Quaint Korea

by Louise Jordan Miln

The traveller belonging to the second class starts with a not too definite intention of seeing Venezuela. He arrives there; unless en route he stumbles upon the borders of some, to him, even more interesting country, and turns aside like the free man he is. He rambles from town to village, and with a mind not so crammed with information that it has room for no more. He learns his new country on the spot. He sees the people. He eats their food. He drinks their wine. He watches them at work, and at play. He learns their language, and some of the thousand secrets which only language can teach. He looks into their eyes, and perchance he gets some passing glimpse into their souls. He goes home. Then he begins to read his guide books. Then he begins to study the history and the ancient literature of the people among whom he has been. And then, and not till then, is he fit to study that history: for we can only read a history with full intelligence if we are familiar with the people of whose ancestors it is written.

I trust that no one will think that I am decrying the study of history in our school-days, or the life-long study of those places we may not visit. I am not that mad. The study of history is invaluable as a means of mental discipline and of personal culture. But we can only get the utmost of delight, the utmost mental nourishment from history, when we are more or less (and the more the better) en rapport with the race whose past it chronicles.

Let us then go into Korea after the method of the second traveller, the happy-go-lucky, seemingly systemless fellow. Let us look at the Koreans of to-day. Let us peep into their houses, watch their amusements, ponder over the most characteristic of their many curious customs, and study their institutions. Then we may spend an hour or more over Korea’s history, not as a duty, but a treat. Our appetites will be keen, and we shall relish what would, I am thinking, seem to us but a boredom of incomprehensible dumb dates and endless iteration of meaningless facts, were we to, after the approved style, plunge into it now!

The Koreans are, in all probability, the children of Japanese stock, but China has been for centuries their wet nurse, and their schoolmistress. No two Oriental peoples are more essentially unlike than are the Chinese and the Japanese. And the Koreans, a race of Japanese, or kindred blood, living under conditions largely Chinese, and deeply imbued with Chinese ideas, present a picture peculiarly quaint, even in the quaintest part of the world.

They have Japanese faces, Chinese customs, and a manner of their own. But into their Chinese-like customs some little Japanese habit has crept now and again. And the Koreans have even ventured, once in a while, to invent a custom of their own.

Every Korean house has a cellar; not for the storing of wine, but for the storing of heat. The cellar is called a khan—its mouth, through which it is fed, is some distance from the house. On a cold night you will see one or more seemingly white-clad figures cramming the khan’s mouth, as fast as they can, with twigs, branches, and other combustible food. But once well fed, the furnace burns for hours, and keeps the house warm all night. So the attendants of the fire are not kept out in the cold over long; and while they are there, their hands are full of work that suffices to keep their blood at a decided tingle. A Korean house heated at sunset keeps warm all night, because the fire built is invariably huge, because the floors through which the heat permeates are made of oil-paper, and because the furnace itself is largely a mass of wooden and of stone intestines, pipes, and flues that retain and give out heat. With almost no exceptions the houses in Korea are one-storied. So simple a scheme of domestic architecture enables so simple a scheme of house-heating to be thoroughly efficacious.

Europeans sleeping for the first time in a Korean house, usually complain that in the middle of the night the heat is too intense, the atmosphere insupportable, and that toward the chill hours of early morning, when the fire has died, and the pipes at last grown cold, the room is most disagreeably cold. But these are minor matters, and far too trivial to disturb Korean slumber.

Next to the Eskimos, the Koreans are the heartiest eaters in the world. So, naturally enough, they sleep profoundly. They seem to be always eating. And nothing short of a royal edict, or a bursting bomb-shell, will interrupt a Korean feast. I regret to say that the flesh of young dogs is their favourite viand. Japanese beer is their favourite beverage. And for this let me commend them. For never in Milwaukee, never in Vienna, have I drank beer so good as that which is made at the Imperial brewery in Tokio. Like all other Orientals, they devour incredible quantities of fish; herrings for a first choice. The herrings are caught in December, and are not eaten until March. Water-melons are the fruit most plentiful and most perfect in Korea. They are superb.

Potatoes were in disgrace, under the ban of a royal edict, when Ja Hong Ting took Helen to Korea. They had been introduced into the country shortly before the Q’s. themselves. And their general use might have done much to alleviate the horrible famines which visit Korea with a horrible regularity. But their use and their culture were forbidden. Only in the less disciplined outskirts of the peninsula were they to be had. The mandarin used to send many miles for potatoes, and then they ate them in safety, only because of the flag that sheltered their house from the too scorching rays of the Korean sun. And it was so at all the legations.

But about the sign-posts in Korea. They are quaint, if you like! Each sign-post is shaped like an old-fashioned English coffin, and it is topped by a face; a very grotesquely painted, a very Korean, a very grinning, but for all that, a very human face. They used to rather startle Helen at first when she came round the corner of a country road, and found them smirking at her in the gruesome moonlight. But she grew used to them. For they were all alike. They all wore the countenance of Chang Sun, a great Korean soldier. Chang Sun lived one thousand, more or less, years ago. His life was devoted to the opening up of his country to the feet of his countrymen. He intersected the hills of Korea with pathways, and to-day he beams upon every Korean wayfarer from every sign-post. Beneath his beaming face you may (if you are learned enough) read his name. Beneath his name you may read to where the road or roads lead; how far the next settlement, or the next rest-house is, and one or two other items that are presumably of general interest to the Korean travelling public.