The great gate is approached by an avenue of trees, and the road is lined with seun-tjeung-pi, monuments to good governors and magistrates, faithful widows, and pious sons. A wide street, its apparent width narrowed by two rows of thatched booths, divides the city. It was a scene of bustle, activity, and petty trade, something like a fair. The women wear white sheets gathered round their heads and nearly reaching their feet. The street was thronged with men in huge hats and very white clothing, with boy bridegrooms in pink garments and the quaint yellow hats which custom enjoins for several months after marriage, and with mourners dressed in sackcloth from head to foot, the head and shoulders concealed by peaked and scalloped hats, the identity being further disguised by two-handled sackcloth screens, held up to their eyes. In thatched stalls on low stands and on mats on the ground were all Korean necessaries and luxuries, among which were large quantities of English piece goods, and hacked pieces of beef with the blood in it, Korean killed meat being enough to make any one a vegetarian. Goats are killed by pulling them to and fro in a narrow stream, which method is said to destroy the rank taste of the flesh; dogs by twirling them in a noose until they are unconscious, after which they are bled. I have already inflicted on my readers an account of the fate of a bullock at Korean hands. It was a busy, dirty, poor, mean scene under the hot sun.
The Song-do inns are bad, and a friend of Mr. Yi kindly lent me a house, partly in ruins, but with two rooms which sheltered Im and myself, and in this I spent two pleasant days in lovely weather, Mr. Yi, who was visiting friends, escorting me to the Song-do sights, which may be seen in one morning, and to pay visits in some of the better-class houses. My quarters, though by comparison very comfortable, would not at home be considered fit for the housing of a better-class cow! But Korea has a heavenly climate for much of the year. The squalor, dust, and rubbish in my compound and everywhere were inconceivable, though the city is rather a “well-to-do” one. The water supply is atrocious, offal and refuse of all kinds lying up to the mouths of the wells. It says something for the security of Korea that a foreign lady could safely live in a dwelling up a lonely alley in the heart of a big city, with no attendant but a Korean soldier knowing not a word of English, who, had he been so minded, might have cut my throat and decamped with my money, of which he knew the whereabouts, neither my door nor the compound having any fastening!
Points of interest in a Korean city are few, and the ancient capital is no exception to the rule. There is a fine bronze bell with curiously involved dragons in one of the gate towers, cast five centuries ago, an archery ground with official pavilions on a height with a superb view, the Governor’s yamen, once handsome, now ruinous, with Japanese sentries, a dismal temple to Confucius, and a showy one to the God of War. Outside the crowd and bustle of the city, reached by a narrow path among prosperous ginseng farms and persimmon-embowered hamlets, are the lonely remains of the palace of the Kings who reigned in Korea prior to the dynasty of which the present sovereign is the representative, and even in their forlornness they give the impression that the Korean Kings were much statelier monarchs then than now.
The remains consist of an approach to the main platform on which the palace stood, by two subsidiary platforms, the first reached by a nearly obliterated set of steps. Four staircases 15 feet wide, of thirty steps each, lead to a lofty artificial platform, faced with hewn stone in great blocks, 14 feet high, and by rough measurement 846 feet in length. On the east side there are massive abutments. On the west the platform broadens irregularly. At the entrance, 80 feet wide, at the top of the steps, there are the bases of columns suggestive of a very stately approach. The palace platform is intersected by massive stone foundations of halls and rooms, some of large area. It is backed by a pine-clothed knoll, and is prettily situated in an amphitheatre of hills.
Song-do as a royal city, and as one of the so-called fortresses for the protection of the capital, still retains many ancient privileges. It is a bustling business town, and a great centre of the grain trade. It has various mercantile guilds with their places of business, small shops built round compounds with entrance gates. It makes wooden shoes, coarse pottery and fine matting, and imports paper, which it manufactures with sesamum oil into the oil paper for which Korea is famous, and which is made into cloaks, umbrellas, tobacco-pouches, and sheets for walls and floors. In answer to many inquiries, I learned that trade had improved considerably since the war, but the native traders now have to compete with fourteen Japanese shops, and to suffer the presence of forty Japanese residents.
I have left until the last the commodity for which Song-do is famous, and which is the chief source of its prosperity—ginseng. Panax Ginseng or quinquefolia (?) is, as its name imports, a “panacea.” No one can be in the Far East for many days without hearing of this root and its virtues. No drug in the British Pharmacopœia rivals with us the estimation in which this is held by the Chinese. It is a tonic, a febrifuge, a stomachic, the very elixir of life, taken spasmodically or regularly in Chinese wine by most Chinese who can afford it. It is one of the most valuable articles which Korea exports, and one great source of its revenue. In the steamer in which I left Chemulpo there was a consignment of it worth $140,000. But valuable as the cultivated root is, it is nothing to the value of the wild, which grows in Northern Korea, a single specimen of which has been sold for £40! It is chiefly found in the Kang-ge Mountains; but it is rare, and the search so often ends in failure, that the common people credit it with magical properties, and believe that only men of pure lives can find it.
The ginseng season was at its height. People talked, thought, and dreamed ginseng, for the risks of its six or seven years’ growth were over, and the root was actually in the factory. I went to several ginseng farms, and also saw the different stages of the manufacturing process, and received the same impression as in Siberia, that if industry were lucrative, and the Korean were sure of his earnings, he would be an industrious and even a thrifty person.
All round Song-do are carefully fenced farms on which ginseng is grown with great care and exquisite neatness on beds 18 inches wide, 2 feet high, and neatly bordered with slates. It is sown in April, transplanted in the following spring, and again in three years into specially prepared ground, not recently cultivated, and which has not been used for ginseng culture for seven years. Up to the second year the plant has only two leaves. In the fourth year it is six inches high with four leaves, standing out at right angles from the stalk. It reaches maturity in the sixth or seventh year. During its growth it is sheltered from both wind and sun by well-made reed roofs with blinds, which are raised or lowered as may be required. When the root is taken up it is known as “white ginseng,” and is bought by merchants, who get it “manufactured,” about 3¹⁄₄ catties of the fresh root making one cattie of “red” or commercial ginseng. The grower pays a tax of 20 cents per cattie, and the merchant 16 dollars a cattie for the root as received from the manufacturer.
The annual time of manufacture depends on orders given by the Government. The growers and merchants make the most profit when the date is early. Only two manufacturers are licensed, and one hundred and fifty growers. The quantity to be manufactured is also limited. In 1895 it was 15,000 catties of red ginseng and 3,000 of “beards.” The terms “beards” and “tails” are used to denote different parts of the root, which eventually has a grotesque resemblance to a headless man! It is possible that this likeness is the source of some of the almost miraculous virtues which are attributed to it. Everything about the factories is scrupulously clean, and would do credit to European management. The row of houses used by what we should call the excisemen are well built and comfortable. There are two officials sent from Seoul by the Agricultural Department for the “season,” with four policemen and two attendants, whose expenses are paid by the manufacturers, and each step of the manufacture and the egress of the workmen are carefully watched. Mr. Yi was sent by the Customs to make special inquiries in connection with the revenue derived.
Ginseng is steamed for twenty-four hours in large earthen jars over iron pots built into furnaces, and is then partially dried in a room kept at a high temperature by charcoal. The final drying is effected by exposing the roots in elevated flat baskets to the rays of the bright winter sun. The human resemblance survives these processes, but afterwards the “beards” and “tails,” used chiefly in Korea, are cut off, and the trunk, from 3 to 4 inches long, looks like a piece of clouded amber. These trunks are carefully picked over, and being classified according to size, are neatly packed in small oblong baskets containing about five catties each, twelve or fourteen of these being packed in a basket, which is waterproofed and matted, and stamped and sealed by the Agricultural Department as ready for exportation. A basket, according to quality, is worth from $14,000 to $20,000! In a good season the grower makes about fifteen times his outlay. Ginseng was a Royal monopoly, but times have changed. This medicine, which has such a high and apparently partially deserved reputation throughout the Far East, does not suit Europeans, and is of little account with European doctors.