During this second Japanese invasion China, in answer to Korean prayers, sent vast reinforcements to the aid of the Chosönese. For seven years Korea suffered from fire, from pillage, from war, from pestilence, and from famine, and her already depleted resources were drained with the necessity of feeding and sheltering, willy-nilly, two great alien armies. A million Koreans died during these seven years; a million, beyond the normal death-rate, of men were killed in battle, or died after battle, or succumbed to starvation, or one of the dire diseases bred of war, and in war-time. The sun of Korea’s greatness set then, and never since have the Koreans been able to say, or to approximately say,—
‘Now is the sun upon the high-most hill of our national day’s journey.’
Korea struggled, struggled bravely enough, to retrieve her fallen fortunes, but before her old wounds were healed new ones were inflicted. Beyond the mountains that marked, and still mark, her northern boundaries a mighty race had risen—a race that became supreme in China as in Korea, and a race that only now seems in danger of extermination or degradation. The Manchius dwelt where the people of old Fuyu had dwelt. They conquered Korea, and then they conquered China. In 1627 the Manchius practically mastered Chosön; and ten years later they so completely humbled the King of Korea that he acknowledged as his master the Manchiu Emperor, who was now supreme in Pekin, and the Korean King covenanted to send four times a year to the Tartar an enormous tribute, and the Koreans bound themselves to perform to the Tartar and to his represervatives the kow-tow which has played so ridiculous a part in our European difficulties with China, and to sing hymns of praise commemorative of the Manchius’ generosity and graciousness in not having wiped Korea from off the face of the Asiatic earth. Let me quote a short paragraph from an historian who never appears over-partial to China:—
“Aside from the entrance at stated times of the imperial envoy to collect the tribute, and the annual embassy of Korean nobles to Pekin to do homage to ‘the Great Khan,’ the internal politics of ‘the little outpost state’ were not interfered with by the Chinese Government.”
Should Japan become the mistress of Korea; should Japan become the mistress of China—will she, I wonder, be as magnanimous?
Twenty years brought little or no change to the people of Chosön. In 1653 Hamel was wrecked upon the Korean shores, and what I have quoted from his memoirs indicates, by no means sufficiently, but as sufficiently as my space will allow me to indicate, the condition of Korea from then until 1777. And in 1777 begins the history of modern Korea.
That history affords neither pleasant writing nor pleasant reading to any one of European or Europeanly-American birth. Korea is hardly enough placed with China on the one hand and Japan on the other, but for all that she, perhaps because she has been the weakest and the most exposed of Oriental countries, has suffered most from—no, I do not mean suffered, but been most at the mercy of Europe. “Courtesy with the East, respect to the West, tribute to them both, and no foreigners wanted in the kingdom,” was Korea’s political creed when Korea ceased to be one of the intrinsically great nations of the past, and become one of the unjustly unimportant nations. During the last hundred or hundred and twenty years Korea has changed but little centrifugally, but centripetally she has changed, well—considering that she is Asiatic—enormously. Christianity, in an insidious Portuguese sort of way, had peeped into Korea many years before, but now Christianity is forcibly injected into Korea, injected in a way of which, however admirable it may seem to us, Christ would never have approved. Christianity, the species of Christianity offered to Korea, has not flourished there, and the nice, new Occidental civilization which was offered to Korea a year after the patriarchs of Massachusetts perfumed the Bay of Boston with tea-leaves, seems to have been rather a failure in the Land of the Morning Calm.
About the Jesuit fathers who sneaked into Korea under the shelter of the big hats that Korean widowers wear, and about the American and English missionaries who laid down their lives, and who have amplified and luxuriated their lives in Korea, I should like to say a good deal, but when one cannot say all that one might say and wishes to say, it is perhaps least stupid to say nothing. But to those who would like to study Christian missions in the East I would first of all recommend Mr. Curzon’s “Problems of the Far East,” and then, as far as Korea is concerned, I would recommend the works of the missionaries Griffis and Ross.
Korea itself has undergone little change since Hamel escaped from Korea. Korea has suffered during those years a good deal of change at the hands of others, a change that is, I think, not altogether to our credit. An American commodore opened Japan up to the West, and now (so at least they tell me), Japan is threatening to annihilate the West. Another American commodore, rather a noisier man, and not blessed with so fortunate a field of action, opened modern Korea to nineteenth century Europe and nineteenth century North America. Since then, the history of Korea has been a history of Korean degeneration, and European and United States advancement. The King of Korea has become a patron of telephones, and the hero of innumerable magazine articles—magazines published on both sides of the Atlantic.
Such is the outline of Korea’s history—hurried, dry, and incomplete; so incomplete, indeed, that it is not in truth an outline but rather scraps of outline. But Korea’s history is anything but dry, if we study it in something like intelligible entirety.