He wanted to see the inside of my camera and to be photographed, for which purpose we retired to the back of the house to avoid the enormous crowd which had collected, and which was becoming every moment more impolite and disorderly. I made him exchange the foreign cigar, vulgar in a Korean’s mouth, for the national long pipe. At this juncture some friends came up, hangers-on, who were feasting with him to celebrate his having obtained a good place in a recent examination, and made a rudely-worded request for our immediate departure. It was obvious that, after their unmannerly curiosity had been satisfied, our presence, and the courteous treatment extended to us, spoilt their amusement. The ringleader spoke roughly to our host, who turned his back on us and retired meekly to his own apartments, although he is a son of an official of the highest rank, and a near relative of the late Queen. We could only make a somewhat ignominious exit, having been truly “played out.”
This rage for French clocks, German mirrors, foreign cigars, chairs upholstered in velvet, and a general foreign tawdriness is spreading rapidly among the young “swells” who have money to spend, vulgarizing Korean simplicity, and setting the example to those below them of an extravagant and purely selfish expenditure. The house, with its many courtyards, was new and handsome, and money glared from every point. I was glad to return to the simplicity of my boat, hoping that with the “plain living, high thinking” might be combined!
Beyond the mountains east of Yö Ju, the Han passes through a noble stretch of rich alluvium, bearing superb, and fairly clean crops, and bordered by low, serrated, denuded, and much corrugated ranges, faintly tinged with green. On this gently rolling plain are many towns and villages, among the larger of which are Won Ju, Chung Ju, Chöng-phyöng, and Tan-Yang, all on or near the river, by which they conveniently export their surplus produce, chiefly beans, tobacco, and rice, and receive in return their supplies of salt and foreign goods. Even at that season of low water the traffic was considerable.
Higher up, the scenery changes. Lofty limestone bluffs, often caverned, rise abruptly from the river, and wall in the fertile and populous valleys which descend upon it, giving place higher up to grand basaltic formation, range behind range, terraces of columnar basalt occasionally appearing. It was a lovely season, warm days, cold nights, brilliant sunshine, great white masses of sunlit clouds on a sky of heavenly blue, distances idealized in a blue veil which was not a mist, flowers at their freshest, every bird that has a note or a cry vocal, butterflies and red and blue dragon-flies hovering over the grass and water, fish leaping, all nature awake and jubilant. And every rift and bluff had its own beauty of blossoming scarlet azaleas, or syringas, contorted or stately pines, and Ampelopsis Veitchiana rose-pink in its early leafage. There was a note of gladness in the air.
Eight days above Seoul, on the left bank of the river, there is a ruinous pagoda built of large blocks of hewn stone, standing solitary in the centre of a level plain formed by a bend of the Han. The people, on being asked about it, said, “When Korea was surveyed so long ago that nobody knows when, this was the centre of it.” They call it the “Halfway Place.” After that the only suggestions of antiquity are some stone foundations, and a few stone tombs among the trees, which, from their shape, may denote the sites of monasteries.
Near that pagoda were a number of men very drunk, and there were few days on which the habit of drinking to excess was not more or less prominent. The junkmen celebrated the evening’s rest by hard drinking, and the crowd which nightly assembled on the shore when we tied up was usually enlivened by the noisy antics of one or more intoxicated men. From my observation on the Han journey and afterwards, I should say that drunkenness is an outstanding feature in Korea. And it is not disreputable. If a man drinks rice wine till he loses his reason, no one regards him as a beast. A great dignitary even may roll on the floor drunk at the end of a meal, at which he has eaten to repletion, without losing caste, and on becoming sober receives the congratulations of inferiors on being rich enough to afford such a luxury. Along with the taste for French clocks and German gilding, a love of foreign liquors is becoming somewhat fashionable among the young yang-bans, and willing caterers are found who produce potato spirit rich in fusel oil as “old Cognac,” and a very effervescent champagne at a shilling a bottle!
The fermented liquors of Korea are probably not unwholesome, but the liking for them is an acquired taste with Europeans. They vary from a smooth white drink resembling buttermilk in appearance, and very mild, to a water-white spirit of strong smell and fiery taste. Between these comes the ordinary rice wine, slightly yellowish, akin to Japanese sake and Chinese samshu, with a faint, sickly smell and flavor. They all taste more or less strongly of smoke, oil, and alcohol, and the fusel oil remains even in the best. They are manufactured from rice, millet, and barley. The wine-seller projects a cylindrical basket on a long pole from his roof, resembling the “bush” formerly used in England for a similar purpose. Probably one reason that the Koreans are a drunken people is that they scarcely use tea at all even in the cities, and the luxury of “cold water” is unknown to them. The peasants drink hot rice water with their meals, honey water as a luxury, and on festive occasions an infusion of orange peel or ginger. The drying of orange peel is quite a business with Korean housewives. There were quantities of it hanging from the eaves of all the cottages.
Up to a short distance above this pagoda, the rapids for which the Han is famous, though they made our progress slow, had not suggested serious difficulty, far less risk, but for the remaining fortnight they were tortuous rocky channels, through which the river, compressed in width, rushes with great violence and tremendous noise and clatter, or they are successive broken ledges of rock, with a chaos of flurry and foam, varied by deep pools, presenting formidable, and at some seasons insuperable, obstacles to navigation. To all appearance they are far more dangerous than the celebrated rapids of the Yangtze, and the remains of timber rafts and junks attest their destructive properties. They occur at shorter and shorter intervals as the higher waters are reached, till eventually the Han becomes an unbroken rapid or cataract.
Kim, though paid handsomely, was far too stingy to pay for any help en route, his ropes were manifestly bought in “the cheapest market,” and though Wong, my powerful sampan-man, worked with both strength and skill, and Mr. Miller and his servant toiled at the tow ropes, and in great exigencies I gave a haul myself, we sometimes made only 7 miles a day, and ofttimes took two hours to ascend a few yards, two poling with might and main in the boat, and three tugging with all their strength on shore. Often the ropes snapped, when the boat went spinning and flying to the foot of the rapid, sometimes with injury to herself and her contents, sometimes escaping. After a few of such risks I habitually landed, either on a boatman’s back or wading in waterproof Wellingtons, which caused great wonderment in the lookers on. The worst rapids were always in the most beautiful places, and the strolls and climbs of three or four hours along the river banks, through fields with bounteous crops, through odorous Spanish chestnut groves, through thickets with their fascinating bewilderments of roses, clematis, and honeysuckle, and past farmhouses with their privacy of bamboo screens, and deep shade of blossoming fruit trees, were very delightful.
In ten days from Seoul we reach Chöng-phyöng, a town of some pretensions, where in connection with the yamen is a temple pavilion with a high white chair, facing a table with candlesticks upon it, floor, table, and chair deep in dust, though the building is used regularly for offering prayers and sacrifices for the King. Dust is not noteworthy in Korea, but the paintings in this temple are. On the end walls are vivid groups of six noblemen wearing fine horsehair palace hats with wings, each man holding a piece of folded paper in his hand, and listening intently as he bends forward towards the chair. The conception and technique of these paintings are admirable, and the sunset scenes on the back wall, though inferior in execution, are the work of a true artist.