Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

Korean wives have one rather desirable prerogative—a prerogative which the wives of China do not share with them, nor I fancy, do the wives of Japan. A Korean man cannot house his concubines or second-class wives under the roof that shelters his true or first wife, without her permission. Strangely enough, the first wife very rarely objects to living in rather close companionship with the other women of her husband’s household. Perhaps the longing for human companionship is stronger than jealousy in woman’s breast. And perhaps it is because the companionship of men is forbidden her, that a Korean wife comes to not only tolerate, but to enjoy the companionship of the women who share with her, her husband’s affection, attention, and support.

Korean women have not always lived in the strict seclusion in which they live now. Some of the older historians, Chinese and others, describe the appearance of the women and their manners without any hint that seeing them and knowing of them was anything unusual. And Hamel boasts that his blonde beard and that of his fellows, and their blue eyes, found great favour with the women of Quelpaert. In the days of Hamel, as now, the inhabitants of Quelpaert were purely Korean. Almost ever since Korea obtained Quelpaert from Japan, the island has been used as a sort of penal settlement; a place of confinement for foreigners who are unfortunate or unwise enough to land upon the shores of the peninsula, and for grave Korean miscreants who escape the death penalty. But it has also had always a goodly number of inhabitants, of the freemen and the official classes, and all of these, as well as the great bulk of prisoners, have been unmixedly Korean. And the freedom and publicity enjoyed by the women of the island, in Hamel’s time, was doubtless also enjoyed by the women of the peninsula. On the other hand, Hamel may have written only of the women of the labouring class. But even so his testimony—and when has Hamel been proved untruthful?—proves that during the last two hundred years times have greatly changed for Korean women. To-day no Korean woman, however lowly, would look up at a strange man long enough to like him; much less “look to like, if looking liking move.”

In every Korean house of any pretension the women’s apartments are in the most secluded part of the building. They open on to a garden, and never on to a street. The compound is walled, and no two families ever live upon the same compound. And no Korean may go upon the roof of his own house without legal permission, and without giving due notice to all his neighbours. The roof may leak, and the roof may crack in the middle, but before the owner of the house or any mechanic in his employ may go up to see what the matter is, and to remedy it, the occupiers of every house, the garden of which can be seen from his roof, must be notified, and ample time given for the ladies of those various establishments to leave the gardens. So a Korean woman is as hidden from the world, in her husband’s garden or summer-house, as is a nun in her cell.

The wives and daughters of well-to-do Koreans spend a great deal of time in their gardens, sharing naturally enough the intense love of their menkind for nature, and probably finding their peculiar lives more endurable among the trees and the birds and the lotus ponds, than they do in their queer little rooms, through the paper windows of which they cannot look unless they poke a hole with their fingers first—rooms in which there is little space and less furniture.

After the curfew rings it is illegal for a Korean man to leave his own house, unless under circumstances which I have stated in a previous chapter; then it becomes legal for Korean women to slip out and take the air and gossip freely. But both the law and the privilege have fallen somewhat into abeyance, especially in Söul. There are now so many foreigners in Söul, members of legations, and servants connected with legations, that it has been found impossible to keep the streets of Söul free from men after curfew, and so the women of Söul have very greatly lost that which was, a few years ago, one of their few, and one of their most dearly prized privileges.

If the dramatis personæ in Korean society are all men, not so the dramatis personæ in Korea’s history. As in China, and as in Japan, important parts have been played by women in the great historical drama of Korea—a drama that began centuries and centuries ago, and that is not ended yet, or only now ending. Korea has had many remarkable women who have left their as yet indelible stamp upon the customs and the laws of their country, and upon the thought of their countrymen. Korea has had at least three great queens. Korea has had her Boadicea. The present King of Korea owes his kingship, in large part at least, to his great-grandmother, Dowager Queen Cho, who adopted him, and in 1864 was largely instrumental in securing for him the throne to which the royal consul had elected him.

The most powerful women of whom we can read in the history of India, from the time of the Rock Temples to the time of the Indian Mutiny, were purdah-women; and the woman who has perhaps had more influence and more power over her own husband than ever other woman had over other husband—the woman who was perhaps at her death the most sincerely mourned, and the woman who was entombed as no other woman has ever yet been entombed, and probably as no other woman will ever be entombed—the beautiful Arjamand Banu—lived in the strictest purdah. And until the breaking out of the Chino-Japanese war, the most powerful person in Korea was, and for twenty years had been, a woman, the king’s wife. Queen Min, for even she has no name, and is known only by the name of the race from which she has sprung, comes of one of the two great intellectual families of Korea; and the great family of Min has produced no cleverer woman or man than the wife of Li-Hsi.

A very large proportion of the literature at our disposal, which treats in any dignified way of Korea, has been written by missionaries. This is inevitably so of any Asiatic country whose first Western invaders have been soldiers of the Cross. Fortunately for the interested student of Korea, the missionaries who have gone to Korea seem almost from the first to have been mentally, socially, and in culture, equipped above the missionary average in other parts of heathendom. Whether they have had a corresponding moral superiority it would be interesting to know, but I am the last person in the world competent to judge the moral status of a missionary. This of the European missionaries in Korea—from the Jesuit fathers old France sent there to the Presbyterian brethren recently sent from the United States—a surprising number of them had the gift not of writing (for scribbling seems to come as naturally to the average missionary as to the average nineteenth-century woman), but of writing well, and with great discretion. If we would learn the history of Korea, we must learn it very largely from the writings of European missionaries, unless, indeed, we are able to read Chinese, and have access to the fuller, more ably written, and probably more authentic histories of Korea, written by Chinese littérateurs. It is a matter of course that the Chinese, who are akin to the Koreans, and who may almost be said to have brought them up, should make fewer blunders in writing of Chosön than men of utterly dissimilar race and thought habits. Then, too, the writing of the Chinese histories of Korea has been largely contemporaneous with the enactment of that history. And no man can write with entire breadth of a people to whose religion he is bitterly antagonistic.

One blunder is conspicuous in most of the valuable books written by Europeans—written on Korea. They state almost to a volume that the women are uneducated and never pretty.

Educated after European methods they certainly are not. But why should they be? And that they are not—does that prove that they are not educated at all? There are more systems of education than one.