread upon the ground or on the rocks, as much in the sun as
possible, and left to dry indefinitely. No one ever steals them! Think
of it! And even the gentle winds of the Asiatic heavens scorn to blow
them away. If there seems the slightest chance of such a catastrophe, a
few smooth pebbles are laid upon the garments’ edges.
The qualities which the upper classes of Korea have most in common
are—love of art and literature, reverence for law, kindness of
disposition, and love of nature. The point upon which they most differ
is religion. Korea is really a country without religion. The upper
classes are intellectual to a degree, but their intellectuality is
invariably of the agnostic order. Rationalism and agnosticism are the
only recognized religions in upper Korean circles.
The Korean populace also profess agnosticism, but do not practise it; at
least they do not practise rationalism; for if they believe in no gods,
most of them believe in countless devils.
The sacred devil-trees are supposed to be (after the blind) most
efficacious in ridding the land of the spirits of evil. A writer—one of
the best writers on Korea—thus describes a devil-tree upon which he
came one bleak autumn day:—“An ancient tree, around whose base lies
piled a heap of stones. The tree is sacred; superstition has preserved
it, where most of its fellows have gone to feed the subterranean ovens.
It is not usually very large, nor does it look extremely venerable, so
that it is at least open to suspicion that its sanctity is an honour
which is passed along from oak to acorn or from pine to seed: however,
it is usually a fair specimen of a tree, and, where there are few others
to vie with it, comes out finely by comparison: otherwise there is
nothing distinctive about the tree, except that it exists,—that it is
not cut down and borne off to the city on the back of some bull, there
to vanish in the smoke. On its branches hang, commonly, a few old rags,
evidently once of brilliantly-coloured cloth; they look to be shreds of
the garments of such unwary travellers as approached too close; but a
nearer inspection shows them to be tied on designedly. The heap of small
stones piled around the base of the tree gives one the impression at
first that the road is about to undergo repairs, which it sadly needs,
and that the stones have been collected for the purpose. This, however,
is a fallacy: no Korean road ever is repaired.
“The spot is called Son Wang Don, or ‘The Home of the King of the
Fairies.’ The stones help to form what was once a fairy temple, now a
devil-jail; and the strips of cloth are pieces of garments from those
who believed themselves possessed of devils, or feared lest they might
become so. A man caught by an evil spirit exiles a part of his clothing
to the branches of one of these trees, so as to delude the demon into
attaching there.”
We have tried to peep at Söul—the Söul of the people. But not all Söul
is plebeian. It has a most decided aristocracy, both architectural and
human.
Söul has no temples. None may be built within her walls. Of all
civilized countries, Korea is the one country without a religion.
Religion or its analogous superstitions are there, of course; but that
religion is in Korea, not part of Korea. In Korea, religion is under a
ban of official discountenance, or national discredence. Such temples as
do exist in Korea dwell (like architectural lepers) without the city’s
walls. But Söul has her official buildings, and the dwellings of her
rich. Above all, she has her palaces.
But hold! there is one temple within the walls of Söul; but it is there
on sufferance, there against the law. And it is just inside the walls.
It is on a high, lonely mountain place, and far remote from the actual
city—the throbbing, breathing, human city.
And Söul has also what was once a temple. It is as interesting as
anything in Söul. In the first place it is the only pagoda in
Söul—almost, if not quite, the only pagoda in Korea. In the second
place, it is extremely beautiful. In the third place, it, more than any
building I know, accents the decay of all things human, even of (those
perhaps greatest of all human things) great thought-systems.
Yesterday—the yesterday of five hundred years ago—this, Söul’s one
pagoda, was a Buddhist temple. To-day it is a neglected, unconsidered,
tolerated, rather than admired, ornament, in a middle-class Korean’s
back yard.
The pagoda of Söul owes its solitary, but not honoured, old age to the
fact that unlike most pagodas of its period and kind, it was built of
stone. It has eight stories (representative of eight stages or degrees
of the Buddhist heaven); but it is entirely composed of two pieces of
stone. In idea it is Chinese; but its form is a modification or a local
adaptation of its idea; and it is peculiarly rich in most exquisite
Korean carvings.
After the pagoda—perhaps before the pagoda—there are in Söul three
buildings, more than any others indicative of the difference between
Söul the old and conservative, and Söul the new and iconoclastic—I mean
the Foreign Office, the War Office, and the Home Office. They are all of
recent date, all concessions to a cosmopolitanism, with which Korea, the
old, had no sympathy, and into which (though ever so little) Korea, the
new, has been forced by that most brutal of all forces—the force of
circumstances—forced by the irresistible might of the gigantic
disproportion, to her own, of alien numbers. A few years ago Korea had
never had a Foreign Office, because Korea had never deigned to be
cognizant of the existence of any foreign power. True she has, for many
years, paid a lazy tribute to China, and plied a lazier trade with
Japan; but until a short time ago she has been essentially, and indeed,
a hermit nation. Yes, it was verily the land of the morning calm. No
_réveil_ broke its early morning slumber; no drum woke its night to
alarm. It was a heaven of earthly peace, a heaven in which there was
neither fighting nor dying in battle.
But that is changed. So far as outside turmoil can ripple the placid
waters, upon which the lotus-flower blooms and bends, in a luxury of
perfumed sleep, as it does nowhere else—the lakes and ponds of Korea!
Korea admitted, gracefully, if enforcedly, foreigners to her
shores—admitted them for purposes of commerce and of peace. Alas, she
has had to recognize them as ambassadors of war, introducers of
bloodshed.
Korea’s army has for many years been very purely artistic, ornamentally
belligerent—nothing more. It has been found impossible to evolve it
into anything more brutal, nineteenth-centuryish, effective, and
up-to-date.
Korea’s War Office is an unhappy, if seemingly necessary, farce. It has
existed for centuries. But only the conjunction, or rather the
juxtaposition, of Korea with other nations has made it ridiculous.
Korea’s Home Office sprang up—as it must have done in any
self-respecting soil—as soon as a Foreign Office became a regrettable
_fait accompli_. Until Korea had a Foreign Office, Korea’s War Office
was by no means the sad burlesque that it is now. Until Korea had a
Foreign Office, she had not the filmiest need of a Home Office. Korea
was all in all to Korea. Every effort of her being was undivertedly
directed to the welfare of herself and her own. She had no need of, no
excuse for, a Home Office, because all was home, everything for home.
But when she was physically forced to admit the existence of other
peoples, she was morally forced to insistently emphasize the existence
of her own people.
Söul is rich in palaces; very rich in their quality, if not in their
quantity. Each palace is, like every considerable Korean dwelling, a
collection of houses. And every Korean palace—like every Korean
dwelling of any distinction—is more remarkable, more admirable because
of its surroundings—its garden—than because of itself.
There are four nations pre-eminent for landscape gardening—pre-eminent
in this order:—the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Italians.
Korea is, by her climate, held behind Japan in landscape gardening. Most
of the flowers that in Japan bloom all the year round, can in Korea only
bloom for a few months.
But in one phase of landscape gardening—(the art of bringing Nature
into a garden, and there ornamenting her, without insulting her)—the
Koreans quite equal the Japanese.
Water, in the form of miniature lakes, is the crown—the centre of every
far-eastern garden. Nowhere in the world are artificial lakes or ponds
so perfected, so ablush with bloom, so aquiver with perfume, as they are
in Korea. Sometimes they dot great green swards. Sometimes they softly
ripple against the very foundations of a palace; oftenest they are the
one blessed detail of a middle-class man’s dwelling. But they are almost
always emerald with lotus-leaves, and in season, brilliant with the
bloom, and fragrant with the breath of the lotus-flowers. Marble bridges
span them, if they are in the king’s gardens; a unique island centres
them wherever they are—a wee island that is shaded by its one drooping
tree. There the master of the garden spends the long summer days,
basking in the surrounding beauty, smoking, drinking tea, and fishing.