Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

Each Korean province is under arms one year out of seven. The selected soldiers of the province (in Korea, warriorship is a matter of the king’s selection, not of the soldier’s election) are equipped, robed, drilled, paraded, and made generally presentable upon the picturesque, flower-dotted, and bloodless battle-fields of Korea’s martial pageantries. They take their turns in going up to Söul, these impromptu, but for all that, well-rehearsed fighting men. When they get to Söul they there invariably act well their parts. The beginning and the end of their duty are included in ceremonial functions; and the breath of ceremony is the only air that can fully inflate the lungs of any self-respecting Asian. “No man is a hero to his own valet,” we say lightly. But the peoples of the Orient take the great truth of this adage very seriously, almost grimly. They realize that the only divinity that can really hedge a king from the degrading familiarity of his subjects is the divinity of purple and fine linen, the blare of trumpets. In brief, the people (in Asia or in Europe) love a show, and the king who would sit staunchly enthroned upon the hearts, not to mention the intellects, of his people, must be followed by a train of supers as long, and as splendidly clad, as well-trained—and perhaps as meaningless—as those who make the pit of a London theatre appreciate the more clearly the regal glory of Henry the Eighth, of Arthur the deceived, and of that other Henry with whom Becket quarrelled.

But in Korea’s martial comedy there are actors who are never out of the bill. Over each province a general presides, who has under him from three to six colonels; each colonel is the military master of several captains; each captain is the Mars of a city, a castle, a town, or some other fortified place. Even the Korean villages are protected (Japan and China, save the mark!) by a corporal. Under the corporal are petty officers; under the petty officers are soldiers, so-called.

There is one admirable thing about the Korean army. Its books are well kept, and the King of Korea can always tell to the moment how many fighting men are at his disposal. If only they could fight! Or, if only they had no need to fight!

Bows and arrows are conspicuous among the implements of the Korean army. They make little or no impression upon the cannon of civilization, but they serve to remind us of the days when man needed to contend but against nature, to slaughter only birds and four-footed mammals.

The Korean infantry and the Korean cavalry are very similarly equipped. They wear brilliant, if vulnerable, breast-plates. They carry swords nice of shape, if dull of edge, and they used, in battles of great moment, to replace their crimson-decked hats with head-pieces of cotton-batting and tinsel.

There is a unique branch of the king’s immediate servitors. We should bluntly call them spies. The Koreans picturesquely call them “messengers on the dark path.” The King of Korea does not hang about the doorways, nor prowl into the back-yards of his subjects, but in every Korean city he has several, and in every Korean village at least one appointed listener. European history tells us that more than one European monarch has disguised himself at night, and held up his thirsty ears to the nectar or the gall of his subjects’ candid opinions of himself. Whether eaves-dropping is more admirable when performed in person or when deputed to the hireling, is a nice question for those who would judge between East and West. It seems to me that the King of Korea does a dirty thing with rather more dignity than did Napoleon or Nero. At all events, the plebeian spies of Korea are an acknowledged branch of Korean officialism, and every Korean knows that his house, and all it contains, is very possibly under the espionnage of the million eyes of the king.

Korea is as netted day and night with the spies of the king as she is at night netted with signal fires. Just such a system of official espionnage used to exist in Japan. Did Japan copy Korea? Did Korea copy Japan? Again we ask the question, and again Asia declines to answer.

The spies of Li-Hsi are the father confessors of the Koreans, and the custom is so old, so authentic, so much a matter of course in Korea, that the Korean caught in the utterance of treason, or relating some petty offence, cries “mea culpa” rather devoutly.

Not very many years ago there were in Asia three absolute monarchs with comparatively small kingdoms. Those kingdoms were Burmah, Siam, and Korea. Theebaw, the master of many wooden cannon, the monarch of Mandalay, the master of Burmah, has accepted his defeat with a good deal of dignity, and Burmah the old, Burmah the real, is fast passing off of the face of our earth.

Siam, when Sir Harry Parkes first went there, was possibly the most picturesque kingdom in Asia; but the King of Siam is a man so wise in his generation, that we may almost venture to call him a monarch up-to-date. ‘Since he cannot die at the head of his elephant-cavalried army; since he cannot see that army victorious in the land of its birth and its training, he lays bits of his sword (in the form of goodly scraps of his kingdom) at the feet of French democracy, I mean republicanism.’