CHAPTER II
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.