UPPER TAI-DONG.
The track continued shut in by the high mountains which line the Tai-döng till within a mile of Tok Chhön, forcing the ponies to climb worn rock-ladders, or to pick a perilous way among sharp-pointed rocks. I had not thought that Korea could produce anything so emphatic! As the road occasionally broke up in face of some apparently impassable spur, we occasionally got into impassable places, and lost time so badly that we were benighted when little more than halfway, but as there were no inhabitants we pushed on as a matter of necessity. When we got to better going the mapu, inspired by the double terror of robbers and wild animals, hurried on the ponies, yelling as they drove, and by the time we reached the Tok Chhön ferry a young moon had risen, and the mountains in shadow, and the great ferryboat full of horses, men in white, and bulls, in relief against the silvered water, made a beautiful night scene. I sent on the ponies, and Im to prepare my room, fully expecting comfort, as at Phyöng-yang, for though I could never find anybody who had been at Tok Chhön, it was always spoken of as a sort of metropolis.
It is indeed a magistracy, with a remarkably ruinous yamen and a market-place, and is the chief town of a very large region. It is entered from the river by stepping-stones, through abominable slush, by a long narrow street, from which we were directed on and on till we came to a wide place, where the inns of the town are. There in the moonlight a great masculine crowd had collected, and in the middle of it were our mapu, with the loads still on their ponies, raging at large, and Im rushing hither and thither like a madman. For they had been refused accommodation, and every door had been barred against them on the ground that I was a foreigner! They said, truly or falsely, that no foreigner had ever profaned Tok Chhön by his presence, that they lived in peace, and did not want to be “implicated with a foreigner” (all foreigners being Japanese). It is most disagreeable to force oneself in even the slightest degree on any one, but I had been twelve hours in the saddle, it was 8 P.M., there was snow on the ground, and it was freezing hard! The yard door of one inn was opened a chink for a moment, our men rushed for it, but it was at once barred, and we were all again left standing in the street, the centre of a crowd which increased every moment.
Our men eventually forced open the door of one inn and got their ponies in. Then the paper was torn off two doors, and Im was visible against the light from within tearing about like a black dæmon. We had then stood like statues for two hours with our feet in freezing slush, the great crowd preserving a ring round us, staring stolidly, but not showing any hostility. At last Im appeared at an open door, waving my chair, and we got into a high, dark lumber-room; but the crowd was too quick for us, and came tumbling in behind us till the place was full. Then the landlord closed the doors, but they were smashed in, and he had no better luck when he weakly besought the people to look at him and not at the stranger, for his entreaty only produced an ebullition of Korean wit, by no means complimentary. An official from the yamen arrived and inquired if I had any complaint to make, but I had none, and he sat down and took a prolonged stare on his own account, not making any attempt to disperse the crowd.
So I sat facing the door, Mr. Yi not far off smoking endless cigarettes, while Im battled for a room, after one he had secured had its doors broken down by the crowd. I sat for two hours longer in that cold, ruinous, miserable place, two front and three back doorways filled up with men, the whole male population of Tok Chhön, and, never moved a muscle or showed any sign of dissatisfaction! Some sat on the doorsill, little men were on the shoulders of big ones, all, inside and outside, clamoring at once.
The situation might have been serious had a European man been with me, and the experiences of Mr. Campbell of the Consular Service, at Kapsan might have been repeated. No Englishman could have kept his temper in such circumstances from 8 P.M. till midnight. He would certainly have knocked somebody down, and then there would have been a fight. The ill-bred curiosity tires but does not annoy me, though it exceeded all bounds that night. Fortunately for me, a Korean gentleman is taught from his earliest boyhood that he must never lose his temper, and that it is a degradation to him to touch an inferior, therefore he must never strike a servant or one of the lower orders.
At midnight, probably weary of our passivity, and anxious for sleep, the inn people consented to give me a room in the back-yard if I did not object to one “prepared for sacrifice,” and containing the ancestral tablets. The crowd then filled the back-yard, and attempted to pour into my room, when Im’s sorely-tried patience gave way for only the second time, and he knocked people down right and left. This, and the contents of a fire bowl which was upset in the scrimmage, helped to scatter the crowd, but it was there again at daylight, attempting to enter every time Im opened the door!
The “room prepared for sacrifice” in aspect was a small barn, fearfully dirty and littered with rubbish, and bundles of rags, rope, and old shoes were tucked away among the beams and rafters. My camp-bed cut it exactly in half. In the inner half there was a dusty table, and behind it on a black stand a dusty black shrine, at the back of which was a four-leaved screen covered with long strips of paper, on which were poems in praise of the deceased. In front, dividing the room, and falling from the roof to the floor, was a curtain made of two widths of very dirty foreign calico. Among the poor, instead of setting food before the ancestral shrine twice or thrice daily during the three years of mourning for a parent, it is only placed there twice a month. In a small white wooden tablet within the shrine popular belief places the residence of the third soul of the deceased, as I have mentioned before.
I spent two days at Tok Chhön. Properly speaking, the Tai-döng is never navigable to that point, owing to many and dangerous rapids, and any idea of the possibility of this highly picturesque stream becoming “a great commercial highway” may be utterly dismissed. Small boats can ascend it at all seasons to Mou-chin Tai, about 140 li lower down, and during two summer months, when the water is high, a few with much difficulty get up to Tok Chhön, and even a few li farther, and at the same season rafts descend from the forests of the Yung-wön district, from 30 to 40 li higher; but owing to severe rapids, shallows, and sandbanks which shift continually, the river is not really navigable higher than Phyöng-yang, and all commercial theories built upon it are totally chimerical. For 30 li above Tok Chhön the river scenery is far grander than below, the perpendicular walls of limestone rock rising from 800 to 1,000 feet, with lofty mountains above them, the peaks of which, even so early as the end of November, were crested with new-fallen snow. I had been assured in Phyöng-yang that boats could be hired at Tok Chhön, and I had planned to descend the river; but there are no boats, except a few ferry scows, higher than Mou-chin Tai.
Tok Chhön and its district are lamentably poor. The people said that the war had made the necessaries of life dearer, and that they had only the same produce to barter or buy with. The reforms which were being carried out farther south had not reached that region, and “squeezing” was still carried on by the officials. Rice, the ordinary staff of Korean life, is brought from An Ju, but is used only by the rich, i.e. the officials. The poor live on large and small millet. Potatoes and wheat are grown, but the soil is poor and stony. A little trade, chiefly in dried fish and seaweed, is done with Wön-san. A few silk lenos and gauzes of very poor quality are made, the industry having been introduced by the Chinese. Piece goods are only a few cash dearer than at Phyöng-yang. Those displayed on the market-day were nearly all Japanese. It was the dullest market I have seen. The pedlars carried away nearly as much as they brought. The country is absolutely denuded of wood. There are no deciduous trees, and the region owes its few groves of dwarfed and distorted pines to the horseshoe graves on the hillsides. A yamen which only hangs together from force of habit, a Confucian temple, and a Buddhist temple on a height are the only noteworthy buildings.