The concluding day’s march was through a pleasant country, though denuded of trees, and the approach to a great city was denoted by the number of villages, dæmon shrines, and refreshment booths on the road, the increased traffic, and eventually, by a long avenue of stone tablets, some of them under highly decorated roofs, recording the virtues of Phyöng-yang officials for 250 years!
The first view of Phyöng-yang delighted me. The city has a magnificent situation, taken advantage of with much skill, and at a distance merits the epithet “imposing.” It was a glorious afternoon. All the low ranges which girdle the rich plain through which the Tai-döng winds were blue and violet, melting into a blue haze, the crystal waters of the river were bluer still, brown-sailed boats drifted lazily with the stream, and above it the gray mass of the city rose into a dome of unclouded blue.
It is built on lofty ground rising abruptly from the river, above which a fine wall climbs picturesquely over irregular, but always ascending altitudes, till it is lost among the pines of a hill which overhangs the Tai-döng. The great double-roofed Tai-döng Mön (river gate), decorated pavilions on the walls, the massive curled roofs of the Governor’s yamen, a large Buddhist monastery and temple on a height, and a fine temple to the God of War, prominent objects from a distance, prepare one for something quite apart from the ordinary meanness of a Korean city.
Crossing the clear flashing waters of the Tai-döng with our ponies in a crowded ferryboat, we found ourselves in the slush of the dark Water Gate, at all hours of the day crowded with water-carriers. There are no wells in the city, the reason assigned for the deficiency being that the walls enclose a boat-shaped area, and that the digging of wells would cause the boat to sink! The water is carried almost entirely in American kerosene tins. I lodged at the house of a broker, and had nice clean rooms for myself and Im, quite quiet, and with a separate access from the street. It was truly a luxury to have roof, walls, and floor papered with thick oiled paper much resembling varnished oak, but there was no hot floor, and I had to rely for warmth solely on the “fire bowl.”
Taking a most diverting boy as my guide, I went outside the city wall, through some farming country to a Korean house in a very tumble-to-pieces compound, which he insisted was the dwelling of the American missionaries; but I only found a Korean family, and there were no traces of foreign occupation in glass panes let into the paper of the windows and doors. Nothing daunted, the boy pulled me through a smaller compound, opened a door, and pushed me into what was manifestly posing as a foreign room, gave me a chair, took one himself, and offered me a cigarette!
I had reached the right place. It was a very rough Korean room, about the length and width of a N.W. Railway saloon carriage. It had three camp-beds, three chairs, a trunk for a table, and a few books and writing materials, as well as a few articles of male apparel hanging on the mud walls. I waited more than an hour, every attempt at departure being forcibly as well as volubly resisted by the urchin, imagining the devotion which could sustain educated men year after year in such surroundings, and then they came in hilariously, and we had a most pleasant evening. I shall say more of them later. It was a weird walk through ruins which looked ghostly in the starlight to my curious quarters in the densest part of the city by the Water Gate, where at intervals through the night I heard the beat of the sorcerer’s drum and the shrieking chant of the mu-tang.
It may be taken for granted that every Korean winter day is splendid, but the following day in Phyöng-yang was heavenly. Three Koreans called on me in the morning, very courteous persons, but as Mr. Yi and I had parted company for a time on reaching the city, the interpretation was feeble, and we bowed and smiled, and smiled and bowed with tedious iteration without coming to much mutual understanding, and I was glad when the time came for seeing the city and battlefield under Mr. Moffett’s guidance.
On such an incomparable day everything looked at its very best, but also at its very worst, for the brilliant sunshine lit up desolations sickening to contemplate,—a prosperous city of 80,000 inhabitants reduced to decay and 15,000—four-fifths of its houses destroyed, streets and alleys choked with ruins, hill slopes and vales once thick with Korean crowded homesteads, covered with gaunt hideous remains—fragments of broken walls, kang floors, kang chimneys, indefinite heaps in which roofs and walls lay in unpicturesque confusion—and still worse, roofs and walls standing, but doors and windows all gone, suggesting the horror of human faces with their eyes put out. Everywhere there were the same scenes, miles of them, and very much of the desolation was charred and blackened, shapeless, hideous, hopeless, under the mocking sunlight.
Phyöng-yang was not taken by assault; there was no actual fighting in the city, both the Chinese who fled and the Japanese who occupied posed as the friends of Korea, and all this wreck and ruin was brought about not by enemies, but by those who professed to be fighting to give her independence and reform. It had gradually come to be known that the “wojen (dwarfs) did not kill Koreans,” hence many had returned. Some of these unfortunate fugitives were picking their way among the heaps, trying to find indications which might lead them to the spots where all they knew of home once existed; and here and there, where a family found their walls and roof standing, they put a door and window into one room and lived in it among the ruins of five or six.
When the Japanese entered and found that the larger part of the population had fled, the soldiers tore out the posts and woodwork, and often used the roofs also for fuel, or lighted fires on house floors, leaving them burning, when the houses took fire and perished. They looted the property left by the fugitives during three weeks after the battle, taking even from Mr. Moffett’s house $700 worth, although his servant made a written protest, the looting being sanctioned by the presence of officers. Under these circumstances the prosperity of the most prosperous city in Korea was destroyed. If such are the results of war in the “green tree,” what must they be in the “dry”?