So the Korean architect and the Korean builder have the choice of many woods in the erecting of Korean edifices. A marvellous species of oak grows plentifully in Korea—oak whose timbers have been known, and proved to have been, under water for a century at least, and without decaying. But perhaps the most famous of the woods of Korea are the wonderful red and black woods that grow on the island of Quelpaert.
Paper forms a larger part, and is almost as indestructible a part of the Korean house as is wood. This paper is made from cotton—cotton whose fibre is exceptionally long, soft, satiny, and fine. Most Korean papers are beautiful to look at, delightful to touch, and incredibly strong. It is almost impossible to tear them, especially when they are oiled as they are for all architectural purposes. The varieties of Korean papers are almost endless. One kind is an excellent substitute for cloth, and is used for the making of garments, and for linings, and in many ways it takes the place of leather, of woods, and of metals, and of all sorts of woollen things. There is a very thick paper which is made from the bark of the mulberry-tree. It is soft and pliable, and is as glazed as satin. It is almost, if not quite, the most easily washed substance I have ever seen, and is par excellence the Korean choice for table-cloths.
Glass is almost unknown in Korea, and until recent years was quite unknown there. And as we are all very apt to prize most that with which we are least familiar, and the use of which we least understand, so Koreans set great value upon glass. Old bottles, washed ashore from some European shipwreck, often form the most prized bric-a-brac in a mandarin’s dwelling, and any Korean who can get a square foot or two of glass to insert in one of the paper windows of his house is a very proud householder indeed.
In the house of a noble the front or outer apartment is used as a reception-room. Here his friends and acquaintances (indeed, all whose rank entitle them to mingle with him) gather night after night for gossip, for tobacco, and for drink. These rooms take the place of clubs, of bar-rooms, and of the smoking-rooms of hotels, all of which are unknown in Korea.
Background and environments are so studied by every architect in the Far East that landscape-gardening may almost be said to be a part of Korean architecture. No Korean building of any importance lacks courtyards, lotus ponds, groves of trees, and tangles of flowers, through all of which are scattered elaborate little summer-houses. And what the rich Korean does for the surroundings of his house and his city, nature almost invariably does for the surroundings of the house of the poor Korean, who does not live in one of the crowded cities. The Korean hut is sometimes half covered with vines, and is altogether cool and delightful from the shade and the perfume of trees that are heavy with flowers, with fruits, and with nuts. No Korean need be roofless. If a house be burned down, or be blown down, the entire community are more than ready to assist at its re-erection, and the poorest man in the village, the hardest-worked, will spare some fraction of his time to help in the re-building. If a new-comer appears in a Korean village, the inhabitants go to work to help him build, or, if necessary, build for him a where-to-lay-his-head.
Such are a few of the characteristics, the most vivid characteristics, I think, of the architecture of Chosön,—an architecture which is even more significant than architecture usually is. Korean architecture is significant of Korean artisticness. It is significant of Korean good sense; for the architecture of Chosön is invariably well-adapted to the climate of the peninsula. But far beyond this, Korean architecture is significant of the Korean love of seclusion, and of the Korean faith in the efficacy of appearances. The Koreans, more perhaps than any other people, realize that fine feathers make fine birds, and the most studied, the most elaborated, and architecturally the most important part of a Korean house is its fence; which of course is not a part of the house at all. This fence may be a hedge, it may be a wall encircling the domains of a magistrate, or engirdling the city. It may be a series of hedges, of moats, of walls, and of gates. The Koreans are exclusive and seclusive to a degree. This should command for them the sympathy of English people. All Koreans strive heroically to put their best feet forward, personally, financially, and architecturally. This should command them the sympathy of Americans. The Korean farmer screens his house inside a quadrangle of hedges, hedges as sweet as are the hedges of North Wales in the month of July. A Korean king hides his palace behind an externity of many walls that are splendid in height, in colour, in detail, in outline, and in material. Walls between which a score of flowers fight each other for the glory of killing every inch of the grass,—walls between which marble-outlined ponds sleep cosily beneath their green and pink and white coverlets of lilies, and of lotus. And the Koreans who are neither princes nor peasants, but who stand between the two, spend a world of thought, and a good deal of money upon the fences—floral or stone—thrown about their homes. Only the poorest of Korean houses—of which there are many—and only the shops—of which there are few—lack some sort of a wall, some manner of a barrier between the private family life, and the public life of the going and coming community.
Korean walls (I mean the walls of masonry which mark the boundaries of a city or the limits of a gentleman’s grounds, and not the paper walls of a Korean house) are, without exception, Chinese in character. But even more important than these walls are the gateways with which they are broken, and above all, the gateways or gates that stand some distance outside the walls. In Far Asia gates have a significance which they never have had, even in our own old Norman days, and never can have, in Europe. Gates are the architectural ceremonies of the East. They frame many of the most ceremonial ceremonies of the East, and it necessarily follows that they are big and gorgeous. For never did a picture justify more lavish framing than does the picture of Eastern ceremony. There are three great classes of gates in the Far East: the torii of Japan, the red-arrow gates of Korea, and the pailow of China. But before I try to say something of these three gates, there are two or three pleasant things to be said of the gates that ordinarily pierce the wall of a Korean city. The gates themselves are heavily built of wood, are elaborately ornamented with metal, and slowly swing in a rusty sort of way at sunrise, and at sunset—swing at sunrise to let the people of the city out, and the people of the country in; swing at sunset to let the people of the country out, and the people of the city in. Korea not being a land of machinery, it becomes necessary for a certain number of officials to tend these gates. They are not called gate-keepers, but are officers, rather important officers, if I remember, of the Korean army. Now, an army officer, all the world over, does not mind where he lies, what he eats, or how he suffers—when he is on active service: but when debarred from fighting, the soldier, all the world over, and especially the officer-soldier, wants to be well-housed, well-roomed, well-fed, and above all, well-amused. This seems to be the one military trait which Korea has not yet forgotten. Above the gates that open into Söul, and into every other walled Korean city, are built very cosy little stone houses. In these the soldiers on guard—the gate keepers—play cards, eat rice, munch sweetmeats, and sip arrack. Above the gateways that lead into the houses of Korean magistrates, Korean nobles, and of Korean millionaires, just such houses are built. They are the concert halls of Korea. In them the band of the Korean magistrate, the Korean noble, or the Korean millionaire discourses more or less discordant music, and at delightfully respectful distance from its employer’s house. They never play in the cold weather. It has been said that this is so, not because the Korean in whose service they are cares a whit whether their fingers freeze to their instruments or not, but because he is unwilling to open the paper walls of his house wide enough to hear the music that is being played in the gate-houses of his outer walls. I doubt this. A rich Korean, who is covered with layers and layers of silk and wadding, and who sits upon a khan in full fire, and who is surrounded by braziers of charcoal, and whose house is deplorably lacking in ventilation, does not, I think, as a rule, shrink from having his front door or his side wall opened once in a while. Beneath the guard-house building, above the gate of a Korean wall; there can be no khan, for the guard-house is above the gate, and many feet from the ground in which the Khan must be embedded. And so I put it down to the humanity of the average well-to-do Korean that he never makes his band play, on his walls, save in fairly warm weather.
These rooms, these little houses built above the gates of a Korean walled city or the gates of a great man’s domain, have been in years past the scenes of many a Korean romance, and even now they are often the favourite retreats or lounging places of Korean poets and philosophers. They are usually furnished with considerable comfort. They are cosy in the autumn and in the spring, and delightfully cool in the summer. They’re well above the city’s sights, and high above any unpleasant intrusion of the city’s sounds, and so are fit resting-places for one who wants to meditate or dream or write poetry, or be at rest, or escape from the hundred nagging vexations of daily life.
Korean walls are adjuncts to Korean gates, and not, as with us, the gates adjuncts to the walls. The walls are built to emphasize the importance of the gates, to supplement them, and to attract attention to them. To the Korean mind the walls are so much less important than the gates that the gates are often built and the walls omitted altogether. Such gates are the torii of Japan, the pailow of China, and the red-arrow gates of Chosön. Every Korean gate has a name, a name that is meant to be impressive and poetical, symbolical of beauty and of good. And doubtless these names are so to Korean ears, but they are apt to strike the European mind of average stolidity as amusing or silly. In Korea, indeed, every edifice of any pretension has a name. The people of the Far East personify their buildings to a great extent, and endue them with individuality, and with human attributes. Royal gateways are often flanked by two immense Chinese lions, or, as they are more generally called, Korean dogs. These dogs are but one of the many most universal expressions of Korean art. They are the one expression of Korean art with which we, in Europe, are very familiar.
There is nothing else in picturesque Korea so picturesque as the red-arrow gates. I wish I might devote a chapter to them, and I am rather appalled at undertaking to at all clearly describe them in a few paragraphs. A dozen or more of the most eminent European authorities on Korea unanimously declare the red-arrow gates to have either been copied from, or to have been the originals of the Japanese torii. Why, in the bulk of literature that has been written about these strange gates of the Far East, little or no mention has been made of the Chinese pailow puzzles me. There can, I think, be no doubt that the three gates are three generations of one architectural family, or that they have had a common origin. The pailow of China are memorial arches, erected, as a rule, to commemorate the virtue and the character of women who have slaughtered themselves that they might follow their husbands to the grave. These arches are heavier than the Japanese torii, or the Korean red-arrow gates, but they are like both in their general outlines and in situation. And all Chinese architecture is very much heavier than the architecture of Korea or of Japan. The torii of Japan marks the approach to a temple, or to some sacred place. It is formed of two upright columns or pillars which lean slightly toward each other at the top, and are crossed by two or three graceful bars; the upper of which is slightly, but very beautifully curved. The word “torii” is most usually translated “birds’ rest,” from “tori” a “bird,” and “I” “to be” or “rest.” And the theory has been that they were originally built as convenient resting-places for birds: as birds, with all other animals, were sacred in the eyes of the Buddhists. This translation is unsatisfactory. The etymology of the word itself, like that of so many other Japanese words, is hidden in a good deal of mystery, and though to-day we find the torii outside of every Buddhist temple in Japan, we also find one outside every Shinto temple in Japan, and it is easily proved that they were first reared outside the Shinto, and not outside the Buddhist temples. Long before Buddhism was introduced into Japan, the torii stood outside numerous Shinto temples. The most plausible translation of the word “torii,” though it is not a translation altogether convincing, is “a place of passing through.” It is Mr. Chamberlain, I believe, who gives this translation, but his book is not at my hand, and I am not positive. Certainly both in Korea and in Japan the birds make a very general resting-place of the torii, and of the red-arrow gates. But then so do they in China of the pailow, and so do they in America and Europe of the telegraph wires. It is very possible that from this habit of theirs “torii” has come to mean, or has been thought to mean, “birds’ rest.” The red-arrow gates of Korea are taller and narrower than the torii of Japan. The red-arrow gate never stands outside a temple, but outside a palace or some high magistracy, and it denotes the approach to a house of the king, or to the house of one of almost kingly authority. So in Söul we find a red-arrow gate standing outside the yamun of the Chinese Resident, one of the many silent, but clearly legible proofs that Korea has long regarded herself as a vassal of China. These gates are painted a most brilliant red, which is the Korean royal colour. The upright columns of a red-arrow gate are crossed by two horizontal bars. These bars are quite straight, and unlike the cross-bars of the torii, the upper one does not extend quite to the top of the perpendicular column. These gates are called arrow-gates because of twenty or more speared-shaped bits of wood that are embedded in the lower of the two horizontal bars, pierce through the upper bar, and extend a little higher than the shaped ends of the perpendicular columns. They are simplicity itself, these red-arrow gates, except for their gorgeous colouring, and altogether lack the elaboration of the Japanese torii. They are thirty feet high at least, often much higher. But however simple in themselves they make wonderful frames for wonderful bits of Korean landscape. On the exact centre of the upper cross-bar rests a peculiar design which represents the positive and negative essences—the male and female essences of Chinese philosophy. This again is surmounted by tongue-shaped or flame-shaped bits of wood, which are supposed to, in some way, represent the power of the king. The two symbols together signify Korea’s king as omnipotent, since he is under the protection of China, and has espoused the religion of Confucius. It is noticeable that the torii of Japan invariably marks the vicinity of a temple, or of some building, or some place sacred to one or more of the Japanese deities; while in Korea the red-arrow gate invariably signifies the proximity of the dwelling of temporal power. I am inclined to think that the Koreans borrowed the idea of their red-arrow gates from the Chinese, and that the Japanese seeing them, translated them into torii. If this is so, it is presumable that in both instances the borrowers erected the gates in front of what was to them the most important places in their own countries. The Emperor of Japan is the nominal head of the Shinto religion. In the days when the torii was introduced into Japan, religion was probably a great force in the three islands, and the temples seemed to the Japanese the most appropriate places to be honoured by this arched sign of importance. In Korea, on the other hand, religion is, and for many years has been, under a social and governmental ban. In Korea the king is all, and the gods are naught, so—as a matter of course—the red gates reared their graceful, arrow-crowned heads outside the house of a king, or of a deputed representative of the Chinese emperor.