The bridges of Korea, the big bell at Söul, and a dozen other characteristic details of Korea’s rich architecture, all rise up before me and seem to reproach me for passing them by without a word. To touch upon them with anything approaching adequacy would require pages and not words, and the pages at my disposal are growing few. But I can heartily recommend their study and the study of Korean architecture in general to all who are interested in the East, and in architecture, and who are fascinated by the quaint and the symbolical.
CHAPTER VIII.
HOW THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE, AND THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES.
There is nothing else, I think, that so positively proves the intimate relationship of China, Japan, and Korea, as does the great similarity between their games and their amusements—a similarity which almost amounts to identicalness. If it is true that “in vino veritas,” it must be equally true that men are most natural when they are happiest, freest from care, and have neither business nor duties beyond recreating themselves. So when we study the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans at play, and find that they all play very much alike, appreciate the same or kindred amusements, have the same methods of feasting, of resting, and of enjoyment, we are justified in concluding that these three peoples are very near of kin. But if they be children of the same parents, they are not the children of one birth, and this to me, at least, is proved by the few but sharp differences between each of their three ways of amusing themselves.
China, Korea, and Japan! And the greatest of these is China. Let us watch them, beginning with China, at their recreations, and then let us note how in those recreations they differ.
Feasts naturally form an important part of the happiness of a people, the majority of whom commonly go hungry. A Chinese dinner is in more than one way startling—to the average European mind. But it is a very good dinner for all that.
I have been at many a Chinese dinner. Sometimes I have sat with the quaint Chinese women, behind the shelter of the lattice. Sometimes I have feasted brazenly with the men; and more than once the women of a Chinese household have, out of courtesy to me, come forth from the prized seclusion of their lattice-screened coign of vantage, and joined me in eating with the commoner faction of the family herd; in breaking bread with men.
Chinese festivals! The subject is so intricate and so interesting that I have not the impertinence to dismiss it in a sentence. But, in passing, I may say that no people enjoy festivals more, no people indulge in them more discreetly, less frequently than do the Chinese.
Chinese ceremonials! Funerals, weddings, and a hundred others! I know, in all the East, nothing more incomprehensible to the average, well educated European mind; nothing more philosophically pregnant to minds that are exceptionally industrious and exceptionally open.
Chinese recreations are almost myriad. They fly kites; they let go perfumed, brightly-lit balloons of silk and of silk-like paper; they light their fire-fly-lit land with a hundred thousand lanterns, and in honour of those lanterns, in indulgence of themselves, they hold a feast.