CHAPTER XXI
THE KING’S OATH—AN AUDIENCE
Leaving Wladivostok by the last Japanese steamer of the season, I spent two days at Wön-san, little changed, except that its background of mountains was snow-covered, that the Koreans were enriched by the extravagant sums paid for labor by the Japanese during the war, that business was active, and that Japanese sentries in wooden sentry-boxes guarded the peaceful streets. Twelve thousand Japanese troops had passed through Wön-san on their way to Phyöng-yang. At Fusan, my next point, there were 200 Japanese soldiers, new waterworks, and a military cemetery on a height, in which the number of graves showed an enormous Japanese mortality.
Reaching Chemulpo on 5th January, 1895, viâ Nagasaki, I found a singular contrast to the crowd, bustle, and excitement of the previous June. In the outer harbor there were two foreign warships only, in the inner three Japanese merchant steamers. The former predominant military element was represented by a few soldiers, ten large hospital sheds, and a crowded cemetery, in which the Japanese military dead lie in rows of 60, each grave marked by a wooden obelisk. The solid and crowded Chinese quarter, with its roaring trade, large shops, and noise of drums, gongs, and crackers, by day and night, was silent and deserted, and not a single Chinese was in the street as I went up to I-tai’s inn. One shop had ventured to reopen. At night, instead of throngs, noise, lights, and jollification, there was a solitary glimmer from behind a closed shutter. The Japanese occupation had been as destructive of that quarter of Chemulpo as a mediæval pestilence.
In the Japanese quarter and all along the shore the utmost activity prevailed. The beach was stacked with incoming and outgoing cargo. The streets were only just passable, not alone from the enormous traffic on bulls’ and coolies’ backs, but from the piles of beans and rice which were being measured and packed on the roadway. Prices were high, wages had more than doubled, “squeezing” was diminished, and the Koreans were working with a will.
I went up to Seoul on horseback, snow falling the whole time. So safe was the country that no escort was needed, and I rode as far as Oricol without even a mapu. The halfway house of my first visit was a Japanese post, and going to it in ignorance of the change, I was very kindly received by the Japanese soldiers, who gave me tea and a brazier of charcoal. The Seoul road, pegged out by Japanese surveyors for a railroad, was thickly sprinkled for the whole distance with laden men and bulls.
At Seoul I was the guest of Mr. Hillier, the British Consul-General, for five weeks. The weather was glorious, and the mercury sank on two occasions to 7° below zero, the lowest temperature on record. I received the warmest welcome from the kindly foreign community, and was steeped in Seoul life, the political and other interests growing upon me daily; and having a pony and a soldier at my disposal, I saw the city in all its turnings and windings, and the charming country outside the gates, and several of the Royal tombs with their fine trees, and avenues of stately stone figures.
The stagnation of the previous winter was at an end. Japan was in the ascendant. She had a large garrison in the capital, some of the leading men in the Cabinet were her nominees, her officers were drilling the Korean army, changes, if not improvements, were everywhere, and the air was thick with rumors of more to come. The King, whose Royal authority was nominally restored to him, accepted the situation, the Queen was credited with intriguing against the Japanese, but Count Inouye was acting as Japanese minister, and his firmness and tact kept everything smooth on the surface.
On the 8th of January, 1895, I witnessed a singular ceremony, which may have far-reaching results in Korean history. The Japanese having presented Korea with the gift of Independence, demanded that the King should formally and publicly renounce the suzerainty of China, and having resolved to cleanse the Augean stable of official corruption, they compelled him to inaugurate the task by proceeding in semi-state to the Altar of the Spirits of the Land, and there proclaiming Korean independence, and swearing before the spirits of his ancestors to the proposed reforms. His Majesty, by exaggerating a trivial ailment, had for some time delayed a step which was very repulsive to him, and even the day before the ceremony, a dream in which an Ancestral Spirit had appeared to him adjuring him not to depart from ancestral ways, terrified him from taking the proposed pledge.
But the spirit of Count Inouye proved more masterful than the Ancestral Spirit, and the oath was taken in circumstances of great solemnity in a dark pine wood, under the shadow of Puk Han, at the most sacred altar in Korea, in presence of the Court and the dignitaries of the kingdom. Old and serious men had fasted and mourned for two previous days, and in the vast crowd of white-robed and black-hatted men which looked down upon the striking scene from a hill in the grounds of the Mulberry Palace, there was not a smile or a spoken word. The sky was dark and grim, and a bitter east wind was blowing—ominous signs in Korean estimation.
The Royal procession, which had something of the aspect of the kur-dong, was shorn of the barbaric splendor which made that ceremonial one of the most imposing in the Eastern world. It was, in fact, barbaric with the splendor left out; and there were suggestions of a new era and a forthcoming swamping wave of Western civilization, in the presence within the Palace gates and in the procession of a few trim, dapper, blue-ulstered Japanese policemen, as the special protectors of the Home Minister Pak-Yöng-Ho, one of the revolutionaries of 1884, against whom there was a vow of vengeance, though the King had been compelled to pardon him, to reinstate his ancestors who had been degraded, to recall him from exile, and to confer upon him high office.