Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

Yet from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Chinese gentleman dressed like the Corean of to-day, and the mandarin of Canton or Nanking was as innocent of the Tartar hair-tail as is the citizen of Seoul. The Coreans simply adhere to the fashions prevalent during the Ming era. The Chinese, in the matter of garb, however loath foreigners may be to credit it, are more progressive than their Corean neighbors.

To the house of Ni belongs also the greater honor of abolishing [[83]]at least two cruel customs which had their roots in superstition. Heretofore the same rites which were so long in vogue in Japan, traces of which were noticed even down to the seventeenth century, held unchallenged sway in Corea. Ko-rai-chang, though not fully known in its details, was the habit of burying old men alive. In-chei was the offering up of human sacrifices, presumably to the gods of the mountains and the sea. Both of these classes of rites, at once superstitious and horrible, were anciently very frequent; nor was Buddhism able to utterly abolish them. In the latter case, they choked the victims to death, and then threw them into the sea. The island of Chansan was especially noted as the place of propitiation to the gods of the sea.

The first successors of the founder of the house of Ni held great power, which they used for the good of the people, and hence enjoyed great popularity. The first after Taijo reigned two years, from 1398 to 1400. Hetai-jong, who came after him, ruled eighteen years, and among other benefits conferred, established the Sin-mun-ko, or box for the reception of petitions addressed directly to the king. Into this coffer, complaints and prayers from the people could lawfully and easily be dropped. Though still kept before the gate of the royal palace in Seoul, it is stated that access to it is now difficult. It seems to exist more in name than in fact. Among the first diplomatic acts of King Hetai-jong was to unite with the Chinese emperor, in a complaint to the mikado of Japan, against the buccaneers, whom the authorities of the latter country were unable to control. Hence the remonstrance was only partially successful, and the evil, which was aggravated by Corean renegades acting as pilots, grew beyond all bounds. These rascals made a lucrative living by betraying their own countrymen.

Siei-jong, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his father, Hetai-jong, enjoyed a long reign of thirty-two years, during which the fortifications of the capital were added to and strengthened. The Manchius beyond the Ever-white Mountains were then beginning to rise in power, and Liao Tung was disturbed by the raids of tribes from Mongolia, which the Ming generals were unable to suppress. When the fighting took place within fifty miles of her own boundary river, Chō-sen became alarmed, and looked to the defence of her own frontier and capital. In 1450, on the death of the king, who “in time of peace prepared for war,” Mun-jong, his son, succeeded to royal power. As usual [[84]]on the accession of a new sovereign, a Chinese ambassador was despatched from Peking, which had been the Ming capital since 1614, to Seoul, to confer the imperial patent of investiture. This dignitary, on his return, wrote a book recounting his travels, under the title of “Memorandum concerning the Affairs of Chō-sen.” According to this writer, the military frontier of Corea at that time was at the Eastern Mountain Barrier, a few miles northwest of the present Border Gate. Palladius, the Russian writer, also states that, during the Ming dynasty, three grades of fortresses were erected on the territory between the Great Wall and the Yalu River, “to guard against the attacks of the Coreans.”

It is more in accordance with the facts to suppose that the Chinese erected these fortifications to guard against invasion from the Manchius and other northern tribes that were ravaging Liao Tung, rather than against the Coreans. These defences did not avail to keep back the invasion which came a generation or two later, and “the Corean frontier,” which the Chinese traveller, in 1450, found much further west than even the present “wall of stakes,” shows that the neutral territory was then already established, and larger than it now is. Of this strip of rich forest and ginseng land, with many well-watered and arable valleys, once cultivated and populous, but since the fifteenth century desolate, we shall hear again. In Chinese atlases the space is blank, with not one village marked where, until the removal by the Chinese government of the inhabitants westward, there was a population of 300,000 souls. The depopulation of this large area of fertile soil was simply a Chinese measure of military necessity, which compelled her friendly ally Chō-sen, for her own safety, to post sentinels as far west of her boundary river as the Eastern Mountain Barrier, described by the imperial envoy in 1450.

The century which saw America discovered in the west, was that of Japan’s greatest activity on the sea. On every coast within their reach, from Tartary to Tonquin, and from Luzon to Siam, these bold marauders were known and feared. The Chinese learned to bitterly regret the day when the magnetic needle, invented by themselves, got into the hands of these daring islanders. The wounded eagle that felt the shaft, which had been feathered from his own plumes, was not more to be pitied than the Chinese people that saw the Japanese craft steering across the Yellow Sea to ravage and ruin their cities, guided by the compass bought in China. They not only harried the coasts, but went far [[85]]up the rivers. In 1523, they landed even at Ningpo, and in the fight the chief mandarin of the city was killed.

Yet, with the exception of incursions of these pirates, Chō-sen enjoyed the sweets of peace, and two centuries slipped away in Morning Calm. The foreign vessels from Europe which first, in 1530, touched at the province of Bungo, in Southern Japan, may possibly have visited some part of the Corean shores. Between 1540 and 1546 four arrivals of “black ships” from Portugal, are known to have called at points in Japan. It was from these the Japanese learned how to make the gunpowder and firearms which, before the close of the century, were to be used with such deadly effect in Corea.

The Neutral Territory (from a Chinese Atlas).

Now came back to Europe accounts of China and Japan—which were found to be the old Kathay, and Zipangu of Polo and the Franciscans[[86]]—and of “Coria,” which Polo had barely mentioned. It was from the Portuguese, that Europe first learned of this middle land between the mighty domain of the Mings, and the empire in the sea. Stirred by the spirit of adventure and enterprise, and unwilling that the Iberian peninsulars should gain all the glory, an English “Society for the Discovery of Unknown Lands” was formed in 1555. A voyage was made as far as Novaia Zemlia and Weigatz, but neither Corea nor Cathay was reached. Other attempts to find a northeast passage to India failed, and Asia remained uncircumnavigated until our own and Nordenskjöld’s day. The other attempts to discover a northwest passage to China around the imaginary cape, in which North America was supposed to terminate, and through the equally fictitious straits of Anian, resulted in the discoveries of the Cabots, and of Hudson and Frobisher—of the American continent from the Hudson River to Greenland, but the way to China lay still around Africa.