KOREAN ARCHITECTURE.
What her dress is to woman, his dwelling is to man. I am speaking, of
course, of average man and of average woman. What she wears indicates
what she is, and is the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most
common expression of her individuality, and of her character. She, her
very self, peeps from beneath the laces at her neck. The house in which
he lives shelters his women and his young; the buildings which he
erects, or helps to erect, indicate who and what he is, and are the most
natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of his
individuality, and of his character; and we may see him as he really is,
in his roof, his door-step, and, in brief, in the exterior and the
interior of his home.
It is this, its revelation of mankind, which makes architecture so
intensely interesting a study, the most interesting, I often think, of
all the studies of the inanimate. Not for their grace of outline, not
for their beauty of colour, not for their artistic consistency, not for
their happy placement, are the great buildings of this world supremely
interesting to us; but for the glimpses they give us into the souls, the
lives of the men who have reared them.
Of more recent years records have been made and preserved of the doings
of most of the civilized peoples, but, beyond a doubt, many such records
made in olden times have been irretrievably lost, and many a page of
history—a page clear and convincing to us to-day—would have been lost
to us for ever were it not for the silent but indisputable testimony of
old buildings: ruined houses, scraps of temples, broken bridges,
crumbling towers, and grotesque caves.
It is impossible to speak of Korean architecture without speaking of
Chinese architecture, and of Japanese architecture. And it is so
impossible to separate the architecture of Korea from either the
architecture of China, or the architecture of Japan, that one has a very
convenient excuse for writing of the architecture of Korea as it visibly
is, and for writing little or nothing of what it means. Korean
architecture, in all its best phases, is purely Tartar. Chinese
architecture is largely Tartar. But China, in architecture, as in
ethics, and as in sociology, is at heart more or less Mongolian. China
has been ridden under, not exterminated, by Tartar supremacy. Japanese
architecture is Tartar, but it is very many other things, and the
charitable mantle of Japanese art is so all-covering, and her artists
have graciously adopted the art-methods of so many different peoples,
that it is quite impossible to say whether Tartar influence is the
parent or the powerful adopted child of Japanese art.
For convenience, I will divide Korean architecture into the architecture
of the poor and the architecture of the rich. Korean hovels are like
most other hovels. Extreme poverty goes rather naked the wide world
over, and the Korean poor live in houses of mud, roofed with leaves; and
if the leaves and the mud give out they have holes in their roofs
instead of chimneys.
Korean hovels, Korean houses, and Korean palaces have many
characteristics in common, characteristics which are climatic and
racial. Let us peep first at the homes of the Korean poor. The home of a
poor Korean, dwell he in a Korean city, dwell he in a Korean village, or
dwell he desperately perched upon the rocky side of a Korean mountain,
is a house of one story—that is, of one story in which people live.
Above is a thin sort of attic in which grains and other provisions are
stored, and beneath is a fairly thick sort of basement in which heat is
bred, from which heat is generated. Like all other Korean houses the
interior of this house is lined with paper. It has a paper roof, paper
floor, or floor-cloth, and paper walls. The walls slide back or lift up,
or are in one of several other ways got rid of, in the summer; but they
are walls for all that, no less walls because they are also windows and
doors. Paper is the chief feature of every ordinary Korean house; and to
say that is to say a great deal for paper: because the cold of a Korean
winter is excessive, is far beyond the cold of the winter in which I
write. In every Korean house, be it the house of prince or of pauper,
there is what seems to be at first sight, to European eyes, a paucity of
furniture. There is nothing more significant of the difference between
the simple artisticness of the East and the elaborate inartisticness of
the West than the way in which Western rooms are crowded with inanimate
unnecessaries, and the way in which Eastern rooms are sparsely
supplemented with inanimate necessaries.
I had afternoon tea yesterday with a friend who loves me so well, and
whom I so well love, that I am sure she will forgive me for drawing, to
her disadvantage, a comparison between her drawing-room and the
drawing-room of a Korean man, or the boudoir of a Korean woman, I never
go into my friend’s drawing-room without feeling a thrill of admiration
for the nice way in which her butler avoids knocking over one of a pair
of priceless vases, which were stolen from Pekin about the time that Sir
Harry Parkes and Sir Henry Loch were rather inconveniently imprisoned
there. I creep in, as gracefully as I can, between the butler and the
two priceless blue things. I cross a bit to the left, to avoid a
malachite table crowded with silver pigs (some of them so little that
they would look lost on a threepenny-bit, some of them a foot or more
long); then I cross to the right, to avoid a wonderful teak-wood cabinet
of no particular style, that looks very staggery beneath a multitude of
tea-pots—tea-pots most of which are not interesting in themselves, and
none of which are interesting in their common conglomeration. Then I
almost trip over the wool of a slaughtered Persian lamb, and I just save
myself from tumbling into a Louis Quinze chair, and so I work my way
through the ages—through the races, until I reach my hostess, who, like
myself and everyone else there, is in nice, new, nineteenth-century,
ugly raiment. There may be space in this London drawing-room for her,
for me, and for all the other ordinary folk which are gathered together,
because we are very much alike, but there is not room for all the
chairs, and the tables, and half the other pieces of furniture, because
no two of them are alike. We humans are used to fashionable crushes, but
I think it is a shame not to give the furniture room to breathe.
Let us peep into a Korean drawing-room. A long cool place. There is a
padded quilt, probably covered with silk, in one corner. The host sits
on that, and any guests that come to him. If the weather be cold, and
the host be rich, a brazier of charcoal usually stands in another
corner. There is a small table, or perhaps there are two, with writing
and painting materials. Unless the house be one of dire poverty there
is, at one end of the room, a chest of drawers or a buffet, or a
sideboard, or something of that sort: a huge piece of furniture made out
of more or less costly woods, fitted with drawers and doors, and
embellished with metal handles. The handles, or the clasps, or the locks
are made in the shape of butterflies, for the butterfly is a very
favourite expression of Korean artistic outline. When it is time to eat,
a table is brought in for the host and one for each of his guests—a
table a foot or two high, and just about as square as high. Upon this,
small dishes of food are placed, and small but often-filled cups of
drink. When the meal is over, the tables and the dishes and the remnants
of meat and of liquor (but there are not often many of either) are taken
away.
In an ordinary Korean house there is little or no other furniture. A
screen perhaps, precious for its decorations, and for the carvings of
its frame, and three or four pictures—pictures distinctly Korean, but I
assure you by no means inartistic. I can think of nothing else that
ordinarily furnishes a Korean room, except the quaintly clad people, and
the sunshine that comes in almost iridescently—it shines through
windows of so many different colours: windows of paper. The colour of
the light depends entirely upon the colour and the texture of the paper
through which it comes. A Korean bed-room is very like a Korean
sitting-room. The quilt upon which a Korean sits through the day is the
same as, or very like, the quilt upon which he sleeps at night. Tiger
skins are also greatly used for floor rugs and bed coverings.
To stray a moment from the exact subject of architecture. The Koreans
wear, I believe, very much the same clothes in day as in night. Indeed,
I believe that the Korean changes his or her garments for five reasons
only: to eat, to put on new clothes when the old ones are worn out, to
have the clothes she or he is wearing washed, to put on his or her best
clothes in celebration of some festival or other ceremonial, and to go
into mourning. Firstly and foremost, a Korean undresses to eat. They are
not civilized enough, the people of Chosön, to array themselves for
feeding time. They do not deny their relationship with other hungry
mammals. When they are hungry they eat. When they are thirsty they
drink, and to be truthful, their hunger and their thirst is usually
enormous, and of long endurance. They are neither ashamed of their
hunger nor of their thirst, for they appease neither before going to a
feast. Indeed, to gorge oneself is considered the acme of Korean
elegance, and it is the one elegance in which all Koreans, rich and
poor, young and old, male and female, prince and peasant, indulge
themselves on every possible or semi-possible occasion. And that they
may eat the utmost possible morsel, they loosen their garments before
they sit down to the feast.
But I was speaking of the houses of the Korean poor. Perhaps it is
rather inappropriate to speak of banquets in connection with them; yet,
except among the most abjectly poverty-stricken, banquets are held
sometimes (at marriages, on birthdays, on feast-days, and on lucky-days,
if possible) in every Korean home.
Only Koreans of certain position are allowed to cover their roofs with
tiles. A peasant’s roof is almost invariably thatched with straw or
grass. Every Korean house contains but one room, or, to state it
differently, every Korean room, excepting for a door opening into
another house or room, is in itself a complete house. It has a roof of
its own, and four walls of its own, and is in every way independent of
any other rooms or houses, which may form other parts of its owner’s
dwelling. When inside a Korean dwelling one may fancy oneself in a suite
of apartments opening into each other, that is, of course, if a certain
number of the paper walls are opened. From the outside of a Korean
dwelling, one seems to be looking at a collection of more or less
closely built, but entirely independent houses. The position of woman
being what it is, even the poorest Korean house has, or ought to have,
more than one room. This peculiarity; this similarity between exteriors
and interiors, makes Korean architecture uniquely picturesque, and
public buildings and the dwellings of the rich supremely so. Indeed, the
better class of houses often have not only a roof to each room, but two
or three roofs to each room. Now a Korean roof, to my mind, is the most
beautiful roof in the world. It is Chinese in general character, and
slopes from the ridge pole in graceful concave curves. Except in the
houses of the poor it is tiled. The tiles overlap each other, are
unevenly curved, and rest upon a foundation of earth. In the course of a
few seasons a Korean roof breaks into bud, and into blossom. Perhaps a
great patch of odd blue flowers covers one-half of the roof, perfuming
the air for many yards. Perhaps quaint crimson tulips lift their happy
heads between every few tiles. Wild pinks, forget-me-nots, and orchids
mingle on one roof, and another roof glitters in the sunshine like gold
because it is the bed of a thousand yellow sun-lilies.
Imagine an old Korean monastery which is backgrounded by hills, some of
them covered with verdure, and some of them naked rocks, rocks that are
broken here and there by patches and cracks of hardy flowers. In the
distance, we hear the melodious drip of some gentle waterfall. Nearer we
hear the full-throated soprano of the larks. And a dozen other birds,
green and blue, and purple, and grey with breasts of yellow, fly from
their nests in the teak-wood trees, to drink the sweet blood of the
blooming iris. The monastery has a score or more of houses, each
rambling from some other. The monastery is low and porticoed, and the
doors, which are also its windows and its walls, are slid back in the
grooves, and our view of each of the many interiors is only obstructed
by the eight square posts which are the only permanent walls of a Korean
building. Inside we catch a glimmer of metallic Buddhas, and hear the
careless Sanskrit sing-song of the monks. In the courtyard stands a
great brass Korean bell or gong, and the stick with which it is struck
lies beside it. A huge glimmering gong is this; to call the brethren to
prayer and to rice. Around the edges of the monastery’s roofs runs a
peculiar shell-like beading, which is a distinction of a sacred or
religious edifice. The roof was a dark brown once, but the tiles, those
that have not been broken away, have grown purple and blue, softened by
time and blighted by weather. Where the tiles have crumbled away, and
over many tiles that have not yet succumbed to decay, honey-suckles,
yellow and buff, and white and rose-coloured, are creeping and tangling
themselves with great, green ropes that are heavy with gourds—gourds
that are little and pale, and gourds that are big and golden and
speckled.
Or let us look at some one of the king’s many houses. Its round columns
and its square rafters are lacquered and crimson. Its paper walls are as
fine and as polished as silk. Innumerable steps lead up to it, and it is
almost heavy with carvings. Three roofs shelter it, and look like a tent
with an awning above an awning. Each roof is a bed of flowers that are
brilliant and fragrant—flowers among which birds that are splendid of
feather, and sweet of throat, make their nests. But the birds and the
flowers are not the only denizens of the typical Korean roof. Effigies
in mud, in bronze, or in wood squat on the ridges. They look a little
like monkeys, very little like men, and some of them very much like
pigs. They are absurd and impossible to a degree, and yet, for all that,
they are rather life-like, and, on a weird moonlight night, decidedly
startling. These are the protectors of the houses; and what the
scarecrow which the European or American farmer manufactures out of his
oldest trousers, his most ragged coat, and his most disreputable hat, is
to the blackbirds and the crows of the Occident, these grotesque figures
are to the evil spirits of Korea. They frighten away the devils, the
gods of misfortune, and the demons of disease that would fain light upon
the roofs, and curse the dwellers of the houses. Socially they belong
with the demons and the imps and the witches, with the monks and the
nuns, and the hundred other personages of Korea’s queer religious or
irreligious spiritualistic community. But physically they are a striking
and a fascinating detail of Korea’s remarkable architecture.
I have spoken of the khans, which are the furnaces of the Korean houses.
They are not altogether underground, and so every Korean house rests, as
it were, upon a pedestal—a pedestal of stone or of earth. But the house
is almost never built of stone. Wood and paper are its only materials,
and few of the countries in the world are richer in woods, and no
country is so rich in paper as Korea.
The fame of Korea’s paper is more world-wide than the fame of any other
Korean product. But admirable as it is, superior for many purposes as it
is to all other papers, it is really for her woods, and for their
quality, that Korea should be noted more than for any other thing which
she grows or manufactures. Bamboo is there, of course, in abundance, and
abundantly used. Find me the country in Asia where bamboo does not grow,
and I’ll vow to you that that country has been an iceberg and in some
strange way become detached from its anchorage at the North Pole,
drifted down to the southern seas, and after centuries become overgrown
with all sorts of green and gay things, and so come to think itself, and
to be thought, a part of the Orient. When I say that bamboo grows in
Korea I am saying that Korea is in Asia, and I am saying no more. The
temples, the palaces, the shrines, and the lumber-yards of China and
Japan were for many years, and now largely are, dependent for the most
choice of their woods upon the forests of Korea. And many of the most
valued of the tree species in Japan have sprung up from seeds that were
gathered in Chosön. In the palaces, and in the joss-houses of Pekin, and
in the famous temples of Tokio and Kioto, columns and ceilings of
especial beauty and of great value, commercially and artistically, have
been hewn from trees that grew in Korea. Korea is rich in willow, in
fir, in persimmon, in chestnut, and in pine—pine which the Chinese
prefer above all other woods for many of the parts of waggons, boats,
and ships. Korea is rich in ash, in hornbeam, in elm, and in a dozen
other hard, very hard, enduring timbers. The flag that flies above the
yamun of a Chinese mandarin is in all probability attached to a pole of
Korean wood, and, beyond doubt, the white flags that so recently
fluttered upon the ill-fated ships outside the forts of Wei-Hai-Wei, had
not those ships been built in Europe, would have made their signals of
defeat from the top of what once had been trees in Chei-chel-sang or in
Hoang-hai. Korea is splendid with oaks, and with maples, and is well
supplied with larch and with holly. And at one season of the year many
of her hill-slopes are purple with mulberries. The juniper-tree grows
there in vast numbers; the cork-tree and the Korean varnish-tree, from
the sap of which comes the golden-hued lacquer, which is one of the
important materials of Korean art. This sap is poisonous, so poisonous
that the men who work with it are paid above the rates usually received
by Korean art-artisans. There is another tree in Korea which has so
disagreeable a name that I won’t name it, but from it a very fine white
wax is extracted. And there are trees that are pricked for the oil that
gushes from them—oil from which one of the great national drinks—a
hot, peppery drink—is made, and which is almost the only oil used in
the toilet of a Korean woman.
So the Korean architect and the Korean builder have the choice of many
woods in the erecting of Korean edifices. A marvellous species of oak
grows plentifully in Korea—oak whose timbers have been known, and
proved to have been, under water for a century at least, and without
decaying. But perhaps the most famous of the woods of Korea are the
wonderful red and black woods that grow on the island of Quelpaert.
Paper forms a larger part, and is almost as indestructible a part of the
Korean house as is wood. This paper is made from cotton—cotton whose
fibre is exceptionally long, soft, satiny, and fine. Most Korean papers
are beautiful to look at, delightful to touch, and incredibly strong. It
is almost impossible to tear them, especially when they are oiled as
they are for all architectural purposes. The varieties of Korean papers
are almost endless. One kind is an excellent substitute for cloth, and
is used for the making of garments, and for linings, and in many ways it
takes the place of leather, of woods, and of metals, and of all sorts of
woollen things. There is a very thick paper which is made from the bark
of the mulberry-tree. It is soft and pliable, and is as glazed as satin.
It is almost, if not quite, the most easily washed substance I have ever
seen, and is _par excellence_ the Korean choice for table-cloths.
Glass is almost unknown in Korea, and until recent years was quite
unknown there. And as we are all very apt to prize most that with which
we are least familiar, and the use of which we least understand, so
Koreans set great value upon glass. Old bottles, washed ashore from some
European shipwreck, often form the most prized bric-a-brac in a
mandarin’s dwelling, and any Korean who can get a square foot or two of
glass to insert in one of the paper windows of his house is a very proud
householder indeed.
In the house of a noble the front or outer apartment is used as a
reception-room. Here his friends and acquaintances (indeed, all whose
rank entitle them to mingle with him) gather night after night for
gossip, for tobacco, and for drink. These rooms take the place of clubs,
of bar-rooms, and of the smoking-rooms of hotels, all of which are
unknown in Korea.
Background and environments are so studied by every architect in the Far
East that landscape-gardening may almost be said to be a part of Korean
architecture. No Korean building of any importance lacks courtyards,
lotus ponds, groves of trees, and tangles of flowers, through all of
which are scattered elaborate little summer-houses. And what the rich
Korean does for the surroundings of his house and his city, nature
almost invariably does for the surroundings of the house of the poor
Korean, who does not live in one of the crowded cities. The Korean hut
is sometimes half covered with vines, and is altogether cool and
delightful from the shade and the perfume of trees that are heavy with
flowers, with fruits, and with nuts. No Korean need be roofless. If a
house be burned down, or be blown down, the entire community are more
than ready to assist at its re-erection, and the poorest man in the
village, the hardest-worked, will spare some fraction of his time to
help in the re-building. If a new-comer appears in a Korean village, the
inhabitants go to work to help him build, or, if necessary, build for
him a where-to-lay-his-head.
Such are a few of the characteristics, the most vivid characteristics, I
think, of the architecture of Chosön,—an architecture which is even
more significant than architecture usually is. Korean architecture is
significant of Korean artisticness. It is significant of Korean good
sense; for the architecture of Chosön is invariably well-adapted to the
climate of the peninsula. But far beyond this, Korean architecture is
significant of the Korean love of seclusion, and of the Korean faith in
the efficacy of appearances. The Koreans, more perhaps than any other
people, realize that fine feathers make fine birds, and the most
studied, the most elaborated, and architecturally the most important
part of a Korean house is its fence; which of course is not a part of
the house at all. This fence may be a hedge, it may be a wall encircling
the domains of a magistrate, or engirdling the city. It may be a series
of hedges, of moats, of walls, and of gates. The Koreans are exclusive
and seclusive to a degree. This should command for them the sympathy of
English people. All Koreans strive heroically to put their best feet
forward, personally, financially, and architecturally. This should
command them the sympathy of Americans. The Korean farmer screens his
house inside a quadrangle of hedges, hedges as sweet as are the hedges
of North Wales in the month of July. A Korean king hides his palace
behind an externity of many walls that are splendid in height, in
colour, in detail, in outline, and in material. Walls between which a
score of flowers fight each other for the glory of killing every inch of
the grass,—walls between which marble-outlined ponds sleep cosily
beneath their green and pink and white coverlets of lilies, and of
lotus. And the Koreans who are neither princes nor peasants, but who
stand between the two, spend a world of thought, and a good deal of
money upon the fences—floral or stone—thrown about their homes. Only
the poorest of Korean houses—of which there are many—and only the
shops—of which there are few—lack some sort of a wall, some manner of
a barrier between the private family life, and the public life of the
going and coming community.
Korean walls (I mean the walls of masonry which mark the boundaries of a
city or the limits of a gentleman’s grounds, and not the paper walls of
a Korean house) are, without exception, Chinese in character. But even
more important than these walls are the gateways with which they are
broken, and above all, the gateways or gates that stand some distance
outside the walls. In Far Asia gates have a significance which they
never have had, even in our own old Norman days, and never can have, in
Europe. Gates are the architectural ceremonies of the East. They frame
many of the most ceremonial ceremonies of the East, and it necessarily
follows that they are big and gorgeous. For never did a picture justify
more lavish framing than does the picture of Eastern ceremony. There are
three great classes of gates in the Far East: the torii of Japan, the
red-arrow gates of Korea, and the pailow of China. But before I try to
say something of these three gates, there are two or three pleasant
things to be said of the gates that ordinarily pierce the wall of a
Korean city. The gates themselves are heavily built of wood, are
elaborately ornamented with metal, and slowly swing in a rusty sort of
way at sunrise, and at sunset—swing at sunrise to let the people of the
city out, and the people of the country in; swing at sunset to let the
people of the country out, and the people of the city in. Korea not
being a land of machinery, it becomes necessary for a certain number of
officials to tend these gates. They are not called gate-keepers, but are
officers, rather important officers, if I remember, of the Korean army.
Now, an army officer, all the world over, does not mind where he lies,
what he eats, or how he suffers—when he is on active service: but when
debarred from fighting, the soldier, all the world over, and especially
the officer-soldier, wants to be well-housed, well-roomed, well-fed, and
above all, well-amused. This seems to be the one military trait which
Korea has not yet forgotten. Above the gates that open into Söul, and
into every other walled Korean city, are built very cosy little stone
houses. In these the soldiers on guard—the gate keepers—play cards,
eat rice, munch sweetmeats, and sip arrack. Above the gateways that lead
into the houses of Korean magistrates, Korean nobles, and of Korean
millionaires, just such houses are built. They are the concert halls of
Korea. In them the band of the Korean magistrate, the Korean noble, or
the Korean millionaire discourses more or less discordant music, and at
delightfully respectful distance from its employer’s house. They never
play in the cold weather. It has been said that this is so, not because
the Korean in whose service they are cares a whit whether their fingers
freeze to their instruments or not, but because he is unwilling to open
the paper walls of his house wide enough to hear the music that is being
played in the gate-houses of his outer walls. I doubt this. A rich
Korean, who is covered with layers and layers of silk and wadding, and
who sits upon a khan in full fire, and who is surrounded by braziers of
charcoal, and whose house is deplorably lacking in ventilation, does
not, I think, as a rule, shrink from having his front door or his side
wall opened once in a while. Beneath the guard-house building, above the
gate of a Korean wall; there can be no khan, for the guard-house is
above the gate, and many feet from the ground in which the Khan must be
embedded. And so I put it down to the humanity of the average well-to-do
Korean that he never makes his band play, on his walls, save in fairly
warm weather.
These rooms, these little houses built above the gates of a Korean
walled city or the gates of a great man’s domain, have been in years
past the scenes of many a Korean romance, and even now they are often
the favourite retreats or lounging places of Korean poets and
philosophers. They are usually furnished with considerable comfort. They
are cosy in the autumn and in the spring, and delightfully cool in the
summer. They’re well above the city’s sights, and high above any
unpleasant intrusion of the city’s sounds, and so are fit resting-places
for one who wants to meditate or dream or write poetry, or be at rest,
or escape from the hundred nagging vexations of daily life.
Korean walls are adjuncts to Korean gates, and not, as with us, the
gates adjuncts to the walls. The walls are built to emphasize the
importance of the gates, to supplement them, and to attract attention to
them. To the Korean mind the walls are so much less important than the
gates that the gates are often built and the walls omitted altogether.
Such gates are the torii of Japan, the pailow of China, and the
red-arrow gates of Chosön. Every Korean gate has a name, a name that is
meant to be impressive and poetical, symbolical of beauty and of good.
And doubtless these names are so to Korean ears, but they are apt to
strike the European mind of average stolidity as amusing or silly. In
Korea, indeed, every edifice of any pretension has a name. The people of
the Far East personify their buildings to a great extent, and endue them
with individuality, and with human attributes. Royal gateways are often
flanked by two immense Chinese lions, or, as they are more generally
called, Korean dogs. These dogs are but one of the many most universal
expressions of Korean art. They are the one expression of Korean art
with which we, in Europe, are very familiar.
There is nothing else in picturesque Korea so picturesque as the
red-arrow gates. I wish I might devote a chapter to them, and I am
rather appalled at undertaking to at all clearly describe them in a few
paragraphs. A dozen or more of the most eminent European authorities on
Korea unanimously declare the red-arrow gates to have either been copied
from, or to have been the originals of the Japanese torii. Why, in the
bulk of literature that has been written about these strange gates of
the Far East, little or no mention has been made of the Chinese pailow
puzzles me. There can, I think, be no doubt that the three gates are
three generations of one architectural family, or that they have had a
common origin. The pailow of China are memorial arches, erected, as a
rule, to commemorate the virtue and the character of women who have
slaughtered themselves that they might follow their husbands to the
grave. These arches are heavier than the Japanese torii, or the Korean
red-arrow gates, but they are like both in their general outlines and in
situation. And all Chinese architecture is very much heavier than the
architecture of Korea or of Japan. The torii of Japan marks the approach
to a temple, or to some sacred place. It is formed of two upright
columns or pillars which lean slightly toward each other at the top, and
are crossed by two or three graceful bars; the upper of which is
slightly, but very beautifully curved. The word “torii” is most usually
translated “birds’ rest,” from “tori” a “bird,” and “I” “to be” or
“rest.” And the theory has been that they were originally built as
convenient resting-places for birds: as birds, with all other animals,
were sacred in the eyes of the Buddhists. This translation is
unsatisfactory. The etymology of the word itself, like that of so many
other Japanese words, is hidden in a good deal of mystery, and though
to-day we find the torii outside of every Buddhist temple in Japan, we
also find one outside every Shinto temple in Japan, and it is easily
proved that they were first reared outside the Shinto, and not outside
the Buddhist temples. Long before Buddhism was introduced into Japan,
the torii stood outside numerous Shinto temples. The most plausible
translation of the word “torii,” though it is not a translation
altogether convincing, is “a place of passing through.” It is Mr.
Chamberlain, I believe, who gives this translation, but his book is not
at my hand, and I am not positive. Certainly both in Korea and in Japan
the birds make a very general resting-place of the torii, and of the
red-arrow gates. But then so do they in China of the pailow, and so do
they in America and Europe of the telegraph wires. It is very possible
that from this habit of theirs “torii” has come to mean, or has been
thought to mean, “birds’ rest.” The red-arrow gates of Korea are taller
and narrower than the torii of Japan. The red-arrow gate never stands
outside a temple, but outside a palace or some high magistracy, and it
denotes the approach to a house of the king, or to the house of one of
almost kingly authority. So in Söul we find a red-arrow gate standing
outside the yamun of the Chinese Resident, one of the many silent, but
clearly legible proofs that Korea has long regarded herself as a vassal
of China. These gates are painted a most brilliant red, which is the
Korean royal colour. The upright columns of a red-arrow gate are crossed
by two horizontal bars. These bars are quite straight, and unlike the
cross-bars of the torii, the upper one does not extend quite to the top
of the perpendicular column. These gates are called arrow-gates because
of twenty or more speared-shaped bits of wood that are embedded in the
lower of the two horizontal bars, pierce through the upper bar, and
extend a little higher than the shaped ends of the perpendicular
columns. They are simplicity itself, these red-arrow gates, except for
their gorgeous colouring, and altogether lack the elaboration of the
Japanese torii. They are thirty feet high at least, often much higher.
But however simple in themselves they make wonderful frames for
wonderful bits of Korean landscape. On the exact centre of the upper
cross-bar rests a peculiar design which represents the positive and
negative essences—the male and female essences of Chinese philosophy.
This again is surmounted by tongue-shaped or flame-shaped bits of wood,
which are supposed to, in some way, represent the power of the king. The
two symbols together signify Korea’s king as omnipotent, since he is
under the protection of China, and has espoused the religion of
Confucius. It is noticeable that the torii of Japan invariably marks the
vicinity of a temple, or of some building, or some place sacred to one
or more of the Japanese deities; while in Korea the red-arrow gate
invariably signifies the proximity of the dwelling of temporal power. I
am inclined to think that the Koreans borrowed the idea of their
red-arrow gates from the Chinese, and that the Japanese seeing them,
translated them into torii. If this is so, it is presumable that in both
instances the borrowers erected the gates in front of what was to them
the most important places in their own countries. The Emperor of Japan
is the nominal head of the Shinto religion. In the days when the torii
was introduced into Japan, religion was probably a great force in the
three islands, and the temples seemed to the Japanese the most
appropriate places to be honoured by this arched sign of importance. In
Korea, on the other hand, religion is, and for many years has been,
under a social and governmental ban. In Korea the king is all, and the
gods are naught, so—as a matter of course—the red gates reared their
graceful, arrow-crowned heads outside the house of a king, or of a
deputed representative of the Chinese emperor.
The bridges of Korea, the big bell at Söul, and a dozen other
characteristic details of Korea’s rich architecture, all rise up before
me and seem to reproach me for passing them by without a word. To touch
upon them with anything approaching adequacy would require pages and not
words, and the pages at my disposal are growing few. But I can heartily
recommend their study and the study of Korean architecture in general to
all who are interested in the East, and in architecture, and who are
fascinated by the quaint and the symbolical.