Corea
COREAN LANDSCAPE.
RAW LEVIES FOR THE CHINESE ARMY.
HISTORICAL SKETCH OF COREA, THE HERMIT NATION.
Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Land—Founding the Kingdom of Cho-sen—The Era of the Three Kingdoms—Dependence on China and Japan—Period of Peace and Prosperity—Invasion of Corea by the Japanese in the Sixteenth Century—Introduction of Christianity—The Modern History of Corea—Breaking down the Walls of Isolation—The French Expedition—American Relations with Corea—Ports Opened to Japanese Commerce—The Year of the Treaties—A Hermit Nation no Longer.
Until recent years our knowledge of the remarkable country of Corea, known indeed to the general public by little more than its name, has been limited to the meagre and scanty information imparted to us by Chinese and Japanese sources. After having been for several thousands of years the scene of sanguinary and murderous feuds between the various races and tribes who peopled the peninsula, and of the intrigues and wars of conquest of its rapacious neighbors, Corea succeeded after its final union under the sway of one ruler, but with considerable loss of territory, in driving back the invaders behind its present frontiers, enforcing since that time with an iron rule, that policy of exclusion which effectually separated it from the whole outer world. Corea, though unknown even by name in Europe until the sixteenth century, was the subject of description by Arab geographers of the middle ages. The Arab merchants trading to Chinese ports crossed the Yellow Sea, visited the peninsula, and even settled there. The youths of Shinra, one the Corean states, sent by their sovereign to study the arts of war and peace at Nanking, the mediæval capital of China, may often have seen and talked with the merchants of Bagdad and Damascus.