CHAPTER III.
SÖUL FROM THE CITY WALL.
Seen from the wall (a most wonderful wall which describes a circuit of 9975 paces), Söul looks like a bed of thriving mushrooms, mushrooms planted between the surrounding high hills, but grown in many places up on to those hills. Yes; they look very much like mushrooms, those low, one-storied houses, with their sloping, Chinese-like roofs, some tiled, some turfed, and all neutral tinted. The houses of Söul are as alike as mushrooms are, and as thickly planted.
The wall defines the city with a strange outline. Now it dips into the tiny valley, now it pulls itself up on to the top of some high hill.
Korea is a most distressingly hilly country. If you elect to go for a decent stroll, it is a matter of climbing a hill, and when you reach the summit of the hill it is a matter of tumbling down the other side, to scramble up another hill, and your path will be just such a succession of ups and downs, even though you go north until you reach the “Ever White Mountain,” and, in reaching it, reach the “River of the Duck’s Green,” which, flowing towards the south, divides Korea from China; reach the Tu Man Kang which, flowing towards the north-east, divides Korea from the territory of the Tsar. Up and down it will be, even though you push east until you reach the purple “Sea of Japan.” Still up and down you will find it, although you go as far south, or as far west, as Korea goes, and find yourself on the shores of China’s “Yellow Sea.” Korea looks like a stage storm-at-sea. Its hills are so many that they lose their grandeur, as individuality is lost in multitude.
But we must get back on to the wall, the wall of Söul.
The wall, which is purely Chinese in character, is punctuated by eight gates. All of them have significant names. Several of them are strictly reserved for very special purposes. The south gate is called “The Gate of Everlasting Ceremony.” The west gate is “The Gate of Amiability.” The east gate is “The Gate of Elevated Humanity.” The south-west gate is “The Gate of the Criminals.” The majority of Korean criminals, who are condemned to death, are beheaded. But this may not be within the city walls. The procession of the man about to die passes through the “Criminals’ Gate.” And that gate is never opened save on the occasions of such gruesome functions. The south-east gate is “The Gate of the Dead.” No corpse is interred within the city walls. And no corpse, save only the corpse of a king, may pass through any other gate than the “Gate of the Dead.” Any corpse (but the monarch’s) would defile the gates through which Söul’s humanity is wont to ebb and flow. The “Gate of the Dead” has another name. It is often called “The Gate of Drainage,” for by its side the River Hanyang flows out to the Yellow Sea. The northern gate stands high upon the summit of a peculiarly shaped hill, which the French missionaries aptly named “Cock’s Comb.” This gate is never opened save to facilitate the flight of a Korean king.
The gates differ greatly in size, which adds to the unusual picturesqueness of the wall.
The Cock’s Comb, up to whose highest ridge the wall of Söul runs, is at once the most distinct and the most interesting bit of Söul’s background. It is, among the mountains of the world, so uniquely shaped that no one who has ever seen it can ever forget it. And it is the altar of the most sacred of Korea’s national ceremonies.
Although a large portion of this hill is enclosed within Söul’s wall, Söul itself, climbing city though it is, has not climbed far up the hill. The summit of the Cock’s Comb is an uninhabited, high suburb of Söul.
When the night has well fallen, when the “white” clad masses in Söul’s market-place can no longer see the outlines of the hill, four great lights break out upon that hill’s crest. To all in Söul those lights cry out, “All’s well. In all Korea, all’s well.” Each light represents two of the eight provinces into which Korea is divided. If in any Korean province or county there is war, or threatening of war, a supplementary light burns near the light that indicates that province. If the war-light is placed on the left, war or invasion threatens one province, if the war light is placed on the right, war or worse threatens another province.
The bonfire signal service of the Korean War Office is complicated and elaborated. One extra fire means that an enemy has been sighted off some part of the sandy Korean coast. Two lights mean that the enemy have landed; three mean the enemy are moving inland; four mean they are pushing toward the capital; five—! Well, when five such fires flare up, the citizens of Söul can only pray—or run and drown themselves in the rapid rushing river that leaves Söul as the condemned leave it—because those five bonfires mean that the enemy draw near the city’s gate.
Telegraphy—as Edison knows it—is unknown in Korea. But the Koreans have a weird but vivid telegraphy of their own.
At short intervals upon their rocky, sandy coast huge cranes are built. Each crane is tended by a trusted official of the Korean king. When dusk begins to fall, the attendant of the crane lights in it a great bonfire, if all is well. That bonfire’s light is seen by the attendant of a fire some miles more inland—some miles nearer Söul—and so from every pace of Korea’s boundary, the faithful servants of Korea’s king flash to Korea’s capital the message, “All is well.” A hundred lines of message-light meet upon that queer hill, the “Cock’s Comb” of Söul.
Many a night of late, unless the wires have lied to us, there must have been a great confusion among those signal fires, and vast confusion in poor frightened Söul.
A certain light will mean “China has pounced upon us.” Another light will mean “Japan has stabbed us.” And a score of other lights will mean a score of dire facts which only the heads of the Korean War Department could translate for us, if they would.
Curfew shall not ring to-night. “Ah! how often,” said Helen, when this Chino-Japanese war was first declared, “I have seen those four placid bonfires tell the gentle Koreans that no Lion of England nor of India had roared, that no Eagle of Russia (not to needlessly mention Austria or America) had swooped, no dragon of China or Japan had belched destroying fire! To-night, if those fires burn, they flash a message of dire distress to Söul’s shrinking, blue-robed men, and hidden, unseen women, unless happily they are unconscious what an excuse for war their isolated peninsula has become.”
Poor Korea! what has she done? Nothing unwomanly. But womanlike she has been unfortunately situated.
China has just suffered a plague.
Japan has just suffered an earthquake. For very many years China and Japan have thought it expedient to soothe national heart-ache (resultant upon national disaster) with the potent mustard plaster of war.
The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The Koreans hate the Japanese and the Chinese, and are hated by both. An Oriental imbroglio is not hard of conception.
The worst of it is that Korea seems doomed. And Korea, with all her faults, is one of the few remaining widows of the dead (but not childless) old world. And she, good purdah-woman that she is, is lying down with considerable wifely dignity upon the funeral pile, which civilization has lit to cremate the false, old notions of the past.
One who has lived in Korea can but think it rather a pity that Korea should cease to be, or be too much remodelled, whoever’s in the wrong—Japan or China.
Nature has found Korea so nearly perfect, that it seems almost profane for man (or those combinations of men called nations) to find fault with her. In Korea there are snows that never melt. In Korea there are flowers that never cease to bloom.
The land of the morning calm! Poor little peninsula (only twice and a half the size of Scotland), the soft, rosy Oriental haze is going to be ripped off of you, and in the cold, clear, brilliant light of Westernized day you are going to fade away into nothing! But before you quite fade away let us have a peep at you. You are superior in many ways to our land. For one thing, you begin your year more sensibly. You ring the new year in with the birth of the year’s first flowers.
The Korean new year is a month later than ours. The snow is still upon the ground there in February. But even so, the fruitless plum-trees open their myriad buds, and long before the cold snow has melted from their feet, their heads are covered with a warm, tinted, perfumed snow of bloom. A few weeks later, and the cherry trees are white with a magnificence of blossom that nowhere in this world cherry-trees can excel, not even in Japan. Before the cherry blossoms fall the wisteria breaks into ten thousand clusters of purple loveliness. Then the peonies flaunt in every fertile and half fertile spot, and mock, like the impudents they are, the splendour of the sun. But their proud heads fall ere long, and all Korea is lovely with the iris.
Autumn is the most delightful of the Korean seasons. It is matchless. Not even on the banks of the Hudson does summer die so splendid a death as she dies in Korea. The Korean summer, superb and perfumed as she is, is very like that false Cawdor of whom Malcolm said to Duncan:
“Nothing in his lifeBecame him like the leaving it.”
“Nothing in his lifeBecame him like the leaving it.”
“Nothing in his lifeBecame him like the leaving it.”
“Nothing in his lifeBecame him like the leaving it.”
“Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.”
Winter in Korea is unqualifiedly cold. The hills are white with snow, and the rivers are grey with ice. The people huddle into their over-heated houses. And I believe that the entire nation does not own a pair of skates. The only sleds, or sleighs, belong to the fishermen who crack through the ice to catch their finny prey. The fisherman sits upon the sled as he plies his noiseless industry, and when his day’s work is done he piles his scaly plunder upon the sled, and so drags it to the market-place.
But it was summer when Helen first stood upon the wall of Söul. A parapet crenulates the outer edge of that old wall. It is broken with loop-holes, and notched with embrasures. And every few yards its broken outline is broken again by the overhanging branches of flower-heavy trees, or by the bright blossoms of some vine that has found root in one of the old wall’s mossy niches.
And within this picturesque wall huddles superlatively picturesque Söul.
The royal palaces are noticeable for their gardens and their size. Big as they are, and they are very big, they are none too big for the vast harem that forms a most important part of their household.
Far from the houses of the king stands “The South set Apart Palace.” The resident Chinese Commissioner lived there. In front of this building stands one of Söul’s two remarkable “Red Arrow Gates.” Near is the United States legation.
One of the most interesting features of Söul is its little Japanese colony. The following description of it was written a few years ago by a talented American, who was for some months the guest of the king of Korea:—
“With its back up against the South Mountain stands the building of the Japanese legation. From a flagstaff above it floats the Japanese ensign, the red ball on the white field. Here lives the little Japanese colony, a true bit of transplanted Japan, all alive in an alien land. Some of the legation have with them their wives, and many children play about the courtyard.
“It has its own force of soldiers, kept constantly recruited from home; its doctors, its policeman—all it can need to be sufficient to itself. The minister is as much a governor as a representative at a foreign court. Day and night the soldiers stand before the gateway of the legation building and change guard as if it were a camp; and whenever the minister goes abroad a certain number of them accompany him as escort. The soldiers are needed. Twice the legation has had to fight its way from Söul to the sea.”
In Korea when one dynasty gives way to another (and that is a fairly frequent occurrence) the newly-throned dynasty abandons the capital of the old dynasty and establishes for itself, and its heirs for ever, a new capital. So was Söul established five hundred years ago by the first crowned ancestor of Korea’s present king.
The city wall was thrown about a very considerable area. And according to rigid Korean custom, that wall must for ever mark the city’s limits. But the actual city, the city of the people, has surged far beyond that wall.
One class of Söul’s inhabitants—a most important class—lives almost in its entirety outside the city’s gates. The fishermen of Söul live in the river suburbs. There they ply their trade winter and summer; and, I might almost add, day and night. They live upon the banks of the river from which they draw their livelihood. Their quaint low houses fringe the edge of the land, and their boats fringe the edge of the water.
Fish and rice are the staple foods of the Koreans, save in the north of the peninsula, where rice will not grow. There fish and millet are the general food. Fish is the great staple throughout the country. And no class of men, perhaps, are so important to Söul’s general welfare as the fishermen who live just beyond the walls, and daily come into her market-places to sell their slippery spoil. Meat is scarcely eaten in Korea. Korea is a land of fearful famines. The rice fails. The millet fails. Everything fails except the fish. Yes; I think that I may unqualifiedly say, that to Korea no class is so important as the fishermen—to the very life of the Koreans no class so necessary, so indispensable.
The women of position are carried through the streets in the closest of closed palanquins. A woman of the middle class, if obliged to walk abroad, invariably wraps an ordinary dress about her head and shoulders. And very far from seductive does she look. The long loose sleeves of the dress hang from her head like great, ungainly, shapeless ears. And the folds of the ungraceful garment are held tightly in front of her face by one determined hand—a hand that never does, and for nothing in the world would, relax its hold. The women of the very poorest class, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, are indeed compelled to, with uncovered heads and unveiled faces, go about the streets. But they move rapidly. They look neither to the right nor to the left. And they slink by men with downcast eyes. And men never look at them. Indeed a Korean gentleman will not, by one single glance, betray that he is aware of the presence in public of any woman; unless indeed she belong to the geisha, or “accomplished class.” The geisha girls go about the streets frankly, and unhiddenly enough. But they are a class aside. In Korean wifehood, in Korean motherhood, they have no part.
The Koreans take a great deal of medicine—those that can afford it—and it never seems to do them any harm. For the rich, pills of incredible size are richly gilded and placed in elaborate boxes. The poor take smaller pills ungilded, and omit the boxes altogether. Very many Koreans take medicine at regular intervals without the slightest reference to their then state of health. These systematic persons do not take medicine when they are ill, unless the illness has the good taste to fall upon their duly appointed medicine-day. This is how an old Korean explained to Helen the philosophy of the medicine-regularly-taken theory. “On every seventh day you rest whether you are tired or not. And on all the other days you work, whether you are tired or not. So do we take our medicine, once in so many weeks, because it is well to observe system: to be regular.” The old man’s eye twinkled finely as he spoke, as who should say, “What are you answered now?” And Helen rather felt that he had her on the hip.
Mr. Percival Lowell says: “In Korea, medicine is an heirloom from hoary antiquity. An apothecary’s shop there needs not to adorn itself with external and irrelevant charms, like the beautiful purple jar that so deceived poor little Rosamond. Upon eminent respectability alone it bases its claim to custom; and its traditions are certainly convincing. Painted upon suitable spots along the front of the building runs the legend, ‘Sin Nong Yu Öp,’—that is, ‘the profession left behind by Sin Nong.’ This eminent person was a ‘spiritual agriculturist,’ the discoverer of both agriculture and medicine; and the pills sold in the shops to-day are supposed to be the counterparts of those invented by him. Worthily to render the legend, we ought to translate it, ‘Jones, successor to Æsculapius’.”
There are two distinct Koreas, distinct though having much in common: the Korea of the upper classes, and the Korea of the populace. We have of late been hearing quite a good deal about the history of Korea, about the topography of Korea, about the King of Korea, and about the Korea of the upper classes. But about the lower classes we have heard comparatively little. The literature at our disposal concerning Korea is more than meagre. Very little of this literature deals with the people—the common people of Korea.
The streets of Söul—the streets upon whose edges the people of Söul live, the streets through which the people of Söul surge—are very wide. Most of them have, however, the appearance of being very narrow. Wide streets seem to the Korean mind unnecessary luxuries. The people of Söul utilize the streets of their city by erecting temporary booths outside their houses, and beyond the booths they spread their trays and mats of merchandise. Inch by inch the street disappears beneath the extemporized shops of the people, until at last just enough room is left for the interminable procession of humanity to squeeze through. This encroachment is taken good-naturedly enough by everyone. The people positively pick their slow way between trays of nuts and mats of grain, booths of hats and sleds of fish. When the king wishes to take a promenade or ride through any of the streets of Söul, all the booths are taken from those streets, and with the trays and mats are tucked out of sight. The streets are swept and garnished. The next day, or, if it is not too late, when his Majesty has returned to his palace, the booths are re-erected, the mats and trays are re-arranged, and the every-day life of Söul goes placidly on until the sovereign elects to take another airing.
It is a common blunder to speak of the people of Söul as wearing white garments; a blunder, or rather a laziness to which I must plead guilty. Korean garments are invariably of a peculiar, delicate blue, unless the wearer be a person of much importance: then, indeed, may his garments brighten into deeper blue, flush into soft and lovely pink, or, if they chance to be the vestments of the King, blush into proudest scarlet. Seen from a distance an ordinary Korean appears to be clad in white, the blue of his dress is so pale; and so, many careless writers—I among them—have made the mistake of saying that white is the hue of the dress of the Korean populace.
The Koreans have a passion for rugged scenery—but then, indeed, they have a passion for every manner of scenery. They call the rocks the earth’s bones. They call the soil the earth’s flesh. The flowers and the trees they call her hair. There is no more rugged bit of scenery near Söul than the Valley of Clothes; and in it stands a picturesque little temple, which was built, so the Koreans say, to commemorate a battle, that they once won. It is a very beautiful specimen of Korean architecture. Indeed, I know no lovelier example of what the architecture of older Korea has become under the influence of Chinese thought and Chinese art.
Through the Valley of Clothes runs a long, clear stream, on whose banks are innumerable large, smooth-topped rocks. Altogether it is an admirable place for Oriental washing. In the winter every Korean garment is ripped into all its component parts before it is washed. In summer the garments are washed each in its entirety. This ripping up of the clothes before washing them is one of the comparatively few customs which the Koreans have borrowed from the Japanese. In Japan, however, all clothes about to be washed are taken to pieces, whether it be winter or summer.
Nothing could well be simpler than themodus operandiof the Korean washermen and washerwomen. The clothes are well soaked in the stream. Then they are well beaten with smooth, heavy, edgeless sticks. Then they are spread upon the ground or on the rocks, as much in the sun as possible, and left to dry indefinitely. No one ever steals them! Think of it! And even the gentle winds of the Asiatic heavens scorn to blow them away. If there seems the slightest chance of such a catastrophe, a few smooth pebbles are laid upon the garments’ edges.
The qualities which the upper classes of Korea have most in common are—love of art and literature, reverence for law, kindness of disposition, and love of nature. The point upon which they most differ is religion. Korea is really a country without religion. The upper classes are intellectual to a degree, but their intellectuality is invariably of the agnostic order. Rationalism and agnosticism are the only recognized religions in upper Korean circles.
The Korean populace also profess agnosticism, but do not practise it; at least they do not practise rationalism; for if they believe in no gods, most of them believe in countless devils.
The sacred devil-trees are supposed to be (after the blind) most efficacious in ridding the land of the spirits of evil. A writer—one of the best writers on Korea—thus describes a devil-tree upon which he came one bleak autumn day:—“An ancient tree, around whose base lies piled a heap of stones. The tree is sacred; superstition has preserved it, where most of its fellows have gone to feed the subterranean ovens. It is not usually very large, nor does it look extremely venerable, so that it is at least open to suspicion that its sanctity is an honour which is passed along from oak to acorn or from pine to seed: however, it is usually a fair specimen of a tree, and, where there are few others to vie with it, comes out finely by comparison: otherwise there is nothing distinctive about the tree, except that it exists,—that it is not cut down and borne off to the city on the back of some bull, there to vanish in the smoke. On its branches hang, commonly, a few old rags, evidently once of brilliantly-coloured cloth; they look to be shreds of the garments of such unwary travellers as approached too close; but a nearer inspection shows them to be tied on designedly. The heap of small stones piled around the base of the tree gives one the impression at first that the road is about to undergo repairs, which it sadly needs, and that the stones have been collected for the purpose. This, however, is a fallacy: no Korean road ever is repaired.
“The spot is called Son Wang Don, or ‘The Home of the King of the Fairies.’ The stones help to form what was once a fairy temple, now a devil-jail; and the strips of cloth are pieces of garments from those who believed themselves possessed of devils, or feared lest they might become so. A man caught by an evil spirit exiles a part of his clothing to the branches of one of these trees, so as to delude the demon into attaching there.”
We have tried to peep at Söul—the Söul of the people. But not all Söul is plebeian. It has a most decided aristocracy, both architectural and human.
Söul has no temples. None may be built within her walls. Of all civilized countries, Korea is the one country without a religion. Religion or its analogous superstitions are there, of course; but that religion is in Korea, not part of Korea. In Korea, religion is under a ban of official discountenance, or national discredence. Such temples as do exist in Korea dwell (like architectural lepers) without the city’s walls. But Söul has her official buildings, and the dwellings of her rich. Above all, she has her palaces.
But hold! there is one temple within the walls of Söul; but it is there on sufferance, there against the law. And it is just inside the walls. It is on a high, lonely mountain place, and far remote from the actual city—the throbbing, breathing, human city.
And Söul has also what was once a temple. It is as interesting as anything in Söul. In the first place it is the only pagoda in Söul—almost, if not quite, the only pagoda in Korea. In the second place, it is extremely beautiful. In the third place, it, more than any building I know, accents the decay of all things human, even of (those perhaps greatest of all human things) great thought-systems.
Yesterday—the yesterday of five hundred years ago—this, Söul’s one pagoda, was a Buddhist temple. To-day it is a neglected, unconsidered, tolerated, rather than admired, ornament, in a middle-class Korean’s back yard.
The pagoda of Söul owes its solitary, but not honoured, old age to the fact that unlike most pagodas of its period and kind, it was built of stone. It has eight stories (representative of eight stages or degrees of the Buddhist heaven); but it is entirely composed of two pieces of stone. In idea it is Chinese; but its form is a modification or a local adaptation of its idea; and it is peculiarly rich in most exquisite Korean carvings.
After the pagoda—perhaps before the pagoda—there are in Söul three buildings, more than any others indicative of the difference between Söul the old and conservative, and Söul the new and iconoclastic—I mean the Foreign Office, the War Office, and the Home Office. They are all of recent date, all concessions to a cosmopolitanism, with which Korea, the old, had no sympathy, and into which (though ever so little) Korea, the new, has been forced by that most brutal of all forces—the force of circumstances—forced by the irresistible might of the gigantic disproportion, to her own, of alien numbers. A few years ago Korea had never had a Foreign Office, because Korea had never deigned to be cognizant of the existence of any foreign power. True she has, for many years, paid a lazy tribute to China, and plied a lazier trade with Japan; but until a short time ago she has been essentially, and indeed, a hermit nation. Yes, it was verily the land of the morning calm. Noréveilbroke its early morning slumber; no drum woke its night to alarm. It was a heaven of earthly peace, a heaven in which there was neither fighting nor dying in battle.
But that is changed. So far as outside turmoil can ripple the placid waters, upon which the lotus-flower blooms and bends, in a luxury of perfumed sleep, as it does nowhere else—the lakes and ponds of Korea!
Korea admitted, gracefully, if enforcedly, foreigners to her shores—admitted them for purposes of commerce and of peace. Alas, she has had to recognize them as ambassadors of war, introducers of bloodshed.
Korea’s army has for many years been very purely artistic, ornamentally belligerent—nothing more. It has been found impossible to evolve it into anything more brutal, nineteenth-centuryish, effective, and up-to-date.
Korea’s War Office is an unhappy, if seemingly necessary, farce. It has existed for centuries. But only the conjunction, or rather the juxtaposition, of Korea with other nations has made it ridiculous.
Korea’s Home Office sprang up—as it must have done in any self-respecting soil—as soon as a Foreign Office became a regrettablefait accompli. Until Korea had a Foreign Office, Korea’s War Office was by no means the sad burlesque that it is now. Until Korea had a Foreign Office, she had not the filmiest need of a Home Office. Korea was all in all to Korea. Every effort of her being was undivertedly directed to the welfare of herself and her own. She had no need of, no excuse for, a Home Office, because all was home, everything for home. But when she was physically forced to admit the existence of other peoples, she was morally forced to insistently emphasize the existence of her own people.
Söul is rich in palaces; very rich in their quality, if not in their quantity. Each palace is, like every considerable Korean dwelling, a collection of houses. And every Korean palace—like every Korean dwelling of any distinction—is more remarkable, more admirable because of its surroundings—its garden—than because of itself.
There are four nations pre-eminent for landscape gardening—pre-eminent in this order:—the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Italians.
Korea is, by her climate, held behind Japan in landscape gardening. Most of the flowers that in Japan bloom all the year round, can in Korea only bloom for a few months.
But in one phase of landscape gardening—(the art of bringing Nature into a garden, and there ornamenting her, without insulting her)—the Koreans quite equal the Japanese.
Water, in the form of miniature lakes, is the crown—the centre of every far-eastern garden. Nowhere in the world are artificial lakes or ponds so perfected, so ablush with bloom, so aquiver with perfume, as they are in Korea. Sometimes they dot great green swards. Sometimes they softly ripple against the very foundations of a palace; oftenest they are the one blessed detail of a middle-class man’s dwelling. But they are almost always emerald with lotus-leaves, and in season, brilliant with the bloom, and fragrant with the breath of the lotus-flowers. Marble bridges span them, if they are in the king’s gardens; a unique island centres them wherever they are—a wee island that is shaded by its one drooping tree. There the master of the garden spends the long summer days, basking in the surrounding beauty, smoking, drinking tea, and fishing.
CHAPTER IV.
KOREA’S KING.
It has been with genuine indignation that I have recently read that the King of Korea is weak of mind and weak of character.
Statements could scarcely have less foundation. Journalism is indeed an exacting profession, and the pressman who would wield an up-to-date pen must, once in a way, write glibly upon a subject of which he knows nothing, or less than nothing. But surely, if one chooses for one’s theme a person whom one has never seen, and of whom one knows nothing authentically, the least one can, in common decency, do is to speak good, not evil of that person. If it is necessary to clothe persons of momentary interest with attributes that are wholly a fabric of guess-work, it seems to me that the most reckless scribbler is in honour bound to clothe the involuntary human lay-figure with whole, clean, garments of praise, and not with grimy rags of fantastic criticism.
As a matter of simple fact, Li-Hsi, the King of Korea, is an admirable man. He has most of the good qualities, and very few undesirable ones.
He has an exceptionally sweet nature. He has a heart of gold. He is patient, forgiving, persevering and hard-working. He is a man of decided mental strength, and of most considerable learning. The welfare of his people has been his unintermittent aim; and to-day he is staunchly enthroned in the hearts of those people.
It has been said that his Korean Majesty is a man of contemptible personal habits. And, worst of all, it has been said that he is entirely under his wife’s thumb. There is in all Christendom no monarch more sober, more unselfish than Li-Hsi. As for the last accusation, it is the one in which there is, I fear, a grain of truth. But what of it? The same thing was said of Frederick the Good. Was he weak-minded, morally corrupt? The same thing is said to-day (and not without some show of truth) of the Emperor of Germany, the King of Italy, and was said of the late Tsar of Russia. They are rather a wholesome, brainy, manly trio, aren’t they?
Unquestionably the Queen of Korea has great influence over the King. But surely even a king might commit a graver crime than that of being fond of his wife. For instance, he might be fond of someone else’s wife. Now that strikes me as rather worse form than the other. And certainly it is the more apt to lead to deeply dire results. On the whole, I think the King of Korea might almost be forgiven his one weakness—a weakness for his own wife.
Of civilized sovereigns, the King of Korea is rather uniquely placed. No monarch could have more absolute power in his own kingdom, no monarch could well have less influence abroad. Indeed even the King’s power at home seems rather tottery just now. But it has been shaken by the rough hands of alien invaders, not by the disloyal hands of his own subjects. To-day, when in Korea all is confusion and dismay, Li-Hsi is as absolutely king over the Koreans as he was when he ascended the throne thirty years ago.
His Majesty is rather under the average of Korean height, and is about forty years of age. The Queen, contrary to the usual custom in Korea, is much younger.
He wears a dress somewhat resembling the ordinary Korean court dress; but his dress is of brilliant scarlet. The dresses of his nobles are of pale blue or pink. The King wears the usual white Korean collar, and a plastron, and shoulder pieces (or epaulettes) of gold and jewels.
All Korean hats are wonderful. A Korean court hat is simply marvellous. It is most noticeable for its wings or ears, which project sharply out from either side. They typify human ears, and signify that the wearer has his ears wide spread to catch the most whispered command of his Majesty. Even Li-Hsi wears a court hat. But his ears (I mean his hat’s ears) stand erect, or are at the tips caught together at the top of the hat. This is because the Emperor of China is too far away for his actual voice to be heard by the Korean King, and no other human being but the Chinese Emperor may speak to Li-Hsi with anything even approaching insistent emphasis. To no other voice need the King of Korea listen, unless he like. So at least it was until a few months ago.
The King of Korea has a gracious but dignified bearing. His face is fine and beautiful, and his smile is peculiarly sweet and winning.
There are two great palaces in Söul: the Old Palace and the New Palace. The New Palace is four hundred years old and more. The old palace is as old as Söul. The present King of Korea lives in the New Palace. His Majesty deserted the Old Palace, or, to be more exact, upon his accession to the throne, declined to adopt it as his residence, because it was full of, to him, painful family reminiscences.
The Old Palace is one of the few Architectural wonders of Söul. It is deserted now, and in parts decaying. It is surrounded by an admirable wall. Its principal gate is guarded by two gigantic stone monsters. The Koreans call them Chinese Lions, and the Japanese call them Korean dogs. They look as much like one as the other. They are of Chinese descent. The Koreans copied them from the Chinese. In Korea they caught the quick Japanese fancy. From that day they have played a conspicuous part in Japanese art, and have even become familiar to European eyes, because they grin at us from so many thousands of the cheaper (so called) Satsuma vases.
The Old Palace is a vast collection of buildings, of court-yards, of landscape gardens, of parks and of lotus-ponds. In its centre stands the famous Audience Hall, which I am almost tempted to call one of the architectural wonders of the world. I may safely call it one of the architectural and artistic wonders of Korea. Many steps lead up to the entrance of the Audience Hall. This alone is in Korea a great distinction. Save the King only, no Korean may build or own a building outside of which there are more than three steps. Four steps would be high treason, and would cost their owner a traitor’s death.
In the background of the Old Palace is Nam San, the mountain upon which signal-fires burn every nightfall, telling the inhabitants of Söul that all goes well throughout the kingdom. Or if, as now, aught goes ill, the fires tell that—tell it with considerable detail. It is a curious signal-code, as complicated as ingenious; but it is beautifully vivid and altogether effective.
The New Palace is in a collection of palaces. Like Söul its grounds are surrounded by an elaborate wall. Those grounds cover over a hundred acres, every rod of which is beautiful. They are carefully laid out, but not with foolish elaborateness. Nature is accented in those palace grounds, but never interfered with. Wherever an exceptionally pretty bit of view is to be seen, there is a quaint Korean summer-house. And as the pretty bits tread upon each other’s heels, the grounds are rather thick with odd summer-houses, and still odder pavilions. The Koreans are intensely fond of Nature; but they are not fond of exercise. They like to sit, even when they look upon the trees, the flowers, the hills, the sky, the lotus-ponds that they so love. Therefore the grounds of a king’s house would be most incomplete, were not rest and shelter available at every few yards.
A summer-house in the grounds of the New Palace is a favourite haunt of the present king. On a drowsy summer afternoon his Majesty sits there for hours, sipping tea and watching the changeless loveliness of the view.
The Koreans drink tea almost as perpetually as the Siamese do, and, like the Siamese, they are greatly addicted to drinking it out of doors. But this must be with them a comparatively new fashion, for Hamel and many other old historians tell us that tea is seldom drunk in Korea.
To one versed in Korean architecture, it is a simple thing to distinguish the house of a king from that of a subject. The columns of the monarchs’ houses are round, and their rafters are square. Only a king may use the round column or the square rafter. Only a king might, until recent years, paint his house. Only a king may wear a coat of brilliant red. Of all men, only the king may look upon the faces of the Queen’s hundreds of attendant ladies. On occasions of ceremony when the King is present, only he may face the south.
The Korean soldiers are clad in dark blue relieved with crimson, and fantastically decorated with ribbons. The Chinese character which signifies valour is elaborately embroidered over their hearts. They’re rather fine-looking fellows, but their manners are mild, and they impress the impartial European observer as staunch lovers of peace. They wear no helmets, but their head-gear is most distinguished.
There is no other inanimate thing so important to the Korean mind as are hats. The hat of the King is his crown. The hat of the soldier is his helmet. And no Korean owns any other chattel so valuable, so indicative of his station, state, and worth, so indispensable, so cherished as his hat; no, not even his children, never to mention his wife.
Black is the Korean hat colour. But even Korean rules have their exceptions. The hats of the Korean army officers are vivid of hue, and heavy with feathers and ribbons; and the hats of the private soldiers have at least a band or border of red to show that the wearers are men of bloodshed and fearless.
In Söul there are military hat stores galore; and naturally enough, for his hat is the most important item of the Korean soldier’s uniform. As for his accoutrements, they are so completely overshadowed by the brim of his mighty hat that they shrink into unconsidered insignificance.
But in years gone by Korea’s army was far less a force of straw and of plumage. The Korean eagle could shriek once—now she seems to have become metamorphosed into a military owl; blind at day, timid at night.
The military force of Korea was at an early period divided into three distinct branches: the navy, the secular army, and the armed or military monks.
The armed monks garrisoned castles and fortresses which were usually inaccessibly placed, or, as we should say to-day, built on commanding positions. They, as a rule, hung frowningly on the rough side of some steep mountain, or punctuated menacingly some narrow and difficult or treacherous pathway.
These religious warriors did not go far upon the war-path. They defended the strongholds, which were also their monasteries, and they engaged valiantly enough in local warfare. These were the most efficient and most esteemed of old Korea’s soldiers. Each town furnished a required number of these holy militaries. They were officered by men of their own order. When they reached the age of sixty they retired from active service, and their sons filled up their vacant places; for they were not celibates, these warrior priests of old Chosön.
Each Korean province is under arms one year out of seven. The selected soldiers of the province (in Korea, warriorship is a matter of the king’s selection, not of the soldier’s election) are equipped, robed, drilled, paraded, and made generally presentable upon the picturesque, flower-dotted, and bloodless battle-fields of Korea’s martial pageantries. They take their turns in going up to Söul, these impromptu, but for all that, well-rehearsed fighting men. When they get to Söul they there invariably act well their parts. The beginning and the end of their duty are included in ceremonial functions; and the breath of ceremony is the only air that can fully inflate the lungs of any self-respecting Asian. “No man is a hero to his own valet,” we say lightly. But the peoples of the Orient take the great truth of this adage very seriously, almost grimly. They realize that the only divinity that can really hedge a king from the degrading familiarity of his subjects is the divinity of purple and fine linen, the blare of trumpets. In brief, the people (in Asia or in Europe) love a show, and the king who would sit staunchly enthroned upon the hearts, not to mention the intellects, of his people, must be followed by a train of supers as long, and as splendidly clad, as well-trained—and perhaps as meaningless—as those who make the pit of a London theatre appreciate the more clearly the regal glory of Henry the Eighth, of Arthur the deceived, and of that other Henry with whom Becket quarrelled.
But in Korea’s martial comedy there are actors who are never out of the bill. Over each province a general presides, who has under him from three to six colonels; each colonel is the military master of several captains; each captain is the Mars of a city, a castle, a town, or some other fortified place. Even the Korean villages are protected (Japan and China, save the mark!) by a corporal. Under the corporal are petty officers; under the petty officers are soldiers, so-called.
There is one admirable thing about the Korean army. Its books are well kept, and the King of Korea can always tell to the moment how many fighting men are at his disposal. If only they could fight! Or, if only they had no need to fight!
Bows and arrows are conspicuous among the implements of the Korean army. They make little or no impression upon the cannon of civilization, but they serve to remind us of the days when man needed to contend but against nature, to slaughter only birds and four-footed mammals.
The Korean infantry and the Korean cavalry are very similarly equipped. They wear brilliant, if vulnerable, breast-plates. They carry swords nice of shape, if dull of edge, and they used, in battles of great moment, to replace their crimson-decked hats with head-pieces of cotton-batting and tinsel.
There is a unique branch of the king’s immediate servitors. We should bluntly call them spies. The Koreans picturesquely call them “messengers on the dark path.” The King of Korea does not hang about the doorways, nor prowl into the back-yards of his subjects, but in every Korean city he has several, and in every Korean village at least one appointed listener. European history tells us that more than one European monarch has disguised himself at night, and held up his thirsty ears to the nectar or the gall of his subjects’ candid opinions of himself. Whether eaves-dropping is more admirable when performed in person or when deputed to the hireling, is a nice question for those who would judge between East and West. It seems to me that the King of Korea does a dirty thing with rather more dignity than did Napoleon or Nero. At all events, the plebeian spies of Korea are an acknowledged branch of Korean officialism, and every Korean knows that his house, and all it contains, is very possibly under theespionnageof the million eyes of the king.
Korea is as netted day and night with the spies of the king as she is at night netted with signal fires. Just such a system of officialespionnageused to exist in Japan. Did Japan copy Korea? Did Korea copy Japan? Again we ask the question, and again Asia declines to answer.
The spies of Li-Hsi are the father confessors of the Koreans, and the custom is so old, so authentic, so much a matter of course in Korea, that the Korean caught in the utterance of treason, or relating some petty offence, cries “mea culpa” rather devoutly.
Not very many years ago there were in Asia three absolute monarchs with comparatively small kingdoms. Those kingdoms were Burmah, Siam, and Korea. Theebaw, the master of many wooden cannon, the monarch of Mandalay, the master of Burmah, has accepted his defeat with a good deal of dignity, and Burmah the old, Burmah the real, is fast passing off of the face of our earth.
Siam, when Sir Harry Parkes first went there, was possibly the most picturesque kingdom in Asia; but the King of Siam is a man so wise in his generation, that we may almost venture to call him a monarch up-to-date. ‘Since he cannot die at the head of his elephant-cavalried army; since he cannot see that army victorious in the land of its birth and its training, he lays bits of his sword (in the form of goodly scraps of his kingdom) at the feet of French democracy, I mean republicanism.’
Theebaw is banished, and Chulalongkorn compromises. And what of Li-Hsi? This, at least, he has made the longest and most hopeless fight of them all against the inroads of Western civilization.
There is no high office in Korea, civil or military, that can be bestowed without the king’s sanction, or that cannot be revoked at the king’s pleasure.
Unfortunately, Li-Hsi has to take the word of the men whom he trusts, as to the efficiency of the majority of the men whom he appoints to positions of power. Were Korean officials fewer in number, then might Li-Hsi know each and all personally; and then might his servants, civil and military, be less complete nonentities on the one hand, and more invariably worthy on the other, in the great pageant of Asia’s Western civilizationship.
The Chinese call their Emperor “The Son of Heaven.” The Japanese used to regard their Mikado with as much veneration, and even now speak of him with no less reverence. The Koreans seem to have caught, from China or Japan, the convenient idea of mediation. According to the religious law of Korea, which is seldom marked, and less often respected, only the king is fit to worship the gods. The subjects of the king must content themselves with worshipping him. To venture to pray to the king is as near heaven as an orthodox Korean may dare to come. And the king, if he be in gracious mood, will pass the prayer on to the god who is no more above him than he is above his people.
It seems a Jacob’s ladder sort of religion—the religion to which the Koreans pretend (for, as a matter of fact, as I shall try to prove later, they have no religion at all). The peasant throws his paper prayer at the feet of his king; the king, if to him it so seems fit, throws that paper prayer at the feet of the god; and perhaps none of the kingly prerogatives more clearly define the high position of the king than the fact that of all Koreans, he alone is fit to speak to the Korean god.
The royal house of Korea emphatically believes that it is descended from divine and royal spirits. If Li-Hsi cannot prove his descent from the denizens of the Korean heaven, we certainly cannot disprove it; and he has the courage of his convictions, for neither he nor any prince of his blood will wed with a maiden who cannot claim as exceptional, as divine, and as ethereal an ancestry. This keeps the royal family of Korea almost as narrowly blooded as the royal family of Siam.
Tinsel has not yet gone off the market even in Europe. Newsboys and Eton boys jostle each other on the curb-stones of Northumberland Avenue in their boyish desire to see a modern Lord Mayor’s Show. In the Orient tinsel is almost as common a commodity, as necessary an adjunct of daily life as is rice itself. When the King of Korea goes forth from his palace grounds he is followed by, preceded by, a glittering throng. Nobles, soldiers, secretaries, and servants arrayed in barbaric splendour, and carrying a hundred symbols of Asiatic majesty, attend upon him; and over him is carried a canopy rich with gold and jewels. Music, unless the king forbid, sounds his approach. But no other sound is heard. No one may speak. The procession moves slowly, silently. The very horses step softly, and would sooner think of cantering backwards than of neighing. The horsemen are followed by footmen. Both carry banners and insignia.
Immediately before the king walks a secretary of state. He carries an elaborate box. I have heard Koreans speak of it as “the mercy-box.” The king’s ear is open to the meanest of his subjects, in theory at least. When the king goes forth his route is probably strewn with papers, papers are thrown from over walls, papers hang by strings from windows and roofs, sticks are placed along the roadside, and in their notched or forked ends are more papers. All these papers are scrupulously gathered up and put into the “mercy-box.” Each paper contains a petition or the story of a wrong for which the sufferer beseeches the king’s redress. These papers are opened by the king in person, after he has returned to the palace. He and he alone decides which of the petitions shall be granted and how; which shall be refused. Often only he ever knows by whom they have been written.
Such is the outing of a Korean king, or rather such it was until a very few years ago. Within six or seven years the ceremonial has been slightly altered. Until then it had remained almost unchanged for centuries. Whether Li-Hsi will ever again go forth in like state I question. It’s more likely that, if he lives and reigns, he will be sending to London or Calcutta for a brougham. But of this I feel sure: while he continues to sit in power upon Korea’s throne, his ears will be keen to hear the cries of his people, and his heart hot to serve them.