CHAPTER IV
SEOUL, THE KOREAN MECCA
Further difficulties and delays, while they pushed my journey into the interior into the hot weather, gave me the advantage of learning a little about the people and the country before starting. In one sense Seoul is Korea. Take a mean alley in it with its mud-walled hovels, deep-eaved brown roofs, and malodorous ditches with their foulness and green slime, and it may serve as an example of the street of every village and provincial town. In country places there are few industrial specialties. A Seoul shop of “assorted notions” represents the shop of every country town. The white clothing and the crinoline dress hat are the same everywhere as in Seoul. Whatever of national life there is exists only in the capital. Strong as is the drift towards London in our own agricultural districts, it is stronger in Korea towards Seoul. Seoul is not only the seat of government, but it is the centre of official life, of all official employment, and of the literary examinations which were the only avenues to employment. It is always hoped that something may be “picked up” in Seoul. Hence there is a constant permanent or temporary gravitation towards it, and the larger proportion of the youths who swing and lounge on sunny afternoons along the broad streets, aping the gait of yang-bans, are aspirants for official position. Gusts of popular feeling which pass for public opinion in a land where no such thing exists are known only in Seoul. It is in the capital that the Korean feels the first stress of his unsought and altogether undesired contact with Western civilization, and resembles nothing so much as a man awaking from a profound sleep, rubbing his eyes half-dazed and looking dreamily about him, not quite sure where he is.
Seoul is also the commercial centre of a country whose ideas of commerce are limited to huckstering transactions. All business is done there. All country shops are supplied with goods from Seoul. All produce not shipped from the treaty ports converges on Seoul. It is the centre of the great trading guilds, which exercise a practical monopoly in certain sorts of goods, as well as of the guild of porters by whom the traffic of the country is carried on. The heart of every Korean is in Seoul. Officials have town houses in the capital, and trust their business to subordinates for much of the year. Landed proprietors draw their rents and “squeeze” the people on their estates, but are absentees living in the capital. Every man who can pay for food and lodging on the road trudges to the capital once or twice a year, and people who live in it, of whatever degree, can hardly be bribed to leave it even for a few weeks. To the Korean it is the place in which alone life is worth living.
Yet it has no objects of art, very few antiquities, no public gardens, no displays except the rare one of the Kur-dong, and no theatres. It lacks every charm possessed by other cities. Antique, it has no ruins, no libraries, no literature, and lastly an indifference to religion without a parallel has left it without temples, while certain superstitions which still retain their hold have left it without a tomb!
Leaving out the temple of Confucius and the homage officially rendered to his tablet in Korea as in China, there are no official temples in Seoul, nor might a priest enter its gates under pain of death, consequently the emphasis which noble religious buildings give even to the meanest city in China or Japan is lacking. There is a small temple to the God of War outside the south gate, with some very curious frescoes, but I seldom saw any worshippers there. The absence of temples is a feature of the other Korean cities. Buddhism, which for 1,000 years before the founding of the present dynasty was the popular cult, has been “disestablished” and practically proscribed since the sixteenth century, and Koreans account for the severe enactments against priests by saying that in the Japanese invasion three centuries ago Japanese disguised themselves as Buddhist priests and gained admission to cities, putting their garrisons to the sword. Be that true or false, Buddhism in Korea to be found must be sought.
GUTTER SHOP, SEOUL.
As there are no temples, so there are no other signs of religion, and the hasty observer would be warranted in putting down the Koreans as a people without a religion. Ancestral worship, and a propitiation of dæmons or spirits, the result of a timid and superstitious dread of the forces of Nature, are to the Korean in place of a religion. Both, I am inclined to believe, are the result of fear, the worship of ancestors being dictated far less by filial piety than by the dread that ancestral spirits may do harm to their descendants. This cult prevails from the King to the coolie. It inspires the costly splendors of the Kur-dong, as well as the spread of ancestral food in the humblest hovel on New Year’s Eve.
The graves within an area of ten miles from the city wall are among the remarkable features of this singular capital. The dead have a monopoly of the fine hill slopes and southern aspects. A man who when alive is content with a mud hovel in a dingy alley, when dead must repose on a breezy hill slope with dignified and carefully tended surroundings. The little fine timber which exists in the denuded neighborhood of Seoul is owed to the Royal and wealthy dead. The amount of good land occupied by the dead is incredible. The grave of a member of the Royal family on a hill creates a solitude for a considerable distance around. In the case of rich and great men as well as of princes, the grave is a lofty grassy mound, often encircled by a massive stone railing, with the hill terraced in front and excavated in a horseshoe shape behind. A stone altar and stone lanterns are placed in front, and the foot of the hill, as at the “Princess’s Tomb,” is often occupied by a temple-like building containing tablets with the name and rank of the dead. The Royal tombs are approached by stately avenues of gigantic stone figures, possibly a harmless survival of the practice of offering human and other sacrifices at a burial. These figures represent a priest, a warrior in armor, a servant, a pony, and a sheep (?). The poorer dead occupy hillsides in numbers, resting under grass mounds on small platforms of grass always neatly kept. The lucky place for interment is in all cases chosen by the geomancer. Behind rich men’s graves pines are usually planted in a crescent. The dead population of the hillsides round Seoul is simply enormous.
Funerals usually go out near dusk with a great display of colored lanterns, but I was fortunate enough to see an artisan’s corpse carried out by daylight. First came four drums and a sort of fife perpetrating a lively tune as an accompaniment to a lively song. These were followed by a hearse, if it may be called so, a domed and gaudily painted construction with a garland of artificial flowers in the centre of the dome, a white Korean coat thrown across the roof, and four flagstaffs with gay flags at the four corners, bamboo poles, flower-wreathed, forming a platform on which the hearse was borne by eight men in peaked yellow hats garlanded with blue and pink flowers. Bouquets of the same were disposed carelessly on the front and sides of the hearse, the latter being covered with shield-shaped flags of gaudily colored muslin. The chief mourner followed, completely clothed in sackcloth, wearing an umbrella-shaped hat over 4 feet in diameter, and holding a sackcloth screen before his face by two bamboo handles. Men in flower-wreathed hats surrounded him, some of them walking backwards and singing. He looked fittingly grave, but it is a common custom for those who attend the chief mourner to try to make him laugh by comic antics and jocular remarks. There are “burial clubs” in Seoul to which 100,000 cash are contributed (then worth about thirty-three dollars, silver). The first man to die receives 30,000 cash, the second 33,000, and the third 37,000. This man had belonged to one of these, which accounts for an artisan having such a handsome funeral.