The language of Korea is mixed. The educated classes introduce Chinese as much as possible into their conversation, and all the literature of any account is in that language, but it is of an archaic form, the Chinese of 1,000 years ago, and differs completely in pronunciation from Chinese as now spoken in China. En-mun, the Korean script, is utterly despised by the educated, whose sole education is in the Chinese classics. Korean has the distinction of being the only language of Eastern Asia which possesses an alphabet. Only women, children, and the uneducated used the En-mun till January, 1895, when a new departure was made by the official Gazette, which for several hundred years had been written in Chinese, appearing in a mixture of Chinese characters and En-mun, a resemblance to the Japanese mode of writing, in which the Chinese characters which play the chief part are connected by kana syllables.
A further innovation was that the King’s oath of Independence and Reform was promulgated in Chinese, pure En-mun, and the mixed script, and now the latter is regularly employed as the language of ordinances, official documents, and the Gazette; royal rescripts, as a rule, and despatches to the foreign representatives still adhering to the old form.
This recognition of the Korean language by means of the official use of the mixed, and in some cases of the pure script, the abolition of the Chinese literary examinations as the test of the fitness of candidates for office, the use of the “vulgar” script exclusively in the Independent, the new Korean newspaper, the prominence given to Korean by the large body of foreign missionaries, and the slow creation of scientific text-books and a literature in En-mun, are tending not only to strengthen Korean national feeling, but to bring the “masses,” who can mostly read their own script, into contact with Western science and forms of thought.
There is no national religion. Confucianism is the official cult, and the teachings of Confucius are the rule of Korean morality. Buddhism, once powerful, but “disestablished” three centuries ago, is to be met with chiefly in mountainous districts, and far from the main roads. Spirit worship, a species of shamanism, prevails all over the kingdom, and holds the uneducated masses and the women of all classes in complete bondage.
Christian missions, chiefly carried on by Americans, are beginning to produce both direct and indirect effects.
Ten years before the opening[3] of Korea to foreigners, the Korean king, in writing to his suzerain, the Emperor of China, said, “The educated men observe and practice the teachings of Confucius and Wen Wang,” and this fact is the key to anything like a correct estimate of Korea. Chinese influence in government, law, education, etiquette, social relations, and morals is predominant. In all these respects Korea is but a feeble reflection of her powerful neighbor; and though since the war the Koreans have ceased to look to China for assistance, their sympathies are with her, and they turn to her for noble ideals, cherished traditions, and moral teachings. Their literature, superstitions, system of education, ancestral worship, culture, and modes of thinking are Chinese. Society is organized on Confucian models, and the rights of parents over children, and of elder over younger brothers, are as fully recognized as in China.
It is into this archaic condition of things, this unspeakable grooviness, this irredeemable, unreformed Orientalism, this parody of China without the robustness of race which helps to hold China together, that the ferment of the Western leaven has fallen, and this feeblest of independent kingdoms, rudely shaken out of her sleep of centuries, half frightened and wholly dazed, finds herself confronted with an array of powerful, ambitious, aggressive, and not always overscrupulous powers, bent, it may be, on overreaching her and each other, forcing her into new paths, ringing with rude hands the knell of time-honored custom, clamoring for concessions, and bewildering her with reforms, suggestions, and panaceas, of which she sees neither the meaning nor the necessity.
And so “The old order changeth, giving place to new,” and many indications of the transition will be found in the later of the following pages.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The following are the measurements of 1,060 men taken at Seoul in January, 1897, by Mr. A. B. Stripling:—