Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

The traveler from Japan to the peninsula still known to the Western world as Korea has a sense of being wafted on some magic carpet thousands of miles while he slept, a sensation which the splendid steamers bridging the Straits of Tsushima several times a day do not dispel. It is surprising how different two lands separated only by a few hours on the sea can be. A fortnight on a Nippon Yusen Kaisha liner and six weeks of wandering from end to end of the Island Empire gave us a Japanese background against which many of the problems of the Far East stood out more clearly, but it did very little to prepare us for the physical aspects of the “Cho-sen” over which the banner of the rising sun now waves. Those who have listened to the long and heated controversy over the adding of this large slice of mainland to the mikado’s realm must often have heard the apologists’ assertion that the two peoples, Japanese and Koreans, are so nearly alike as to be virtually the same. Perhaps they are; but if so, all the outward evidences the casual visitor must depend upon to form an opinion are deceiving. Superficially, at least, Japan and Korea are as different as two Oriental lands and races could well be. In landscape, customs, costumes, point of view, general characteristics, even in the details of personal appearance, the two shores of the Sea of Japan strike the new-comer as having very little in common.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Korea, to any one newly arrived from Japan, is her treelessness. The lack of forests is, with the possible exception of exclamations of incredulity over her extraordinary costumes, almost certain to be the subject of any Occidental’s first paragraph of Korean notes. In our own case this denuded aspect of the peninsula was emphasized by the blazing, cloudless sunshine that beat relentlessly down during all our first day of travel northward to the old capital, and on many another to follow. The bare and sun-scorched landscape suggested some victim of barbarian cruelty, who, stripped of his garments, was being tortured to death by slow roasting. Possibly we should have been prepared for this, but we were not. We had heard much of the doings of Japan in Korea; we knew something of the opera-bouffe hats of the men and the startlingly short waists of the women, but no one had ever told us of the curiously pure and molten sunshine of “Cho-sen,” of the vividness of its shadows and the filtered transparency of its air, nor, for that matter, of the incessant heat we must endure because chance allotted us from June to August in what was once the Hermit Kingdom.

Trees as sparse as the hairs of a Korean beard stood out in lonely isolation across the more or less flat lands of all that first day’s journey; beyond these, usually rather near at hand, rose scarred and repulsive hillsides as unsightly as the faces of those countless inhabitants along the way who had been visited by the “honorable spirit” of smallpox. It was not merely the barrenness of a naturally treeless country, a barrenness as dreary as those upper reaches of the Andes to which real vegetation never attains, but one which, like the denuded plains of Spain, visibly complains of the wanton violence of man. To be sure, many of the rocky hills that sometimes rose to be almost mountains were here and there thinly covered with evergreen shrubs which might some day be trees, and even forests. But these, travelers are informed with what becomes tiresome persistency, were planted by the new Government. The Japanese policy of reforestation, we were eventually to know, has already done excellent things for Korea, and that not merely, as those who resent the rape of the peninsula assert, where it will attract the passing tourist’s eye, and it promises in time to accomplish something worth while; but it is an unfortunate Japanese trait to fear that good deeds will not speak loudly enough for themselves.

The reducing of a once well wooded land to its present nude state is characteristic of the Korean, we were to learn, suggestive of his general point of view. In the olden days the people were often driven to the hills by their savage or demented rulers, and as the rigorous winters that contrast with the tropical summers came on, they not only burned the trees, but as roots make excellent charcoal they dug up even these, leaving nothing that might by any chance sprout again. To replant in better times, to take any serious thought for the morrow, would have been un-Korean. The Korean even of to-day who covets the half-dozen cherries or plums on a limb does not usually take the trouble to pick them; he breaks off the branch and goes his way munching the fruit, with never a thought of next year. Translate this improvidence, this almost complete lack of foresight, into all the details of daily life, and the condition and the final fate of Korea become understandable, in fact inevitable.

Woods survive to any great extent in Korea only in two places—about royal tombs and up along the Yalu River which forms the northern frontier. Elsewhere in the peninsula, with minor exceptions, there are only groups of trees planted by foreign missionaries, and rows of pine shrubs set out directly by the Japanese Government, or by local authorities, school children, or private individuals, under Japanese influence. This treelessness is not the unimportant detail many may think; it is the wanton destruction of her forests of long ago that gives the Korea of to-day her mainly mud houses, much of her filth, dust, and swarming flies, and those devastating floods of the rainy season which sweep roads, bridges, fields, and even villages before them.

There were many other things which gave the Korean landscape its strikingly un-Japanese aspect. Fewer people were working in the larger and less garden-like fields; the village roofs thatched with rice-straw had a flatter, smoother look than the homes of Japanese peasants; the towns themselves seemed to huddle together as closely and inconspicuously as possible, as if to escape, or join in resisting, the rapacious tax-gatherers of the olden days that are not forgotten. Koreans in white, their inevitable color, so rare in Japan, were everywhere, though more often in the shade of villages or rare wayside trees or huts than out in the baking sunshine. The suggestion forced itself upon us that perhaps the fields were larger because the people could not coax themselves to work alone. In Japan it had been unusual to see more than a peasant and his wife in the same field; here work seemed to be done almost entirely by gangs. In spite of the general aridness of the landscape, there were many flooded rice-fields, and in nearly all of them waded a soldier-like line of often a dozen laborers, as many women as men among them. Much of the country showed no signs of the languid hand of man, yet even in the drier sections scattered rows of these peasants, their garments still almost snow-white at a distance, gleamed forth in the otherwise mainly reddish landscape.

Similar groups stood in semicircles on earth threshing-floors flailing grain in a way that is familiar to the Western world, but which we had never seen in Japan. Nor were there any reminders of the Island Empire in the clusters of women kneeling at the edge of every bit of a stream or mud-hole paddling clothes with a sort of cricket-bat. The ways of life, the very architecture, were strangely reminiscent of lands inhabited by negroes.

The most primitive of plows, drawn by bulls, dragged their way to and fro in a field here and there. Along what passed for roads others of these lumbering animals plodded almost hidden under loads of new-cut grain or brushwood, at a pace which seemed to fit the languid temperament of the country. In places a highway, constructed by the new rulers, tried to preserve an unbroken march; but wherever a bridge should have been they almost invariably pitched headlong down into the bed of a stream as waterless as those of summer-time Spain. Even the Japanese, we were to learn before leaving the peninsula, are poor bridge-builders, while the Korean remains true to his natural improvidence in constructing flimsy things of branches and earth, with totally inadequate abutments, which the first dash of the rainy season down the treeless hillsides converts into scattered masses of rubbish.

All the day long the scene varied little from these first few glimpses. There was a certain rough beauty in the tawny hillsides and the broad stretches of sun-flooded rice lands, but of a similarity that grew monotonous, while the ways of the people, until opportunity should come to see them in closer detail, were such as the fleeting tourist is wont to sum up under the outworn word “picturesque” and quickly lose from between the pages of memory. Korea has often been called a land of villages, and in all the two hundred and eighty miles from the southern point of the peninsula to Seoul there was little more than a frequent succession of smooth-thatched, closely snuggled towns varying, outwardly at least, only in size. Not until later on, and by more primitive means of travel, were we to know of the remnants of bygone civilization, the pine-grove tombs of royalty, the ruined palaces of fallen dynasties, and the welter of modern problems with which the peninsula teems.

The Korean wardrobe has so little in common with that of the Occident, and includes so many startling absurdities, that it merits a few words in detail, even though some of its more striking features are fairly familiar to those interested in foreign lands. To begin with the basis of all wardrobes, there is that ingenious contrivance with which the Korean gentleman protects his other garments from perspiration during the blazing months of summer. A missionary who carried home a set of these and offered them to any one in his native parish who could identify them recorded forty-two guesses, all equally wide of the mark, which was the simple phrase “summer underwear.” Out of their environment these useful garments look more like primitive bird-cages or light baskets than what they really are. In their entirety they consist of a kind of waistcoat, a high collar of the Elizabethan period, and cuffs so long as to be almost sleeves—all made of small strips of ratan very loosely woven together. That they are effective in allowing the free circulation of air, and at the same time preserve the cloth garments from contact with the perspiring body, one is willing to grant without the evidence of actual personal experience. Now and again one runs across a Japanese petty official who, in an effort to mitigate his midsummer sufferings, has adopted at least the cuffs; but on the whole this ingenious contribution is likely to suffer the common fate of never finding appreciation beyond its native habitat.