Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Over his ratan skin-protectors the Korean gentleman wears a kind of waistcoat-shirt, trousers (if so commonplace a term may be used for so uncommonplace a garment) which are more than voluminous even in use and, when hung out to dry, suggest the mainsails of a wind-jammer, and finally a turamaggie, an overcoat reaching to the calves and tied together with a bow over the right breast. All these articles are snow-white, and in summer are made of a vegetable fiber so thin as to suggest starched cheese-cloth. The mainsail trousers are fastened tightly about the ankles with a winding of cloth, which also supports the carefully foot-shaped and curiously thick white socks, which are thrust into low slippers cut well away at the instep, slippers formerly of leather richly embroidered or otherwise decorated, but now rapidly giving way to the white or reddish rubber ones made in Japan which are ruining the feet of Korea. The crowning glory and absurdity of this de rigueur costume, however, is the head-dress. About the brow is bound, so tightly as to cause violent headaches when first adopted and to leave lifelong marks, a black band about four inches wide and reaching well up over the curve of the head. On top of this sits a brimless cap shaped like a fez with an L-shaped indentation in its front, and finally over all else reigns an uncollapsible opera-hat. Both the hat and the cap beneath it are made of horsehair, or cheap imitations thereof, and are so loosely woven and screen-like in their transparency that facetious and unkindly foreigners are wont to refer to them as “fly-traps.” This term is as unwarranted as it is offensive, for the one place in Korea which is free from flies in season is the hat-protected crown of the adult Korean male. One need not take the word of “old-timers,” but will find ample evidence in photographs of a decade or more ago that the opera-bouffe contraption with which the Korean gentleman tops himself off once had brim enough to do duty almost as a real hat. Such utilitarian days are past, however; perhaps it is that universal bugbear of the human family, the high cost of living, which has reduced the brim to little more than a ledge. The fact remains that a fly must walk with caution now in making a circuit which in the good old days he might safely have accomplished after sipping long and generously at the edge of a bowl of sool. However, let there be no misapprehension, no uncalled for sympathy under the impression that this shrinking has worked hardship upon the wearer. The Korean hat was not designed to be a protection for the head and a shade for the face. Its purpose in life is far more serious and is concentrated on one single object,—to protect from evil spirits the precious topknot which is the badge of full Korean manhood. Hence its duty is not merely an outdoor one; wicked beings of the invisible world have no compunction in taking unfair advantage of their victims, so that to this day it is a common practice for the Korean man to lay him down to sleep—on his bare papered floor, using a hardwood brick as a pillow—with his precious top-hat still in place.

However, we have not yet completely garbed our yang-ban, our gentleman of the Land of Morning Calm. His hat, being light, almost ethereal, in fact, must be held in place, whether in sleep or in the slightest breeze, for which purpose a black ribbon under the chin serves the ordinary man and a string of amber beads his haughtier fellow-citizen. Add to this the unfailing collapsible fan, and a pipe as long and heavy as a cane, with a bowl the size of the end of the thumb, and you may vizualize in his entirety the proud gentleman who sallies forth from his mud hut and picks his way leisurely between the mud-holes and offal-heaps of any town or city street. The fan is rarely inactive, now dispensing a breeze to the copper-tinted face of its owner, now shading it from the direct rays of a burning sun. The pipe, bowl down, swings with the jaunty aggressiveness of an Englishman’s “stick”; above all else the features remain fixed and unalterable in their serenity, for in the code of the genuine Korean gentleman of the old school there is no greater vulgarity than to show in public either mirth, anger, curiosity, or annoyance. Nothing could be more specklessly white than this dignified apparition, for do not his servant-wives spend their days, and no small portion of their nights, in preparing his garments for the daily sortie and mingling with his fellows? Behold him, then, as he joins the latter, in a shop-door or on a shaded street-corner, where he squats with them in that fashion which has caused a row of Korean males to be likened to penguins, letting his spotless starched turamaggie spread out on the unswept earth with a carelessness which seems a boast of his ability to command unlimited female labor.

We must come back again, however, to the incredible hat, as the eyes and the attention constantly will as long as one remains in Korea. If the Japanese are commonplace and unoriginal in their head-dress, certainly their newly captured fellow-subjects make up for it. Set usually at a jaunty angle, whether by design, breeze, or cranial malformation, a jauntiness enhanced by its scarcity of brim, the “fly-trap” hat furnishes Korea half its picturesqueness. Graduates of modern mission or Japanese government schools, self-complacent young men who have been abroad, native Christian pastors, may wear the Panama or the felt of the West above their otherwise national white garb, but the “fly-trap” is still the prevailing head-dress throughout the length, breadth, and social strata of the peninsula. Far and wide, in city or village, in crowded marts or on lonely country roads, indoors or out, awake or asleep, the high hat is seldom missing. It persists to the very edge of the frontier, then disappears as suddenly as it had sprung up at the other extremity of the country. After one has weathered the first shock it does not look so greatly out of place on your city gentleman, but I never learned to behold it with proper equanimity on the heads of porters, plasterers, and peasants. Even the workman without it, however, is still conspicuous. Tattered, soiled, and sun-scorched men wandering across the country with a kind of tramp’s pack on their backs wear the horsehair bird-cage on their heads; perhaps the most incongruous sight of all is to behold a battered old man of the rice-fields solemnly squatting on a garbage-heap in his mud hamlet, with his opera hat perched on guard above his gray and scanty topknot.

Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the light-brown hat formerly worn by all men about to be married, or to add a new wife to their collection of servants; once the custom was wide-spread of painting the hat white in sign of mourning, but to-day black is almost universal, and an excellent foil to the otherwise white garb. Bridegrooms no longer feel compelled publicly to announce their happy status, and there is another and more effective means of showing grief at bereavement,—a mourner’s hat like a large, finely woven, inverted basket with scalloped edges, which completely hides the afflicted face of the wearer. As he ambles along under this ample protection instead of blistering beneath a horsehair cage, surely a feeling of gratitude toward the departed relative must pervade the thoughts of the bereaved, particularly as the Korean term of mourning lasts for three years. There is a still more enormous, very coarsely woven, sunshade worn by peasants in the midsummer months, while Buddhist priests, otherwise indistinguishable from layman tramps and beggars, wear a smaller hat of similar shape to that of the mourners, but raised on bamboo stilts well above the head. The horsehair hat is costly, by Korean standards, the better ones even by our own, and, being put together with glue, is frail and perishable. Water is particularly fatal to it. Let the first drop of a shower fall, therefore, and from within the garments of every Korean man appears a hat-umbrella, a little cone-shaped cover of oiled paper or silk, like a miniature Japanese parasol, which is quickly opened and slipped over the precious hat. As to the rest of the male garb, no damage is possible which cannot be repaired by the return of sunshine or a few hours’ labor by the women at home. Thus on a rainy day the black heads above white bodies characteristic of all Korea turn to drenched cheese-cloth surmounted by oily yellow clowns’ caps.

It is fitting that the wardrobe of the insignificant sex should be simpler, and more easily described. Except that anything in the way of head-dress is denied them, lest they compete with the decorative male, the garb of the Korean women is in the main a crude replica of that of the men. All reasonably available evidence goes to show that the women are never permitted the luxury of wickerwork undergarments. Trousers, socks, and slippers are similar to those worn by the male; above these is the thinnest and slightest of garments, which barely covers the shoulders, and over the trousers is worn a white skirt fastened well up above the floating ribs. In summer at least that is all, except in a few old-fashioned communities, where a muffling white cloak covering everything except the eyes and the feet is still occasionally seen. That, I repeat, is all, and from our puritanical point of view it is not enough. For the Korean woman insists that the waistline is at the armpits, and makes no provision to have the upper and lower garments contiguous, with the result that she displays to the public gaze exactly that portion of the torso which the women of most nations take pains to conceal. Missionaries, who are as prone as the rest of us to lose their native point of view through long contact with other races, assure us that Korean women are extremely modest. In general deportment the statement holds water; but a married lady of Korea, marching down the main thoroughfare of one of our cities in her native garb, would be granted anything but modesty. One might fancy that the costume was prescribed by some lascivious tyrant of olden days; those who have looked deeply into the matter, however, assure us that it is due to the pride of motherhood. The fact remains that, though the precept and example of Western nations have tended to lengthen the upper garment among better-class women of the cities, and particularly among those who have attended modern schools, the great majority of the adult female sex in Korea still wear their breasts outside their clothing. Sun-browned and leather-textured as the face, the plumpness of matrons or the withered rags of age are almost always in plain, not to say insistent, evidence. In fact neither the men nor the women of the masses often succeed in making both garments meet; males below the turamaggie class as habitually display their navels as their wives do their bosoms.

White is as universally the color of Korean garments in winter as in summer; the only difference is that they thicken from cheese-cloth to cotton-padded ones as the cold season advances. The incongruous sight of skaters in what looks like tropical garb, of whole towns of people wading through the snow from which they are barely distinguishable, provokes the wonder of winter visitors. The whiteness of a Korean crowd can be duplicated nowhere on earth. Within the lifetime of any one capable of reading these lines the glimpse of a figure in dark or colored garments anywhere in the peninsula betrayed it at once as that of a foreigner. The first record of any variation from this rule was when, a decade ago, the upper classmen of a mission school in Seoul agreed by resolution to adopt dark European trousers, in order to spare their wives or mothers some of their incessant washing and ironing.

The sounds of these two occupations are never silent in Korea. Stand on an eminence above any town or city of the land, and to the ears will be borne the similar yet easily distinguishable rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat of a hundred housewives busy with one or the other of their two principal duties. How they attain the snowy whiteness required by their unaffectionate masters by paddling their garments at the edge of any mud-hole or trickle of sewage is one of the mysteries of the East; yet not a roadside puddle or a hollowed rock but is turned into a wash-tub, and never is the visible result outwardly anything but spotless purity. In contrast to the dull plump-a-plump of washing paddles is this falsetto tone of ironing, prolonged far into every night. Nay, wake up at any hour and it will be strange if you do not catch the sound of some distant housewife putting the finishing touches on the garments in which her lord will strut forth into the world in the morning. For in Korea the hot iron is not in vogue, except a tiny one used along the sewed or pasted seams. Instead, the clothing is folded over a hardwood cylinder and beaten with two miniature baseball-bats, beaten with an endless persistency that suggests an unsuspected durability in the apparently flimsy material, and with a rhythm that has grown almost musical with centuries of practice.

Children are often dressed in colors, and unmarried maidens may wear garments of a green or bluish tinge; but all soon succumb to the omnipresent white. Huge hats not unlike those of men in mourning were once universally required for young women not yet sentenced to the servitude of a husband, that their faces might not be disclosed to the male sex. Missionaries by no means gray in the service recall how half-acres of these basket-hats used to lie stacked up before native churches on days of service. But the old order passes, even in the once Hermit Kingdom, and one may travel far afield now and still perhaps look in vain for any survival of this long prevalent custom. As in Japan, the head-dress of the women of Korea is now a matter of hair, in this case drawn smoothly and tightly down over the scalp, like a cap of oily black velvet, and tied in a compact little knot behind, decorated perhaps with a red cloth rosette and thrust through with what looks almost like one of our new-fashioned nickel-plated lead-pencils.

The Koreans have never been reduced to any such crude expedient as a bachelor-tax to keep up their marriage-rate. Until very recent years all boys wore their hair in a long braid up to the day they took a wife. Even now this custom survives in some outlying districts, though none yielded more swiftly to the influx of foreign influence. As long as a man wore a braid he was rated a minor; when he approached manhood he became more and more a community butt, and shame and ridicule rarely failed to drive him into an early marriage. Girls, too, had powerful reasons for not long persisting in the dreadful condition of maidenhood, not the least among which was the custom, still widely practised, of burying the body of an unmarried woman in the public highway, to the everlasting shame of her family to its remotest branches. Moreover, a Korean woman is not given a name of her own until she has borne a son, after which she is forever known as “Mother of So-and-So.” Before that her title, even to her husband, is “Yea!” or the slightly more honorable “Yea-bo!” which correspond fairly closely to our affectionate “Heh!” or “Heh, you!”