The common name for barley is po-ri; in poetical parlance the Koreans call barley The Fifth Moon of Autumn, because it is then that it is harvested. The value of barley to the Korean arises from the fact that it is the first grain to germinate in the spring. It carries the people on until the millet and rice crops are ready. Barley and wheat are extensively raised throughout Korea for the purpose of making wine and beer. In other ways, however, they may be considered almost as important as the different kinds of pulse. The uses of barley are very numerous. Besides being used directly as farinaceous food it becomes malt, medicine, candy, syrup, and furnishes a number of side-dishes. Wheat comes mostly from Pyöng-an Province, only small crops of it appearing in the other Provinces. Barley yields spring and autumn crops, but wheat yields only the winter crop. The poor accept wheat as a substitute for rice, and brew a gruel from it. It is used as a paste; it figures in the native pharmacopœia, and in the sacrifices with which the summer solstice is celebrated.
Oats, millet, and sorghum are other important cereals in Korea. There are six varieties of millet; the price of the finer qualities is the same as that obtained for rice. One only of these six varieties was found originally in the country. Sorghum is grown principally in Kyöng-syang Province. It grows freely, however, in the south; but is less used than wheat, millet, or oats in Korea. A curious distinction exists between the sorghum imported from China and the native grain. In China, sorghum is used in making sugar; when this sugar-producing grain arrives in Korea it is found impossible to extract the sugar. Two of the three kinds of sorghum in Korea are native, the third coming from Central China. Oats become a staple food in the more mountainous regions, where rice is never seen; it is dressed like rice. From the stalk the Koreans make a famous paper, which is used in the Palaces of the Emperor. It is cultivated in Kang-won, Ham-kyöng, and Pyöng-an Provinces.
The Korean is omnivorous. Birds of the air, beasts of the field, and fish from the sea, nothing comes amiss to his palate. Dog-meat is in great request at certain seasons; pork and beef with the blood undrained from the carcase; fowls and game—birds cooked with the lights, giblets, head and claws intact, fish, sun-dried and highly malodorous, all are acceptable to him. Cooking is not always necessary; a species of small fish is preferred raw, dipped into some piquant sauce. Other dainties are dried sea-weed, shrimps, vermicelli, made by the women from buckwheat flour and white of egg, pine seeds, lily bulbs, honey-water, wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, wild potatoes, and all vegetables of Western and Eastern gardens; even now the list is by no means exhausted.
Their excesses make them martyrs to indigestion.
CHAPTER XI
Japan in Korea—Historical associations—In Old Fusan—Political and economic interests—Abuse of paramountcy
JAPANESE CAVALRY
Southern Korea bears many evidences of the warlike activities and commercial enterprise of the past generations of Japanese, who, abandoning their own island home, sought domicile upon the shores of the neighbouring peninsula. The precarious existence of these waifs and strays from an alien state, in the midst of a people whose whole attitude was anti-foreign, did not deter others from coming to her ports. This gradual migration from Japan to the Hermit Kingdom continued during many centuries, promoting an intercourse between two races which the Government was powerless to frustrate. Japanese historians argue from this settlement in Korea that the State was a vassal of Japan from the second century by right of conquest and appropriation. The idea, which prevailed through seventeen centuries, was not finally rejected until the Ambassador of the Mikado signed a treaty at Seoul on February 7th, 1897, which recognised Korea as an independent nation. From about the beginning of the Christian era until the fifteenth century, the relations between Japan and Korea were very close. From this period onward Korea, although maintaining her attitude of complacent indifference to events outside her own Empire, betrayed signs of weakness in her policy of isolation when menaced with the importunate demands of her rival neighbours, China and Japan.