[1] On which tablets erected to the memory of the slain have been erected by the Coreans. See the article, Kang-wha, by Rev. M. N. Trollope, (Corean) Asiatic Society Transactions, Vol. II, Part I. [↑]
[2] At that time I was engaged in editing and annotating Hamel’s Narrative, which is the first account in any European language of Corea. Hamel and his party of Dutchmen were shipwrecked and spent fourteen years in Corea (see pp. 167–76). I have examined and read several copies in the original Dutch editions, printed in cheap pamphlet form at Rotterdam in Holland in 1668, and now preserved in the Royal Library at The Hague. The full narrative in English is given in the book Corea Without and Within. Philadelphia, 1884. Mr. Percival Lowell, the Secretary of the Corean Special Mission, returned with Han Yong Sik, and as the guest of the king spent a winter in Seoul, the literary fruit of which is the charming volume Chosen, the Land of Morning Calm, in which the proper names are transliterated according to Aston’s Manual of Corean Geographical and Other Proper Names Romanized. Yokohama, 1883. [↑]
[3] Nevertheless, in 1886 there were unearthed in Seoul two Dutch vases, as described in Mr. Scott’s paper in Vol. XXVIII, 1893–94, of the Transactions of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The figures of Dutch farm-life told their own story, and the well-worn rings of the handles bore evidence of constant use for years. Mr. Scott suggests that the presence of these Dutchmen might perhaps explain the anomaly often noticed in Corea—namely, blue eyes and fair hair. [↑]
[4] See his biography by Lane-Poole and Dickens, 1894. [↑]
[5] See the forthcoming Korean History, by Homer B. Hulbert, in the Korean Review (April, 1904, p. 180). This work is a complete survey of the story of Chō-sen from prehistoric to recent times. [↑]
CHAPTER LI.
THE WAR OF 1894: COREA AN EMPIRE.
In Asia and in semi-civilized states, as in the old European world, each sovereignty is a church nation. Religion and the state are one. China, Corea, and Japan, in their normal oriental condition, are all acute illustrations of the evils of the union of church and state. Like Turkey and Russia, they are persecuting nations, allowing no freedom of conscience to the subject. Any attempt to think differently from the orthodox and established cult, or philosophy, is sure to call down persecution, torture, and death. Modern Japan, by ceasing to be oriental and adopting freedom of conscience, has simplified the relations between ruler and ruled. China still persecutes in bigotry, and during the course of her history has shed more blood in the name of religion and government than probably the mediæval states of Europe.[1] In all Asiatic countries in which religious despotism still flourishes, practical Christianity, especially that form of it which is founded on the Bible in the vernacular, is the great disturbing force, even as it is the hope of the future. It comes at once into collision with the theory of the union of Church and State. Giving the common man a new outlook on the universe makes him exactly the kind of man that despots and men of privilege and prerogative most bitterly fear, hate, and oppose. Of this truth Corea is a striking illustration.