The rainfall is abundant but not excessive, and the desolating floods which afflict Korea’s opposite neighbor, Japan, are as unknown as earthquakes. Irrigation is only necessary for rice, which is the staple of Korea. Except on certain rice lands, two crops a year are raised throughout central and southern Korea, the rice being planted in June, or rather transplanted from the nurseries in which it is sown in May, and is harvested early in October, when the ground is ploughed and barley or rye is sown, which ripens in May or early June of the next year, after which water is let in, the field is again ploughed while flooded, and the rice plants are set out in rows of “clumps,” two or four or even six plants in a “clump.” Where only one crop is raised, the rice field lies fallow from the end of October till the following May. In wheat, barley, or rye fields the sowing is in October, and the harvest in May or June, after which beans, peas, and other vegetables are sown. Along the “great roads,” as the crops approach ripeness, elevated watch-sheds are erected in the fields as safeguards against depredations. The crops, on the whole, are very fine, and would be immense were it not for the paucity of fertilizing material.
Agricultural implements are rude and few. A wooden ploughshare with a removable iron shoe is used which turns the furrows the reverse way to ours. A wooden spade, also shod with iron, is largely used for heavy work. This, which excites the ridicule of foreigners as a gratuitous waste of man power, is furnished with several ropes attached to the blade, each of which is jerked by a man while another man guides the blade into the ground by its long handle. The other implements are the same sort of sharp-pointed sharp hoe which is in use in China, and which in the hands of the eastern peasant fills the place of shovel, hoe, and spade, a reaping hook, a short knife, a barrow, and a bamboo rake which is largely used in the denudation of the hills.
Grain, peas, and beans are threshed out with flails as often as not in the roadway of a village, while the grinding of flour and the hulling of rice are accomplished by the stone quern, and the stone or wooden mortar, with an iron pestle worked by hand or foot, the “pang-a,” or, as has been previously described, by a “mul,” or water “pang-a.” Rice is threshed by beating the ears over a board, and all grain is winnowed by being thrown up in the wind.
The pony is not used in agriculture. Ploughing is done by the powerful, noble, tractable, Korean bull, a cane ring placed in his nostrils when young rendering him manageable even by a young child. He is four years in attaining maturity, and is now worth from £3 to £4, his value having been enhanced by the late war and the prevalence of rinderpest in recent years. Milk is not an article of diet. In some districts ox-sleds of very simple construction are used for bringing down fuel from the hills and produce from the fields, and at Seoul and a few other cities rude carts are to be seen; but ponies, men, and bulls are the means of transport for produce and goods, the loads being adjusted evenly on wooden pack saddles, or in the case of small articles in panniers of plaited straw or netted rope. In the latter, ingeniously made to open at the bottom and discharge their contents, manure is carried to the fields. Both bulls and ponies are shod with iron. The pony carries from 160 to 200 lbs. Sore backs are lamentably common.
The breed of pigs is very small. Pigs are always black and loathsome. Their bristles stand up along their backs, and they are lean, active, and of specially revolting habits. The dogs are big, usually buff, long-haired, and cowardly, and caricature the Scotch collie in their aspect. The fowls are plebeian, and for wildness, activity, and powers of flight are unequalled in my experience. Ducks are not very common, and geese are kept chiefly as guards, and for presentation at weddings as emblems of fidelity. The few sheep bred in Korea are reserved for Royal sacrifices. I have occasionally seen mutton on tables in Seoul, but it has been imported from Chefoo. The villages which make their living altogether by agriculture are usually off the high roads, those which the hasty traveller passes through depending as much on the entertaining of wayfarers as on the cultivation of the land. In these, nearly every house has a covered shelf in front at which food can be obtained, but lodging is not provided, and the villages which can feed and lodge beasts as well as men are few. The fact that the large farming villages are off the road gives an incorrect notion of the population of Korea.
On the slope of a hillside above a pleasant valley lies the town of An-byöng, once, judging from the extent of its decaying walls and fortifications, and the height of its canopied but ruinous gate towers, a large city. The yamen and other Government buildings are well kept, and being in good repair, are in striking contrast to those previously seen on the route. The “main street” is, however, nothing but a dirty alley. The town has a diminishing population, and though it makes some paper from the Brousonettia Papyrifera, and has several schools, and exchanges rice and beans for foreign cottons at Wön-san, it has a singularly decaying look, and is altogether unworthy of its position as being one of the chief places in the province of Ham-gyöng. Outside of it the road crosses a remarkably broad river bed by a bridge 720 feet long, so dilapidated that the ponies put their feet through its rotten sods several times.
From An-byöng to Ta-ri-mak, a short distance from Nam-San on the main road from Seoul to Wön-san, is a long and tedious ride through thinly peopled country and pine woods full of graves. We spent two nights there at a very noisy and disagreeable inn, in which privacy was unattainable and the vermin were appalling. There the host was specially unwilling to take in foreigners, on the ground that we should not pay, a suspicion which irritated our friendly mapu, who vociferated at the top of their voices that we paid “even for the smallest things we got.” The swinging season was at hand, each amusement having its definite date for beginning and ending, and in every village swings were being erected on tall straight poles. Wong could never resist the temptation of taking a swing, which always amused the people.
At this inn there were some musical performers who made both night and day wearisome to me, but gave great pleasure to others. I have not previously mentioned my sufferings on the Han from the sounds produced by itinerant musicians, and by the mu-tang or sorceress and her coadjutors; but, as has been forcibly brought out in a paper on Korean music by Mr. Hulbert in the Korean Repository,[21] the sounds are peculiar and unpleasing, because we neither know nor feel what they are intended to express, and we bring to Korean music not the Korean temperament and training but the Western, which demands “time” as an essential. It may be added that the Koreans, like their neighbors the Japanese, love our music as little as we love theirs, and for the same reason, that the ideas we express by it are unfamiliar to them.
One reason of the afflictive and discordant sounds is that the gamut of Korea differs from the musical scale of European countries, with the result that whenever music seems to be trembling on the verge of a harmony, a discord assails the ear. The musical instruments are many, but they are not carefully finished. Among instruments of percussion are drums, cymbals, gongs, and a species of castanet. For wind instruments there are unkeyed bugles, flutes, and long and short trumpets; and the stringed instruments are a large guitar, a twenty-five stringed guitar, a mandolin, and a five-stringed violin. The discord produced by a concert of several of these instruments is heard in perfection at the opening and closing of the gates of cities.
There are three classes of Korean vocal music, the first being the Si-jo or “classical” style, andante tremuloso, and “punctuated with drums,” the drum accompaniment consisting mainly of a drum beat from time to time as an indication to the vocalist that she has quavered long enough upon one note. The Si-jo is a slow process, and is said by the Koreans to require such long and patient practise that only the dancing girls can excel in it, as they alone have leisure to cultivate it. One branch of it deals with convivial songs, of one of which I give a translation from the gifted pen of the Rev. H. B. Hulbert of Seoul.[22]