Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

Let us take the poor women of Söul, and compare them with the poor women of Liverpool or of London, and with the women of many tongues, who flock into New York through the portals of Castle Garden. The Korean women can read and write, the large majority of them. They cook well, cleanly, and economically. Out of a few simple ingredients (which her Western sister would scorn), and with a few simple implements (that that sister would not understand)—often almost without implements and with little fire—fire that must be coaxed and humoured, and humoured and coaxed, the poorest Korean woman will prepare a meal which no hungry European, prince or peasant, need scorn to eat. It will be savoury, wholesome, clean to daintiness, and pleasantly served. They can sew, make all that they, their husbands, and their children wear, can these poor, ignorant, heathen women. They are expert washerwomen. Most of them can make pictures with sharp sticks, or with brush, and almost all of them are more or less skilled in midwifery, in the care of the sick, in sick-room cookery, and in the care of children. They know how to keep their tempers, hold their tongues, control their appetites, to make much of little, and to enjoy to the full and with thanksgiving any small pleasure that falls to their scantily pleasured lot. Now let us turn to the Seven Dials, or to the Five Points—No, on second thought let us not!

As for Korean gentlewomen, they are skilled in Korean music, in Chinese and Korean literature. They are unsurpassed mistresses of the needle, more than able with the brush, and thoroughly acquainted with every detail of the complicated Korean etiquette. They are deft in the nice ceremonies of the toilet. They know the histories of Korea, of China, and perhaps of Japan. They are familiar with their own folk-lore, and can repeat it glibly and picturesquely. They are nurses and mothers and wives by nature, and wives, mothers, nurses, and accoucheuses by training. Above all, they are taught (and they learn) to be amiable. They are instructed in the art of charming, and in the grace of being gentle, as soon as they are taught to walk. I have known advanced women in Europe who could scarcely boast of being more highly educated. And the happiest women I have known have not always been the most learned. I think that we are apt to underrate the education of women in the East because it differs so essentially from ours: but then so do their physique and the country in which they live; its flora, its climate, and its sociology. A Korean once told me (he was a kinsman of Queen Min, a traveller, a linguist, and a man of—cosmopolitanly speaking—most considerable attainments) that his wife was more widely and more thoroughly versed in Chinese literature, modern and classic, than he. And Chinese literature is indisputably the greatest literature that Asia has ever produced.

The Queen of Korea is, with the possible exception of the Dowager Empress of China, as well educated as any royal lady in Asia.

As to the national lack of beauty among the women of Korea—why, it is neither more nor less than nonsense, ignorant, and rather stupid nonsense. I know no race in which the women who earn their individual slice, and a goodly share of the family loaf, in the sweat of their brows retain their beauty long. The women seen on the streets of Söul and in the fields, and on the mountain slopes of Korea, belong—if I may for the sake of emphasis repeat myself—belong to the hardest-worked, the most weather-beaten, burden-bent, and ill-fed class in Korea. Their personal appearance is no indication of the real type of Korean womanhood. They are painted by the sun and the wind, disfigured with trouble and back-ache, and their once pretty faces have been profaned by many tears, and they are hideous. But the women of the Korean leisure class are, as a rule (a rule with only just enough exceptions to prove it), undeniably pretty—pretty with a prettiness that is closely akin to the prettiness of the women of Japan and Burmah. The Queen of Korea is quaintly pretty, and among the three hundred women who are, nominally at least, the concubines of the king, and among the very many female attendants of their two Majesties, there is scarcely a plain face. Of course many Europeans who have been resident in Korea, and have written of their residence, have not had access to the court, much less to the Queen and her ladies. But surely any wide-eyed man who has spent some time in Korea has seen and seen again the geisha girls. Who that has lived in Korea denies their beauty? And would it not occur to an observer of somewhat less than abnormal reasoning power that since the only female members he had ever seen of the Korean leisure class were beautiful, that it was fairly presumable that the Korean women who worked even less, and lived in greater luxury, and under more healthy conditions, were at least as beautiful?

Korean women (those of them who have not been scarred by over-toil, nor deformed by privation) have remarkably small, and remarkably pretty hands and feet, and of nothing are they prouder than of their dimpled fingers, and their shapely, delicate feet, But the feet of a Korean woman are small by nature, never by art. They have lovely eyes—these women—musical voices, and are graceful of motion.

The Queen is pale and delicate-looking. She has a remarkable forehead, low but strong, and a mouth charming in its colouring, in its outlines, in its femininity, in the pearls it discloses, and sweet with the music that slips through it when she speaks. She dresses plainly as a rule, and in dark but rich materials. In this she resembles the high-born matrons of Japan. And in cut her garments are more Japanese than those of other Korean women: she wears her hair parted in the middle, and drawn softly into a simple knot or coil of braid. She wears diamonds most often; not many, but of much price. They are her favourite gems. In this one particular she is almost alone among the women of the East; for pearls are the beloved jewels of almost every woman and girl-child that is born in the Orient.

Queen Min has been as assiduous as she has been powerful in advancing the interests of her family—the family of her birth I mean, for her marriage—unlike the marriages of other Korean women—has no whit divorced her from the people of her blood. All the desirable offices in Korea were held for years by her kinsmen.

Queen Min has not only been the power behind the Korean throne, but she has been, even more than the King, the all-seeing eye of Korea. Her spies have been everywhere, seen everything, reported everything.

Two things that are true of the Queen are peculiarly significant of the grip that Oriental customs have upon the most autocratic of Oriental minds. She—the most powerful Korean in Korea—is content to be nameless; a sovereign with almost unlimited power, but without a nominal individuality; and to be called merely by the family name of her forefathers, and to be designated only as the daughter of her fathers, the wife of her husband, and the mother of her son.

It strikes an Occidental as even more strange that a woman so supremely powerful with her husband and king should be so graciously tolerant of the women of his harem. She not only tolerates them, she seems to like them, to take pride in them, and she is on the friendliest terms with Li-Hsi’s eldest son, who is also the son of a concubine. True her own son is the crown prince, but it is probable that his elder brother and not he will be Korea’s next king, if the present dynasty be destined to have another king. Li Hsia—Queen Min’s son—is not the imbecile he has been reported, but he has not the greatest mental strength, and less strength of body.