If a Korean family is unlucky they are very apt to think that one or more of their ancestors has been buried in an uncongenial spot. Then, no matter what the cost, no matter what the trouble, the grave is, or the graves are, opened, and the dead moved to some more desirable place. Korean mourning is as long or longer, as intricate or more intricate, than Chinese mourning, but so similar to Chinese mourning, which has been so often and so fully described, that it would be superfluous to here more than mention Korean mourning.
Such, then, is the religion or the irreligion of Korea. Superstition for the people; ancestor-worship for the people, the princes, and for those who are between. Strange that a nation that has driven from its midst one of the great religions of this earth, and has unrelentingly persecuted the religion of Christ, should be so devoted in its ancestor-worship. But which of us that has ever lain awake through the wordless watches of the lonely night and longed in vain—
“For the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still,”
shall blame the Koreans for their incessant, their blind, filial devotion?
CHAPTER XI.
KOREA’S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL.
In the tenth century Korea assumed its present boundaries, and for nine hundred years it has remained unchanged in its coast line, and its northern limits. Except on the north, Korea is surrounded by the sea, and its northern boundary is marked by the Yalu and the Tiumen rivers, that almost meet at two of their sources. For convenience in the recapitulation of Korea’s history—a recapitulation in which everything else must be sacrificed to brevity—the history of the peninsula may be divided into three periods: First, the period antecedent to the final settlement of Korea’s boundaries—a period whose history is in part at least, conjectural; second, a period reaching from then until modern times; and third, a period covering Korea’s recent history, and the comparative opening up of Korea to foreign travellers, and to foreign influence. We know as much and as little of Korea’s remotest ancestry as we do of the ancestries of other countries. The Korean family can trace its pedigree a long way, but at length the pedigree becomes lost in the mists of remote history and of prehistoric times, and we can form no conclusive opinion as to who were the first founders of the race.
Korean civilization came chiefly from China, and the Koreans themselves from the highlands of Manchuria and the Amoor valley.
The kingdom of Korea, and indeed the nation of Korea, was founded by an ancestor of Confucius. In Latin his name is Kicius, in Japanese it is Ki-shi, and in Chinese Ki-tsze, which means Viscount of Ki. He was a faithful vassal of the Chow dynasty of old China, and when the Chows were overthrown in 1122 B.C. he refused to acknowledge the new power, and fled with, some say five some say ten thousand followers to the north-east. Here he founded a kingdom which he called Chosön, and of which he made himself king. He was welcomed by the people already living there, and these aborigines and the followers of Ki-tsze are among the remotest ancestors to which Koreans can prove their claim. Ki-tsze introduced into his kingdom the study and the practice of medicine, agriculture, literature, the fine arts, and a dozen other industries in which China was then most proficient. He founded his kingdom on the lines of Chinese feudalism, and very much as he founded it the kingdom endured until the beginning of the Christian era, and the Koreans to-day call Ki-tsze the father of Chosön, and because of him, and the quality of his kingdom, claim that their civilization is almost as ancient as the civilization of China, and older than the civilization of Chaldea.