At Hoa-chung we turned eastwards, and took the main road to the coast, attaining an altitude (uncorrected) of 3,117 feet by continued ascents over rounded hills, which, when not absolutely bare except for coarse, unlovely grasses, only produced stunted hazel bush. After this an easy ascent among absolutely denuded hills leads up to a spirit shrine of more than usual importance, crowded with the customary worthless ex votos, rags and old straw shoes. At that point the road makes an altogether unexpected and surprising plunge over the bare shoulders of a bare hill into Paradise!
This pass of the “Ninety-nine Turns,” Tchyu-Chi-chang, deserves its name, the number of sharp zigzags not being exaggerated, as in the case of the “Twelve Thousand Peaks.” It is so absolutely rocky, and so difficult in consequence, that it is more passable in snow than in summer. Its abrupt turns lead down a forest-clothed mountain ridge into a magnificent gorge, densely wooded with oak, Spanish chestnut, weeping lime, Abies excelsa, and magnolia, looped together with the white mille-fleur rose. On the northern side rises Hoang-chyöng San, a noble mountain and conspicuous landmark, much broken up into needles and precipices, and clothed nearly to its summit with forests, of which the Pinus sylvestris is the monarch. The descent of the pass takes one hour and a half, the road coming down upon a torrent 50 feet wide, only visible in glints of foam here and there, amid its smothering overgrowth of blossoming magnolia, syringa, and roses.
The filthy, miserable hamlet of Chyung-Tai, composed of five hovels, all inns, was rather a comfortless close to a fatiguing day. These houses are roofed, as in some other villages, with thick slabs of wood heaped on each other, kept on, so far as they are kept on, by big stones. The forest above on the mountains is a Royal reservation, made so by the first king of this dynasty, who built stone walls round the larger trees.
I had occasion to notice at Chyung-Tai, and in many other places, the extreme voracity of the Koreans. They eat not to satisfy hunger, but to enjoy the sensation of repletion. The training for this enjoyment begins at a very early age, as I had several opportunities of observing. A mother feeds her young child with rice, and when it can eat no more in an upright position, lays it on its back on her lap and feeds it again, tapping its stomach from time to time with a flat spoon to ascertain if further cramming is possible. “The child is father to the man,” and the adult Korean shows that he has reached the desirable stage of repletion by eructations, splutterings, slapping his stomach, and groans of satisfaction, looking round with a satisfied air. A quart of rice, which when cooked is of great bulk, is a laborer’s meal, but besides there are other dishes, which render its insipidity palatable. Among them are pounded capsicum, soy, various native sauces of abominable odors, kimshi, a species of sour kraut, seaweed, salt fish, and salted seaweed fried in batter. The very poor only take two meals a day, but those who can afford it take three and four.
In this respect of voracity all classes are alike. The great merit of a meal is not so much quality as quantity, and from infancy onwards one object in life is to give the stomach as much capacity and elasticity as is possible, so that four pounds of rice daily may not incommode it. People in easy circumstances drink wine and eat great quantities of fruit, nuts, and confectionery in the intervals between meals, yet are as ready to tackle the next food as though they had been starving for a week. In well-to-do houses beef and dog are served on large trenchers, and as each guest has his separate table, a host can show generosity to this or that special friend without helping others to more than is necessary. I have seen Koreans eat more than three pounds of solid meat at one meal. Large as a “portion” is, it is not unusual to see a Korean eat three and even four, and where people abstain from these excesses it may generally be assumed that they are too poor to indulge in them. It is quite common to see from twenty to twenty-five peaches or small melons disappear at a single sitting, and without being peeled. There can be no doubt that the enormous consumption of red pepper, which is supplied even to infants, helps this gluttonous style of eating. It is not surprising that dyspepsia and kindred evils are very common among Koreans.
The Korean is omnivorous. Dog meat is in great request at certain seasons, and dogs are extensively bred for the table. Pork, beef, fish, raw, dried, and salted, the intestines of animals, all birds and game, no part being rejected, are eaten—a baked fowl, with its head, claws, and interior intact, being the equivalent of “the fatted calf.” Cooking is not always essential. On the Han I saw men taking fish off the hook, and after plunging them into a pot of red pepper sauce, eating them at once with their bones. Wheat, barley, maize, millet, the Irish and sweet potato, oats, peas, beans, rice, radishes, turnips, herbs, and wild leaves and roots innumerable, seaweed, shrimps, pastry made of flour, sugar, and oil, kimshi, on the making of which the whole female population of the middle and lower classes is engaged in November, a homemade vermicelli of buckwheat flour and white of egg, largely made up into a broth, soups, dried persimmons, sponge-cakes, cakes of the edible pine nut and honey, of flour, sugar, and sesamum seeds, onions, garlic, lily bulbs, chestnuts, and very much else are eaten. Oil of sesamum is largely used in cooking, as well as vinegar, soy, and other sauces of pungent and objectionable odors, the basis of most of them being capsicums and fermented rotten beans!
The magistracy of Thong-chhön, where we halted the next day at noon, and where the curiosity of the people was absolutely suffocating, is a town sheltered from the sea, which is within 2 miles, by a high ridge, and is situated prettily in a double fold of hills remarkable for the artistic natural grouping of very grand pines.
At this point a spell of the most severe heat of the year set in, and the remainder of the journey was accomplished in a temperature ranging from 89° to 100° in the shade, and seldom falling below 80° at night, phenomenal heat for the first days of June. Taking advantage of it, the whole male population was in the fields rice planting. Rice valleys, reaching the unusual magnitude for Korea of from 3 to 7 miles in breadth, and from 6 to 14 miles in length, sloping gently to the sea, with innumerable villages on the slopes of the hills which surround them, were numerous. Among them I saw, for the only time, reservoirs for the storage of water for irrigation. The pink ibis and the spotted green frog were abundant everywhere. The country there has a look of passable prosperity, but the people are kept at a low level by official exactions.
On this coast of Kong-wön-Do are the P’al-kyöng or “Eight Views,” which are of much repute in Korea. We passed two of them. Su-chung Dai (The Place Between the Waters) is a narrow strip of elevated white sand with the long roll of the Pacific on the east, and the gentle plash of a lovely fresh-water lake on the west. This lake of Ma-cha Töng, the only body of fresh water which I saw in Korea, about 6 miles in length by 2 in breadth, has mountainous shores much broken by bays and inlets, at the head of each of which is a village half hidden among trees in the folds of the hills, while wooded conical islets break the mirror of the surface. On the white barrier of sand there are some fine specimens of the red-stemmed Pinus sylvestris, with a carpet of dwarf crimson roses and pink lilies. Among the mountain forests are leopards, tigers, and deer, and the call of the pheasant and the cooing of the wild dove floated sweetly from the lake shore. It was an idyll of peace and beauty. The other of the “Eight Views” is rather a curiosity than a beauty, miles of cream-colored sand blown up in wavy billows as high as the plumy tops of thousands of fir trees which are helplessly embedded in it.
During the long hot ride of eleven hours, visions of the evening halt at a peaceful village on the seashore filled my mind, and hope made the toilsome climb over several promontories of black basalt tolerable, even though the descents were so steep that the mapu held the ponies up by their tails! In the early twilight, when the fierce sun blaze was over, in the smoky redness of a heated evening atmosphere, when every rock was giving forth the heat it had absorbed in the day, across the stream which is at once the outlet of the lake and the boundary between the provinces of Kang-wön and Ham-gyöng, appeared a large, straggling, gray-roofed village, above high-water mark, on a beach of white sand. Several fishing junks were lying in shelter at the mouth of the stream. Women were beating clothes and drawing water, and children and dogs were rolling over each other on the sand, all more or less idealized by being silhouetted in purple against the hot, lurid sky.