An abbot, framed in the doorway of a quaint building, and looking like a picture of a portly, jolly, mediæval friar, welcomed us, and he and his monks regaled us with honey water in the large guest hall, but simultaneously produced a visitors’ book and asked us how much we were going to pay, the sum being duly recorded. The grasping ways of these monks, who fleeced the mapu so badly as to make them say they “had fallen among thieves,” contrast with the friendly hospitality of their brethren of the Diamond Mountain, and can only be accounted for by the contaminating influences of a treaty port, from which they are distant only a long day’s journey!
“See the sights first and then pay,” they said, the glorious views and the quaint picturesqueness of the monastic buildings clustering on the crags above the cataracts being the sight par excellence. It was refreshing to turn from the contemplation of the sensual, acquisitive, greedy faces of most of the monks to Nature at her freshest and fairest, on one of the loveliest days of early June.
The interiors of the temples are shabby and dirty, the paint is scaling off the roofs, and the floors and even the altars were hidden under layers of herbs drying for kitchen use. Besides the tablet to the first king of the present dynasty in a handsome tablet-house, the noteworthy “sight” to be seen is a small temple dedicated to the “Five Hundred Disciples.” Sök-wang Sa is not a holy place, and the artist who caricatured the devout and ascetic followers of the ascetic Sakymuni has bequeathed a legacy of unhallowed suggestion to its inmates!
The “Five Hundred” are stone images not a foot in height, arranged round the dusty temple in several tiers, each one with a silk cap on, worn with more or less of a jaunty air on one side of the head or falling over the brow. The variety of features and expression is wonderful; all Eastern nationalities are represented, and there are not two faces or attitudes alike. The whole display shows genius, though not of a high order.
Among the infinite variety, one figure has deeply set eyes, an aquiline nose, and thin lips; another a pug nose, squinting eyes, and a broad grinning mouth; one is Mongolian, another Caucasian, and another approximates to the Negro type. Here is a stout, jolly fellow, with a leer and a broad grin suggestive of casks of porter and the archaic London drayman; there is an idiot with drooping head, receding brow and chin, and a vacant stare; here again is a dark stage villain, with red cheeks and a cap drawn low over his forehead; then Mr. Pecksniff confronts one with an air of sanctimoniousness obviously difficult to retain; Falstaff outdoes his legendary jollity; and priests and monks of all nations leer at the beholders from under their jaunty caps. It is an exhibition of unsanctified genius. Nearly all the figures look worse for drink, and fatuous smiles, drunken leers, and farcical grins are the rule, the effect of all being aggravated by the varied and absurd arrangements of the caps. The grotesqueness is indescribable, and altogether “unedifying.”
It was a great change to get on the broad main road to Wön-san, and to see telegraph poles once more. There was plenty of goods and passenger traffic across the fine plain covered with rice and grain, margined by bluffs, and dotted with what have obviously once been islands, near which Wön-san is situated.
Where the road is broad, a high heap of hardened mud runs along the centre, with hardened mud corrugations on either side; where narrow, it is merely the top of a rice dyke. The bridges are specially infamous; in fact, they were so rotten that the mapu would not trust their ponies upon them, and we forded all the streams. Yet this road, which I found equally bad at the three points at which I touched it, is one of the leading thoroughfares by which goods pass from the east to the west coast and vice versa,—tobacco, copper, salt fish, seaweed, galena, and hides from the east, and foreign shirtings, watches, and miscellaneous native and foreign articles from the west.
The heat of the sun was but poorly indicated by a shade temperature of 84°, and it was in his full noontide fierceness that we reached the huddle of foul and narrow alleys and irregular rows of thatched shops along the high-road which make up the busy and growing Korean town of Wön-san, which, with an estimated population of 15,000 people, lies along a strip of beach below a pine-clothed bluff and ranges of mountains, then green to their summits, but which I saw in December of the same year in the majesty of the snow which covers them from November to May. The smells were fearful, the dirt abominable, and the quantity of wretched dogs and of pieces of bleeding meat blackening in the sun perfectly sickening. This aspect of meat, produced by the mode of killing it, has made foreigners entirely dependent on the Japanese butchers in Seoul and elsewhere. The Koreans cut the throat of the animal and insert a peg in the opening. Then the butcher takes a hatchet and beats the animal on the rump until it dies. The process takes about an hour, and the beast suffers agonies of terror and pain before it loses consciousness. Very little blood is lost during the operation; the beef is full of it, and its heavier weight in consequence is to the advantage of the vendor.
Then came a level stretch of about a mile, much planted with potatoes, glimpses of American Protestant mission-houses in conspicuous and eligible positions (eligible, that is, for everything but mission work), and the uneven Korean road glided imperceptibly into a broad gravel road, fringed on both sides with neat wooden houses standing in gardens, which gradually thickened into the neatest, trimmest, and most attractive town in all Korea, the Japanese settlement of the treaty port of Wön-san, opened to Japanese trade in 1880 and to foreign trade generally in 1883.
Broad and well-kept streets, neat wharves, trim and fairly substantial houses, showing the interior dollishness and daintiness characteristic of Japan, a large and very prominent Japanese Consulate in Anglo-Japanese style, the offices of the “N.Y.K.,” the Japan Mail Steamship Company (an abbreviation as familiar to residents in the Far East as “P. & O.”), a Japanese Bank of solid reputation, Customs’ buildings, of which a neat reading-room forms a part, neat Japanese shops where European articles can be bought at moderate prices, a large schoolhouse, with a teacher in European dress, and active manikins and hobbling but graceful women, neither veiled nor muffled up, are the features of this pleasant Japanese colony, which is so fortunate as to have no history, its progress, though not rapid, having been placid and peaceful, not marred by friction either with Koreans or foreigners of other nationalities; and even the recent war, though it led to the removal of the Chinese consul and his countrymen, an insignificant fraction of the population, had left no special traces, except that the enormous wages paid to transport coolies by the Japanese had enabled them to gamble with yen instead of cash!