After spending half a day at the prefectural town of Nang-chhön, where I am glad to record that the officials were very courteous, we ascended the Han to a point above the wild hamlet of Ut-Kiri, on a severe rapid full of jagged rocks. Ut-Kiri is above the head of low water navigation, but in two summer months during the rains small boats can reach Ku-mu-nio, “the last village,” 20 li higher. It was a wild termination of the long boat journey. An abrupt turn of the river, and its monotonous prettiness is left behind, and there is a superb mountain view of saddleback ridges and lofty gray peaks surrounding a dark expanse of water, with a margin of gray boulders and needles of gray rock draped with the Ampelopsis, a yellow clematis, and a white honeysuckle. It was somewhat sad not to be able to penetrate the grim austerity to the northward, but the rapids were so severe and the water ofttimes so shallow that it was impossible to drag the sampan farther, though at that time she only drew 2 inches of water. From Ma-chai on the forks she had been poled and dragged up forty rapids, making eighty-six on the whole journey.
From the thinly peopled solitudes of these upper waters we descended rapidly, though not without some severe bumps, to the populous river banks, where villages are half hidden among orchards and chestnut and mulberry groves, and the crops are heavy, and that abundance of the necessaries of life which in Korea passes for prosperity is the rule.
Ta-rai, a neat, prosperous place of 240 people, among orchards, and hillsides terraced and bearing superb crops, is an example of the riverine villages. Its houses are built step above step along the sides of a ravine, down which a perennial stream flows, affording water power for an automatic rice hulling machine. For exports and imports the Han at high water is a cheap and convenient highway. The hill slopes above the village, with their rich soil, afford space for agricultural expansion for years to come. And not to dwell altogether on the material, there is a shrine of much repute on a fork-like slope near the river. It contains a group of mirioks, in this case stones worn by the action of water into the semblance of human beings. The central figure, larger than life, may even to a dull imagination represent a person carrying an infant, and its eyes, nose, and mouth are touched in with China ink. It is surrounded by Phallic symbols and mirioks, which may be supposed to represent children, and women make prayers and offerings in this shrine in the hope of obtaining a much coveted increase in their families, for male children are still regarded as a blessing in Korea, and “happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.”
Ka-phyöng again, a small prefectural town of 400 houses 1¹⁄₂ miles from the river, is a good specimen of the small towns of the Han valley, with a ruinous yamen, of course, with its non-producing mob of hangers-on. It is on the verge of an alluvial plain, rolling up to picturesque hills, gashed by valleys, abounding in hamlets surrounded by chestnut groves and careful cultivation. The slopes above Ka-phyöng break up into knolls richly wooded with conifers and hard-wood trees, fringing off into clumps and groups which would not do discredit to the slopes of Windsor. The people of a large district bring their produce into the town, and barter it for goods in the market. The telegraph wire to Wön-san crosses the affluent on which Ka-phyöng is built, and is carried along a bridle path which for some li runs along the river bank. Junks loaded 10 feet above their gunwales, as well as 4 feet outside of them with firewood, and large rafts were waiting for the water to rise. Boats were being built and great quantities of the strong rope used for towing and other purposes, which is made from a “creeper” which grows profusely in Central Korea, were awaiting water carriage. Yet Ka-phyöng, like other small Korean towns, has no life or go. Its “merchants” are but pedlars, its commercial ideas do not rise above those of the huckster, and though poverty, as we understand it, is unknown, prosperity as we understand it is absent. There are no special industries in any of the riverine towns, and if they were all to disappear in some catastrophe it would not cause a ripple on the surface of the general commercial apathy of the country.
Similar remarks apply to the prefectural town of Nang-chhön, where we again wasted some hours, while Kim’s rice was first bargained for and then cleaned. At that point there is a fine deep stretch of the river 230 yards broad abounding in fish. From Nang-chhön we dropped down the Han to a deep and pretty bay on which the small village of Paik-kui Mi is situated, where we halted for Sunday, our last day in the sampan, which had been a not altogether comfortless home for five weeks and a half.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Class privileges are now abolished, on paper at least, but their tradition carries weight.
CHAPTER IX
KOREAN MARRIAGE CUSTOMS
Paik-kui Mi was not without a certain degree of life on that Sunday. A yang-ban’s steward impressed boats for the gratuitous carriage of tiles to Seoul, which caused a little feeble excitement among the junkmen. There was a sick person, and a mu-tang or female exorcist was engaged during the whole day in the attempt to expel the malevolent dæmon which was afflicting him, the process being accompanied by the constant beating of a drum and the loud vibrating sound of large cymbals. Lastly, there was a marriage, and this deserves more than a passing notice, marriage, burial, and exorcism, with their ceremonials, being the outstanding features of Korea.[18]
The Korean is nobody until he is married. He is a being of no account, a “hobbledehoy.” The wedding-day is the entrance on respectability and manhood, and marks a leap upwards on the social ladder. The youth, with long abundant hair divided in the middle and plaited at the back, wearing a short, girdled coat, and looking as if he had no place in the world though he may be quite grown up, and who is always taken by strangers for a girl, is transformed by the formal reciprocal salutations which constitute the binding ceremony of marriage. He has received the tonsure, and the long hair surrounding it is drawn into the now celebrated “topknot.” He is invested with the mangan, a crownless skullcap or fillet of horsehair, without which, thereafter, he is never seen. He wears a black hat and a long full coat, and his awkward gait is metamorphosed into a dignified swing. His boy companions have become his inferiors. His name takes the equivalent of “Mr.” after it; honorifics must be used in addressing him—in short, from being a “nobody” he becomes a “somebody.”