Mourners dress in straw-colored hempen cloth, and all wear the enormous hats mentioned before, which so nearly conceal the face that the carrying of the grass-cloth screen is almost a work of supererogation. A mourner may not enter the palace grounds, and as mourning for a father lasts for three years, a courtier thus bereaved is for that time withdrawn from Court.
Among the curious customs mainly of Chinese origin connected with death are the dressing the dying person in his best clothes when death is very close at hand. The very poor are buried coffinless in a wrapping of straw, and are carried by two men on a bier, the nature of the burden being concealed by hoops covered with paper.
When Buddhist priests and temples were prohibited in the walled towns three centuries ago, anything like a national faith disappeared from Korea, and it is only through ancestral worship and a form of “Shamanism” practiced by the lower and middle classes that any recognition of the unseen survives, and that is in its most superstitious and rudimentary form. Protestant Christian missionaries, preceded in 1784 by those of the Roman Catholic Church, entered Korea in 1884, almost as soon as the country was opened by treaty, and agents of the American Methodist Episcopal and Northern Presbyterian Churches took up their abode in Seoul. They have been followed by representatives of several of the divisions among Protestants—Southern Presbyterians, Canadian Presbyterians, Australian Presbyterians, and Baptists—and in 1890 the first English mission to Korea was founded under Bishop Corfe. A Roman Catholic Church and a very large Roman Catholic Cathedral with a spire occupy two of the most prominent sites in Seoul. One of the best sites is covered with the buildings belonging to the Methodist Episcopal Mission, schools for girls and boys, a printing press, a Union Church, and hospitals for men and women, with which dispensaries are connected. The girls’ school connected with this mission is one of the most admirable in its organization and results that I have seen. The Presbyterians occupy a lowlier position, but have the same class of agencies at work, and lately the King handed over to them a large hospital in the city, known as the “Government Hospital.”
Bishop Corfe’s mission occupies two modest sites in modest fashion, all its buildings being strictly Korean. On one side of Seoul, at Nak-tong, it has the Community House, where the bishop, clergy, doctor, and printer live and have their private chapel, also the Mission press, and a very efficient hospital for men, admirably nursed by the Sisters of St. Peter’s Kilburn. On the slope of the British Legation Hill are the English Church of the Advent, a beautiful Korean building, the Community House of the Sisters of St. Peter, and the Women’s Hospital buildings, embracing a dispensary, a new hospital (the Dora Bird Memorial) of eighteen beds, with a room for a private patient, besides an old hospital, to be used only for infectious diseases. These are under the charge of a lady physician, and are also nursed by the Sisters of St. Peter, who in both hospitals do admirable work in a bright and loving spirit which is beyond all praise.
There are about 75 Protestant and 34 Roman missionaries in Korea, mostly in Seoul. The language has the reputation of being very difficult, and few of this large number have acquired facility in the use of it. The idea of a nation destitute of a religion, and gladly accepting one brought by the foreigner, must be dropped. The religion the Korean would accept is one which would show him how to get money without working for it. The indifference is extreme, the religious faculty is absent, there are no religious ideas to appeal to, and the moral teachings of Confucius have little influence with any class. The Korean has got on so well without a religion, in his own opinion, that he does not want to be troubled with one, specially a religion of restraint and sacrifice which has no worldly good to offer. After nearly twelve years of work, the number of baptized native Protestant Christians in 1897 was 777.[10] The Roman Catholics claim 28,802, and that the average rate of increase is 1,000 a year.[11] Their priests live mostly in the wretched hovels of the people, amidst their foul surroundings, and share their unpalatable food and sordid lives. Doubtless, mission work in Korea will not differ greatly from such work elsewhere among the older civilizations. Barriers of indifference, superstition, and inertness exist, and whatever progress is made will probably be chiefly through medical missions, showing Christianity in action, and native agency, and through such schools as I have already alluded to, which leave every feature of Korean custom, dress, and manner of living untouched, while Christian instruction and training are the first objects, and where the gentle, loving, ennobling influence of the teacher is felt during every hour of the day.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] In 1897 the influence of Christianity was much stronger than in 1895, and the prospects of its spread much more encouraging.
[11] For statistics of Missions in February, 1897, see Appendix.
CHAPTER V
THE SAILING OF THE SAMPAN
At a point when the difficulties in the way of my projected journey had come to be regarded as insurmountable, owing to the impossibility of getting an interpreter, and I had begun to say “if I go” instead of “when I go,” Mr. Miller, a young missionary, offered his services, on condition that he might take his servant to supplement his imperfect knowledge of Korean. Bishop Corfe provided me with a Chinese servant, Wong, a fine, big, cheery fellow, with inexhaustible good-nature and contentment, never a cloud of annoyance on his face, always making the best of everything, ready to help every one, true, honest, plucky, passionately fond of flowers, faithful, manly, always well and hungry, and with a passable knowledge of English! He was a Chefoo sampan-man when Bishop Corfe picked him up, and nothing could make him into a regular servant, but he suited me admirably, and I was grieved indeed when I had to part with him.