It doesn’t greatly matter, however, for the chances are that he has always spoken of it as “Sool,” which is the native fire-water, instead of using the proper pronunciation of “Sow-ohl”; and to learn the new name is easier than to change the old. Our own impressions of what was for more than five centuries the capital of Ch’ao-Hsien, the Land of Morning Calm, and is still the seat of the Government-General of Cho-sen, started at delight, sank very near to keen disappointment, then gradually climbed to somewhere in the neighborhood of calm enjoyment. Seen from afar, the jagged rows of mountain peaks that surround it should quicken the pulse even of the jaded wanderer. The promise that here at last he will find that spell of the ancient East which romancers have enticed him to seek, in the face of his cold better judgment, seems to rise in almost palpable waves from among them. Then he descends at a railway station that might be found in any prairie burg of our central West, and is bumped away by Ford into a city that is flat and mean in its superficial aspect, commonplace in form, and swirling with a fine brown dust. But next morning, or within a day or two of random wandering, according to the pace at which his moods are geared, interest reawakens from its lethargy, and something akin to romance and youthful enthusiasm grows up out of the details of the strange life about him.
There are, of course, almost no real streets, in the American sense, in the Far East; hence only those wholly unfamiliar with that region will be greatly surprised to find that the “many broad avenues” of Seoul, emphasized by semi-propagandist scribblers, are rather few in number and, with one or two exceptions, are sun-scorched stretches of dust which the rainy season of July and August will turn to oozing mud. But the eye will soon be caught by the queer little shops crowded tightly together along most of them, particularly by the haphazard byways that lead off from them into the maze of mushroom hovels that make up the native city. From out of these dirty alleys comes jogging now and then a gaudy red and gold palanquin in which squats concealed some lady of quality, though these conveyances now are almost confined to weddings and funerals; the miserable little mud hovels disgorge haughty gentlemen in spotless white who would be incredible did not the falsetto rat-a-tat of ironing and the groups of women kneeling along the banks of every slightest stream explain them. There is constant movement in the streets of Keijo, a movement that might almost be called kaleidoscopic, were it not for the whiteness of Korean dress; but it strikes one as rather an aimless movement, a leisurely if constant going to and fro that rarely seems to get anywhere. Dignified yangbans, that still numerous class of Korea, and especially of the capital, which in the olden days was rated just below the nobility, strut past in their amber beads and their huge tortoise-shell goggles as if they were really going somewhere; but if one takes the trouble to follow them he will probably find them doubling back on their tracks without having reached any objective. In the olden days they could at least go to the government offices where they pretended to do something for their salaries; since Japan has taken away their sinecures without removing the pride that forbids them to work, there is little else than this random strolling left for them to do.
In contrast to this numerous gentry, outdistanced by modern changes, there are sweating coolies lugging this or that, bulls hidden under mounds of brown-red brushwood from some far-off hillside, sleek-haired women slinking by with an almost apologetic air, many of them with the uncovered, sun-browned breasts somewhat less general in the capital than elsewhere, here and there a Korean pony, cantankerous with his full malehood, all streaming to and fro between an unbroken gauntlet of languid shopkeepers in their fly-trap “household” caps, of mangy dogs and dirty children. “Old-timers” will tell you that this was not so long ago all there was to Seoul, except inside the several big palace compounds, now so uninhabited; that walking, still much in vogue among the Koreans, was for the overwhelming majority the only means of getting about the city. Then there were no rickshaws, not over-numerous even to-day after twelve years of wholly Japanese rule; then none of the little dust- or mud-floored tram-cars, now so crowded, bumped along the principal avenues; certainly no battered and raucous-voiced automobiles scattered terror among the placid foot-going population. It is not difficult to picture the comparative silence of that bygone Seoul, with slipper-clad footsteps pattering noiselessly through the dust, or the mild clumping of that cross between the Dutch wooden shoe and the Japanese geta still worn in muddy weather, punctuated now and then by the booming of a mammoth bell, the mild hubbub of passing royalty surrounded by shrieking out-runners, and the incessant accompaniment of the falsetto rat-a-tat of ironing.
With the definite coming of the Japanese much of that ancient Seoul has departed. The great wall that enclosed the city has been largely leveled, for the Koreans, according to their new rulers, can only fight behind walls. Only a pair of the imposing city gates remain, and these as mere monuments instead of entrances and exits. The Independence Arch built to celebrate the end of paying tribute to Peking stands shabby, cracked, and blistered in a bed of sand in the ragged outskirts. Rubbish and worse litter the dark, wooden-slatted enclosure in which the mighty bell that once transmitted royal commands sits drunkenly and dejected on the ground. Vagabonds build their nests beneath the Oriental roof that shelters the stone-turtle monument of which the city was once so proud; the magnificent Altar of Heaven has become a garden ornament within the grounds of the principal hotel, and is generously furnished with Japanese settees and capacious cuspidors bearing the railway-hotel insignia. Of the three principal palaces one is a mere wilderness of weeds and vacant-eyed edifices; another houses the weak-minded remnant of the once royal family and has bequeathed most of its grounds to museum, botanical, and zoölogical purposes; the third, and most historic, is being completely hidden from the city by a mammoth modern building designed to become the headquarters of the Governor-General.
One might almost assume that a policy of blotting out the visible reminders of the old independent Korea had been adopted by the new rulers. Yet it is hardly that, I fancy, but mainly the utilitarian sense of modern improvement which is showing such small respect for the monuments of bygone Cho-sen. The Japanese are ardent in their efforts to make Seoul a city in the modern sense—the modern Western sense, I could have said, for their new structures are hardly copied from Japan. Imposing buildings that might have been transported from our own large cities are growing up for the housing of banks and important firms and government offices. There is already one genuinely asphalted street; new parks have been laid out where only wilderness or rubbish heaps were before. Besides the big central one there are adequate branch post-offices in every section of the city; police stations at every turn keep a watchful eye out for new candidates to the mammoth new penitentiary, built on the latest approved model, out near the “Peking Pass.” After their lights the new rulers are steadily improving the material aspect of the city, as of the whole peninsula. It would be too much to expect them to improve certain personal habits and domestic customs beyond the point which the Japanese themselves have reached, so that some forms of uncleanliness and undress, for instance, which a new American colony would quickly be forced to eradicate, have been given no attention.
The new rulers once planned even greater changes in the old city. They set about with the apparent intention of virtually moving it, or at least the commercial center of it, down nearer the River Han, in a section they called Ryuzan. There they built the railway headquarters and blocks of brick residences for the employees. A stone palace for the mikado’s viceroy was erected, streets laid out, and improvements impossible in the crowded portion of the city were projected. But commerce has a way of choosing its own localities; the Koreans are nothing if not conservative; local gossip has it that when Prince Ito was taken down to see his new residence he remarked to his well meaning subordinates that they might live down there in the swamp if they wished, but that he for one would stay in town. The prince is well known to have been no recluse and hermit who would deny himself the soft pleasures of cities. In the end his choice proved wise, for it is a rare rainy season that does not wipe out scores of native huts down along the Han and encroach upon the unused and isolated palace he rejected. The railway headquarters, residences, and school remain, and trains halt for an exasperatingly long time at Ryuzan station, so near that of Nandaimon to which most travelers are bound, almost as if the officials would vent their pique at having their will thwarted; but even the Japanese residents have preferred the old city. Along its southern edge, under the brow of Nansan Hill, dwell and trade that quarter of the fourth of a million of population which wears kimonos and getas, and the stroller down “Honmachidori” and its adjacent streets, narrow, crowded, busy, and colorful as a thoroughfare of old Japan, could easily imagine himself back in the Island Empire, far from the languid, white-clad throngs of the Land of Morning Calm.
CHAPTER II
SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS
It was our good fortune to dwell out over the hills beyond Seoul rather than in the hot and often breathless city itself. The half-hour walk led up past the big granite Bible School, along a little stream with its inevitable clothes-paddling women, flanked the grave-mound of a little prince, then climbed steeply over another half-wooded ridge from which stretched a wide-spreading mountainous view, everywhere deep green except for the broad brown streak of the River Han and here and there a mushroom patch of village. An American mission college was building in a big hilly pine-grove that owed its preservation to the tomb of a king’s concubine. Pines as fantastic and sturdy as any in Japan stood out against the sky-line; here and there a group of stinking chestnut-trees kept them company. Before they were granted this semi-sacred site the missionaries from our almost mythological land of “Mi-guk” had to agree not to build anywhere overlooking the grave; they had already been asked to close a path used as a short cut by students and an occasional faculty member, because it ran along the brow of the hill above the tomb. To look down upon a royal burial site is the height of disrespect in Korea, hence they are all arranged after a fixed pattern designed to avoid this sacrilege.
Out beyond the Todaimon, or East Gate, on the opposite side of the city, is the tomb of a more famous queen; but we preferred what we called our own, which is identical in form and size, and in a solitude much less often broken. Besides, “ours” really contained the mortal remains, while even the finger and a few bones which were all that remained after the brutal assassination and burning of Korea’s last queen were now buried elsewhere. Quite like ours are all the royal graves scattered up and down the peninsula of Cho-sen, in the several regions where succeeding dynasties built their capitals, flourished for a while, and fell, so that leisurely to visit it was worth a hasty glimpse of many others.
We could wander up over the pine-clad hill to the grave, for all the injunction against it; things are not so strict as all that in Korea, unless something Japanese is involved. But it was more convenient, and not merely more respectful, to approach the sanctuary from the bottom. On a level space in the forest, wholly cleared of trees but thick with grass, there was first of all the caretaker’s residence, a high-walled compound set off in the edge of the woods to the left. In a direct line down the center of the grassy rectangle stood first a torii, a square arch made of three light tree-trunks painted red, the upper crosspiece decorated with crude and fanciful carvings, a gateway without contiguous fence or wall. The Koreans are sensitive about the use of this symbolic entrance to their royal tombs; the caretaker of the little prince’s tomb we passed on our way in or out of Seoul told us one day, when we found that arch newly closed with barbed wire, that we might still pass through the grounds, but not beneath the torii. A hundred feet or more through this isolated entrance to her last resting-place stood the concubine’s prayer-house, so to speak—a large building by Korean standards, with a roof of highly colored tiles and four flaring gable-peaks, along which sat as many rows of porcelain monkeys to guard against evil spirits, as is the Korean custom. Through the many holes that had been torn by time or inquisitive fingers in the oily paper serving as glass between the slats of the many padlocked doors, one could dimly make out a bare wooden floor, scattered with dust and bits of rubbish, and a bare table-like altar on which, no doubt, boiled rice and other foods are at certain intervals offered to the spirit of the dead. It was plain that no such thoughtfulness had been shown recently, for dust and dinginess and faded paint were the most conspicuous features of the edifice, inside and out.