Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

I had afternoon tea yesterday with a friend who loves me so well, and whom I so well love, that I am sure she will forgive me for drawing, to her disadvantage, a comparison between her drawing-room and the drawing-room of a Korean man, or the boudoir of a Korean woman, I never go into my friend’s drawing-room without feeling a thrill of admiration for the nice way in which her butler avoids knocking over one of a pair of priceless vases, which were stolen from Pekin about the time that Sir Harry Parkes and Sir Henry Loch were rather inconveniently imprisoned there. I creep in, as gracefully as I can, between the butler and the two priceless blue things. I cross a bit to the left, to avoid a malachite table crowded with silver pigs (some of them so little that they would look lost on a threepenny-bit, some of them a foot or more long); then I cross to the right, to avoid a wonderful teak-wood cabinet of no particular style, that looks very staggery beneath a multitude of tea-pots—tea-pots most of which are not interesting in themselves, and none of which are interesting in their common conglomeration. Then I almost trip over the wool of a slaughtered Persian lamb, and I just save myself from tumbling into a Louis Quinze chair, and so I work my way through the ages—through the races, until I reach my hostess, who, like myself and everyone else there, is in nice, new, nineteenth-century, ugly raiment. There may be space in this London drawing-room for her, for me, and for all the other ordinary folk which are gathered together, because we are very much alike, but there is not room for all the chairs, and the tables, and half the other pieces of furniture, because no two of them are alike. We humans are used to fashionable crushes, but I think it is a shame not to give the furniture room to breathe.

Let us peep into a Korean drawing-room. A long cool place. There is a padded quilt, probably covered with silk, in one corner. The host sits on that, and any guests that come to him. If the weather be cold, and the host be rich, a brazier of charcoal usually stands in another corner. There is a small table, or perhaps there are two, with writing and painting materials. Unless the house be one of dire poverty there is, at one end of the room, a chest of drawers or a buffet, or a sideboard, or something of that sort: a huge piece of furniture made out of more or less costly woods, fitted with drawers and doors, and embellished with metal handles. The handles, or the clasps, or the locks are made in the shape of butterflies, for the butterfly is a very favourite expression of Korean artistic outline. When it is time to eat, a table is brought in for the host and one for each of his guests—a table a foot or two high, and just about as square as high. Upon this, small dishes of food are placed, and small but often-filled cups of drink. When the meal is over, the tables and the dishes and the remnants of meat and of liquor (but there are not often many of either) are taken away.

In an ordinary Korean house there is little or no other furniture. A screen perhaps, precious for its decorations, and for the carvings of its frame, and three or four pictures—pictures distinctly Korean, but I assure you by no means inartistic. I can think of nothing else that ordinarily furnishes a Korean room, except the quaintly clad people, and the sunshine that comes in almost iridescently—it shines through windows of so many different colours: windows of paper. The colour of the light depends entirely upon the colour and the texture of the paper through which it comes. A Korean bed-room is very like a Korean sitting-room. The quilt upon which a Korean sits through the day is the same as, or very like, the quilt upon which he sleeps at night. Tiger skins are also greatly used for floor rugs and bed coverings.

To stray a moment from the exact subject of architecture. The Koreans wear, I believe, very much the same clothes in day as in night. Indeed, I believe that the Korean changes his or her garments for five reasons only: to eat, to put on new clothes when the old ones are worn out, to have the clothes she or he is wearing washed, to put on his or her best clothes in celebration of some festival or other ceremonial, and to go into mourning. Firstly and foremost, a Korean undresses to eat. They are not civilized enough, the people of Chosön, to array themselves for feeding time. They do not deny their relationship with other hungry mammals. When they are hungry they eat. When they are thirsty they drink, and to be truthful, their hunger and their thirst is usually enormous, and of long endurance. They are neither ashamed of their hunger nor of their thirst, for they appease neither before going to a feast. Indeed, to gorge oneself is considered the acme of Korean elegance, and it is the one elegance in which all Koreans, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, prince and peasant, indulge themselves on every possible or semi-possible occasion. And that they may eat the utmost possible morsel, they loosen their garments before they sit down to the feast.

But I was speaking of the houses of the Korean poor. Perhaps it is rather inappropriate to speak of banquets in connection with them; yet, except among the most abjectly poverty-stricken, banquets are held sometimes (at marriages, on birthdays, on feast-days, and on lucky-days, if possible) in every Korean home.

Only Koreans of certain position are allowed to cover their roofs with tiles. A peasant’s roof is almost invariably thatched with straw or grass. Every Korean house contains but one room, or, to state it differently, every Korean room, excepting for a door opening into another house or room, is in itself a complete house. It has a roof of its own, and four walls of its own, and is in every way independent of any other rooms or houses, which may form other parts of its owner’s dwelling. When inside a Korean dwelling one may fancy oneself in a suite of apartments opening into each other, that is, of course, if a certain number of the paper walls are opened. From the outside of a Korean dwelling, one seems to be looking at a collection of more or less closely built, but entirely independent houses. The position of woman being what it is, even the poorest Korean house has, or ought to have, more than one room. This peculiarity; this similarity between exteriors and interiors, makes Korean architecture uniquely picturesque, and public buildings and the dwellings of the rich supremely so. Indeed, the better class of houses often have not only a roof to each room, but two or three roofs to each room. Now a Korean roof, to my mind, is the most beautiful roof in the world. It is Chinese in general character, and slopes from the ridge pole in graceful concave curves. Except in the houses of the poor it is tiled. The tiles overlap each other, are unevenly curved, and rest upon a foundation of earth. In the course of a few seasons a Korean roof breaks into bud, and into blossom. Perhaps a great patch of odd blue flowers covers one-half of the roof, perfuming the air for many yards. Perhaps quaint crimson tulips lift their happy heads between every few tiles. Wild pinks, forget-me-nots, and orchids mingle on one roof, and another roof glitters in the sunshine like gold because it is the bed of a thousand yellow sun-lilies.

Imagine an old Korean monastery which is backgrounded by hills, some of them covered with verdure, and some of them naked rocks, rocks that are broken here and there by patches and cracks of hardy flowers. In the distance, we hear the melodious drip of some gentle waterfall. Nearer we hear the full-throated soprano of the larks. And a dozen other birds, green and blue, and purple, and grey with breasts of yellow, fly from their nests in the teak-wood trees, to drink the sweet blood of the blooming iris. The monastery has a score or more of houses, each rambling from some other. The monastery is low and porticoed, and the doors, which are also its windows and its walls, are slid back in the grooves, and our view of each of the many interiors is only obstructed by the eight square posts which are the only permanent walls of a Korean building. Inside we catch a glimmer of metallic Buddhas, and hear the careless Sanskrit sing-song of the monks. In the courtyard stands a great brass Korean bell or gong, and the stick with which it is struck lies beside it. A huge glimmering gong is this; to call the brethren to prayer and to rice. Around the edges of the monastery’s roofs runs a peculiar shell-like beading, which is a distinction of a sacred or religious edifice. The roof was a dark brown once, but the tiles, those that have not been broken away, have grown purple and blue, softened by time and blighted by weather. Where the tiles have crumbled away, and over many tiles that have not yet succumbed to decay, honey-suckles, yellow and buff, and white and rose-coloured, are creeping and tangling themselves with great, green ropes that are heavy with gourds—gourds that are little and pale, and gourds that are big and golden and speckled.

Or let us look at some one of the king’s many houses. Its round columns and its square rafters are lacquered and crimson. Its paper walls are as fine and as polished as silk. Innumerable steps lead up to it, and it is almost heavy with carvings. Three roofs shelter it, and look like a tent with an awning above an awning. Each roof is a bed of flowers that are brilliant and fragrant—flowers among which birds that are splendid of feather, and sweet of throat, make their nests. But the birds and the flowers are not the only denizens of the typical Korean roof. Effigies in mud, in bronze, or in wood squat on the ridges. They look a little like monkeys, very little like men, and some of them very much like pigs. They are absurd and impossible to a degree, and yet, for all that, they are rather life-like, and, on a weird moonlight night, decidedly startling. These are the protectors of the houses; and what the scarecrow which the European or American farmer manufactures out of his oldest trousers, his most ragged coat, and his most disreputable hat, is to the blackbirds and the crows of the Occident, these grotesque figures are to the evil spirits of Korea. They frighten away the devils, the gods of misfortune, and the demons of disease that would fain light upon the roofs, and curse the dwellers of the houses. Socially they belong with the demons and the imps and the witches, with the monks and the nuns, and the hundred other personages of Korea’s queer religious or irreligious spiritualistic community. But physically they are a striking and a fascinating detail of Korea’s remarkable architecture.

I have spoken of the khans, which are the furnaces of the Korean houses. They are not altogether underground, and so every Korean house rests, as it were, upon a pedestal—a pedestal of stone or of earth. But the house is almost never built of stone. Wood and paper are its only materials, and few of the countries in the world are richer in woods, and no country is so rich in paper as Korea.

The fame of Korea’s paper is more world-wide than the fame of any other Korean product. But admirable as it is, superior for many purposes as it is to all other papers, it is really for her woods, and for their quality, that Korea should be noted more than for any other thing which she grows or manufactures. Bamboo is there, of course, in abundance, and abundantly used. Find me the country in Asia where bamboo does not grow, and I’ll vow to you that that country has been an iceberg and in some strange way become detached from its anchorage at the North Pole, drifted down to the southern seas, and after centuries become overgrown with all sorts of green and gay things, and so come to think itself, and to be thought, a part of the Orient. When I say that bamboo grows in Korea I am saying that Korea is in Asia, and I am saying no more. The temples, the palaces, the shrines, and the lumber-yards of China and Japan were for many years, and now largely are, dependent for the most choice of their woods upon the forests of Korea. And many of the most valued of the tree species in Japan have sprung up from seeds that were gathered in Chosön. In the palaces, and in the joss-houses of Pekin, and in the famous temples of Tokio and Kioto, columns and ceilings of especial beauty and of great value, commercially and artistically, have been hewn from trees that grew in Korea. Korea is rich in willow, in fir, in persimmon, in chestnut, and in pine—pine which the Chinese prefer above all other woods for many of the parts of waggons, boats, and ships. Korea is rich in ash, in hornbeam, in elm, and in a dozen other hard, very hard, enduring timbers. The flag that flies above the yamun of a Chinese mandarin is in all probability attached to a pole of Korean wood, and, beyond doubt, the white flags that so recently fluttered upon the ill-fated ships outside the forts of Wei-Hai-Wei, had not those ships been built in Europe, would have made their signals of defeat from the top of what once had been trees in Chei-chel-sang or in Hoang-hai. Korea is splendid with oaks, and with maples, and is well supplied with larch and with holly. And at one season of the year many of her hill-slopes are purple with mulberries. The juniper-tree grows there in vast numbers; the cork-tree and the Korean varnish-tree, from the sap of which comes the golden-hued lacquer, which is one of the important materials of Korean art. This sap is poisonous, so poisonous that the men who work with it are paid above the rates usually received by Korean art-artisans. There is another tree in Korea which has so disagreeable a name that I won’t name it, but from it a very fine white wax is extracted. And there are trees that are pricked for the oil that gushes from them—oil from which one of the great national drinks—a hot, peppery drink—is made, and which is almost the only oil used in the toilet of a Korean woman.