The charges at Korean inns are ridiculously low. Nothing is charged for the room with its glim and hot floor, but as I took nothing for “the good of the house,” I paid 100 cash per night, and the same for my room at the midday halt, which gave complete satisfaction. Travellers who eat three meals a day spend, including the trifling gratuities, from 200 to 300 cash per diem. Millet takes the place of rice in the northern inns.
The Korean inn is not noisy unless wine is flowing freely, and even then the noise subsides early. The fighting of the ponies, and the shouts and execrations with which the mapu pacify them, are the chief disturbances till daylight comes and the wayfarers move on. Travelling after dark is contrary to Korean custom.
From this slight sketch, the shadows of which will bear frequent and much intensifying, it will be seen that Korean travelling has a very seamy side, that it is entirely unsuited to the “globe trotter,” and that even the specialist may do well to count the cost before embarking upon it.
To me the curse of the Korean inn is the ill-bred and unmanageable curiosity of the people, specially of the women. A European woman had not been seen on any part of the journey, and I suffered accordingly. Sar-pang Kori may serve as a specimen.
My quarters were opposite to the ponies, on the other side of the foul and crowded courtyard. There were two rooms, with a space under the roof as large as either between them, on which the dripping baggage was deposited, and Wong established himself with his cooking stove and utensils, though there was nothing to cook except two eggs obtained with difficulty, and a little rice left over from the boat stores. My room had three paper doors. The unwalled space at once filled up with a crowd of men, women, and children. All the paper was torn off the doors, and a crowd of dirty Mongolian faces took its place. I hung up cambric curtains, but long sticks were produced and my curtains were poked into the middle of the room. The crowd broke in the doors, and filled the small space not occupied by myself and my gear. The women and children sat on my bed in heaps, examined my clothing, took out my hairpins and pulled down my hair, took off my slippers, drew my sleeves up to the elbow and pinched my arms to see if they were of the same flesh and blood as their own; they investigated my few possessions minutely, trying on my hat and gloves, and after being turned out by Wong three times, returned in fuller force, accompanied by unmarried youths, the only good-looking “girls” ever seen in Korea, with abundant hair divided in the middle, and hanging in long plaits down their backs. The pushing and crushing, the odious familiarity, the babel of voices, and the odors of dirty clothing in a temperature of 80°, were intolerable. Wong cleared the room a fourth time, and suggested that when they forced their way in again, they should find me sitting on the bed cleaning my revolver, a suggestion I accepted. He had hardly retired when they broke in again, but there was an immediate stampede, and for the remainder of the evening I was free from annoyance. Similar displays of aggressive and intolerable curiosity occurred three times daily, and it was hard to be always amiable under such circumstances.
The Koreans travel enormously, considering that they seldom make pilgrimages. The pedlars, who solely supply the markets, are always on the move, and thousands travel for other reasons, such as the gatherings at ancestral tablets, restlessness, ennui, ku-kyöng or sightseeing, visits to tombs, place-hunting, literary examinations, place-keeping and attempting to deprive others of place, litigation, and business. The fear of tigers and dæmons prevents people from journeying by night, which is as well, as the bearers of official passports have the right to demand an escort of torchbearers from each village. If necessity compels nocturnal travel, the wayfarers associate themselves in bands, swinging lanterns, waving torches, yelling, and beating gongs. The dread of the tiger is so universal as to warrant the Chinese proverbial saying, “The Korean hunts the tiger one half of the year, and the tiger hunts the Korean the other half.” As I have before remarked, the mandarins and yang-bans, with their trains, quarter themselves on the magistracies, and eat the fat of the land. Should they be compelled to have recourse to the discomforts of an inn and the food of a village, they appropriate the best of everything without paying for it. Hence the visit of a foreigner armed with a kwan-ja is such an object of dread, that on this land journey I never let it be known that I had one, and on my second journey discarded it altogether, trusting in both to the reputation for scrupulous honesty which I at once established with my men to overcome the repugnance which the innkeepers felt to receiving me.
The roads along which the traveller rides or trudges, at a pace, in either case, of 3 miles an hour, are simply infamous. There are few made roads, and those which exist are deep in dust in summer and in mud in winter, where they are not polished tracks over irregular surfaces and ledges of rock. In most cases they are merely paths worn by the passage of animals and men into some degree of legibility. Many of the streams are unbridged, and most of the bridges, the roadways of which are only of twigs and sod, are carried away by the rains of early July, and are not restored till the middle of October. In some regions traffic has to betake itself to fords or ferries when it reaches a stream, with their necessary risks and detentions. Even on the “Six Great Roads” which centre in the capital, the bridges are apt to be in such a rotten condition that a mapu usually goes over in advance of his horses to ascertain if they will bear their weight. Among the mountains, roads are frequently nothing else than boulder-strewn torrent beds, and on the best, that between Seoul and Chemulpo, during the winter, there are tracts on which the mud is from one to three feet deep. These infamous bridle tracks, of which I have had extensive experience, are one of the great hindrances to the development of Korea.
Among the worst of these is that part of the main road from Seoul to Wön-san which we followed from Sar-pang Kori for two days to Sang-nang Dang, where we branched off for the region known as Keum-Kang San, or the Diamond Mountain. The earlier part of this route was through wooded valleys, where lilies of the valley carpeted the ground, and over the very pretty pass of Chyu-pha (1,300 feet), on the top of which is a large spirit shrine, containing some coarsely painted pictures of men who look like Chinese generals, the usual offerings of old shoes, rags, and infinitesimal portions of rice, and a tablet inscribed, “I, the spirit Söng-an-chi, dwell in this place.” There, as at the various trees hung with rags, and the heaps of stones on the tops of passes, the mapu bowed and expectorated, as is customary at the abodes of dæmons.
More than once we passed not far from houses outside of which the mu-tang or sorceress, with much feasting, beating of drums, and clashing of cymbals, was exercising the dæmon which had caused the sickness of some person within. Portions of the expensive feast prepared on these occasions are offered to the evil spirit, and after the exorcism part of the food so offered is given to the patient, in the belief that it is a curative medicine, often seriously aggravating the disease, as when a patient suffering from typhoid fever or dysentery is stuffed with pork or kimshi! Recently a case came under the notice of Dr. Jaisohn (So Chai pil) in Seoul, in which a man, suffering from the latter malady, died immediately after eating raw turnips, given him by the mu-tang after being offered to the dæmons at the usual feast at the ceremony of exorcism.
There is much wet rice along the route, as well as dry rice, with a double line of beans between every two rows, and in the rice revel and croak large frogs of extreme beauty, vivid green with black velvet spots, the under side of the legs and bodies being cardinal red. These appeared to be the prey of the graceful white and pink ibis, the latter in the intensified flush of his spring coloring.