CHAPTER III.
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.