“Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,To cry, Hold, hold!”
“Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,To cry, Hold, hold!”
“Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,To cry, Hold, hold!”
“Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,To cry, Hold, hold!”
“Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, Hold, hold!”
CHAPTER VII.
KOREAN ARCHITECTURE.
What her dress is to woman, his dwelling is to man. I am speaking, of course, of average man and of average woman. What she wears indicates what she is, and is the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of her individuality, and of her character. She, her very self, peeps from beneath the laces at her neck. The house in which he lives shelters his women and his young; the buildings which he erects, or helps to erect, indicate who and what he is, and are the most natural, the most unconscious, and the most common expression of his individuality, and of his character; and we may see him as he really is, in his roof, his door-step, and, in brief, in the exterior and the interior of his home.
It is this, its revelation of mankind, which makes architecture so intensely interesting a study, the most interesting, I often think, of all the studies of the inanimate. Not for their grace of outline, not for their beauty of colour, not for their artistic consistency, not for their happy placement, are the great buildings of this world supremely interesting to us; but for the glimpses they give us into the souls, the lives of the men who have reared them.
Of more recent years records have been made and preserved of the doings of most of the civilized peoples, but, beyond a doubt, many such records made in olden times have been irretrievably lost, and many a page of history—a page clear and convincing to us to-day—would have been lost to us for ever were it not for the silent but indisputable testimony of old buildings: ruined houses, scraps of temples, broken bridges, crumbling towers, and grotesque caves.
It is impossible to speak of Korean architecture without speaking of Chinese architecture, and of Japanese architecture. And it is so impossible to separate the architecture of Korea from either the architecture of China, or the architecture of Japan, that one has a very convenient excuse for writing of the architecture of Korea as it visibly is, and for writing little or nothing of what it means. Korean architecture, in all its best phases, is purely Tartar. Chinese architecture is largely Tartar. But China, in architecture, as in ethics, and as in sociology, is at heart more or less Mongolian. China has been ridden under, not exterminated, by Tartar supremacy. Japanese architecture is Tartar, but it is very many other things, and the charitable mantle of Japanese art is so all-covering, and her artists have graciously adopted the art-methods of so many different peoples, that it is quite impossible to say whether Tartar influence is the parent or the powerful adopted child of Japanese art.
For convenience, I will divide Korean architecture into the architecture of the poor and the architecture of the rich. Korean hovels are like most other hovels. Extreme poverty goes rather naked the wide world over, and the Korean poor live in houses of mud, roofed with leaves; and if the leaves and the mud give out they have holes in their roofs instead of chimneys.
Korean hovels, Korean houses, and Korean palaces have many characteristics in common, characteristics which are climatic and racial. Let us peep first at the homes of the Korean poor. The home of a poor Korean, dwell he in a Korean city, dwell he in a Korean village, or dwell he desperately perched upon the rocky side of a Korean mountain, is a house of one story—that is, of one story in which people live. Above is a thin sort of attic in which grains and other provisions are stored, and beneath is a fairly thick sort of basement in which heat is bred, from which heat is generated. Like all other Korean houses the interior of this house is lined with paper. It has a paper roof, paper floor, or floor-cloth, and paper walls. The walls slide back or lift up, or are in one of several other ways got rid of, in the summer; but they are walls for all that, no less walls because they are also windows and doors. Paper is the chief feature of every ordinary Korean house; and to say that is to say a great deal for paper: because the cold of a Korean winter is excessive, is far beyond the cold of the winter in which I write. In every Korean house, be it the house of prince or of pauper, there is what seems to be at first sight, to European eyes, a paucity of furniture. There is nothing more significant of the difference between the simple artisticness of the East and the elaborate inartisticness of the West than the way in which Western rooms are crowded with inanimate unnecessaries, and the way in which Eastern rooms are sparsely supplemented with inanimate necessaries.
I had afternoon tea yesterday with a friend who loves me so well, and whom I so well love, that I am sure she will forgive me for drawing, to her disadvantage, a comparison between her drawing-room and the drawing-room of a Korean man, or the boudoir of a Korean woman, I never go into my friend’s drawing-room without feeling a thrill of admiration for the nice way in which her butler avoids knocking over one of a pair of priceless vases, which were stolen from Pekin about the time that Sir Harry Parkes and Sir Henry Loch were rather inconveniently imprisoned there. I creep in, as gracefully as I can, between the butler and the two priceless blue things. I cross a bit to the left, to avoid a malachite table crowded with silver pigs (some of them so little that they would look lost on a threepenny-bit, some of them a foot or more long); then I cross to the right, to avoid a wonderful teak-wood cabinet of no particular style, that looks very staggery beneath a multitude of tea-pots—tea-pots most of which are not interesting in themselves, and none of which are interesting in their common conglomeration. Then I almost trip over the wool of a slaughtered Persian lamb, and I just save myself from tumbling into a Louis Quinze chair, and so I work my way through the ages—through the races, until I reach my hostess, who, like myself and everyone else there, is in nice, new, nineteenth-century, ugly raiment. There may be space in this London drawing-room for her, for me, and for all the other ordinary folk which are gathered together, because we are very much alike, but there is not room for all the chairs, and the tables, and half the other pieces of furniture, because no two of them are alike. We humans are used to fashionable crushes, but I think it is a shame not to give the furniture room to breathe.
Let us peep into a Korean drawing-room. A long cool place. There is a padded quilt, probably covered with silk, in one corner. The host sits on that, and any guests that come to him. If the weather be cold, and the host be rich, a brazier of charcoal usually stands in another corner. There is a small table, or perhaps there are two, with writing and painting materials. Unless the house be one of dire poverty there is, at one end of the room, a chest of drawers or a buffet, or a sideboard, or something of that sort: a huge piece of furniture made out of more or less costly woods, fitted with drawers and doors, and embellished with metal handles. The handles, or the clasps, or the locks are made in the shape of butterflies, for the butterfly is a very favourite expression of Korean artistic outline. When it is time to eat, a table is brought in for the host and one for each of his guests—a table a foot or two high, and just about as square as high. Upon this, small dishes of food are placed, and small but often-filled cups of drink. When the meal is over, the tables and the dishes and the remnants of meat and of liquor (but there are not often many of either) are taken away.
In an ordinary Korean house there is little or no other furniture. A screen perhaps, precious for its decorations, and for the carvings of its frame, and three or four pictures—pictures distinctly Korean, but I assure you by no means inartistic. I can think of nothing else that ordinarily furnishes a Korean room, except the quaintly clad people, and the sunshine that comes in almost iridescently—it shines through windows of so many different colours: windows of paper. The colour of the light depends entirely upon the colour and the texture of the paper through which it comes. A Korean bed-room is very like a Korean sitting-room. The quilt upon which a Korean sits through the day is the same as, or very like, the quilt upon which he sleeps at night. Tiger skins are also greatly used for floor rugs and bed coverings.
To stray a moment from the exact subject of architecture. The Koreans wear, I believe, very much the same clothes in day as in night. Indeed, I believe that the Korean changes his or her garments for five reasons only: to eat, to put on new clothes when the old ones are worn out, to have the clothes she or he is wearing washed, to put on his or her best clothes in celebration of some festival or other ceremonial, and to go into mourning. Firstly and foremost, a Korean undresses to eat. They are not civilized enough, the people of Chosön, to array themselves for feeding time. They do not deny their relationship with other hungry mammals. When they are hungry they eat. When they are thirsty they drink, and to be truthful, their hunger and their thirst is usually enormous, and of long endurance. They are neither ashamed of their hunger nor of their thirst, for they appease neither before going to a feast. Indeed, to gorge oneself is considered the acme of Korean elegance, and it is the one elegance in which all Koreans, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, prince and peasant, indulge themselves on every possible or semi-possible occasion. And that they may eat the utmost possible morsel, they loosen their garments before they sit down to the feast.
But I was speaking of the houses of the Korean poor. Perhaps it is rather inappropriate to speak of banquets in connection with them; yet, except among the most abjectly poverty-stricken, banquets are held sometimes (at marriages, on birthdays, on feast-days, and on lucky-days, if possible) in every Korean home.
Only Koreans of certain position are allowed to cover their roofs with tiles. A peasant’s roof is almost invariably thatched with straw or grass. Every Korean house contains but one room, or, to state it differently, every Korean room, excepting for a door opening into another house or room, is in itself a complete house. It has a roof of its own, and four walls of its own, and is in every way independent of any other rooms or houses, which may form other parts of its owner’s dwelling. When inside a Korean dwelling one may fancy oneself in a suite of apartments opening into each other, that is, of course, if a certain number of the paper walls are opened. From the outside of a Korean dwelling, one seems to be looking at a collection of more or less closely built, but entirely independent houses. The position of woman being what it is, even the poorest Korean house has, or ought to have, more than one room. This peculiarity; this similarity between exteriors and interiors, makes Korean architecture uniquely picturesque, and public buildings and the dwellings of the rich supremely so. Indeed, the better class of houses often have not only a roof to each room, but two or three roofs to each room. Now a Korean roof, to my mind, is the most beautiful roof in the world. It is Chinese in general character, and slopes from the ridge pole in graceful concave curves. Except in the houses of the poor it is tiled. The tiles overlap each other, are unevenly curved, and rest upon a foundation of earth. In the course of a few seasons a Korean roof breaks into bud, and into blossom. Perhaps a great patch of odd blue flowers covers one-half of the roof, perfuming the air for many yards. Perhaps quaint crimson tulips lift their happy heads between every few tiles. Wild pinks, forget-me-nots, and orchids mingle on one roof, and another roof glitters in the sunshine like gold because it is the bed of a thousand yellow sun-lilies.
Imagine an old Korean monastery which is backgrounded by hills, some of them covered with verdure, and some of them naked rocks, rocks that are broken here and there by patches and cracks of hardy flowers. In the distance, we hear the melodious drip of some gentle waterfall. Nearer we hear the full-throated soprano of the larks. And a dozen other birds, green and blue, and purple, and grey with breasts of yellow, fly from their nests in the teak-wood trees, to drink the sweet blood of the blooming iris. The monastery has a score or more of houses, each rambling from some other. The monastery is low and porticoed, and the doors, which are also its windows and its walls, are slid back in the grooves, and our view of each of the many interiors is only obstructed by the eight square posts which are the only permanent walls of a Korean building. Inside we catch a glimmer of metallic Buddhas, and hear the careless Sanskrit sing-song of the monks. In the courtyard stands a great brass Korean bell or gong, and the stick with which it is struck lies beside it. A huge glimmering gong is this; to call the brethren to prayer and to rice. Around the edges of the monastery’s roofs runs a peculiar shell-like beading, which is a distinction of a sacred or religious edifice. The roof was a dark brown once, but the tiles, those that have not been broken away, have grown purple and blue, softened by time and blighted by weather. Where the tiles have crumbled away, and over many tiles that have not yet succumbed to decay, honey-suckles, yellow and buff, and white and rose-coloured, are creeping and tangling themselves with great, green ropes that are heavy with gourds—gourds that are little and pale, and gourds that are big and golden and speckled.
Or let us look at some one of the king’s many houses. Its round columns and its square rafters are lacquered and crimson. Its paper walls are as fine and as polished as silk. Innumerable steps lead up to it, and it is almost heavy with carvings. Three roofs shelter it, and look like a tent with an awning above an awning. Each roof is a bed of flowers that are brilliant and fragrant—flowers among which birds that are splendid of feather, and sweet of throat, make their nests. But the birds and the flowers are not the only denizens of the typical Korean roof. Effigies in mud, in bronze, or in wood squat on the ridges. They look a little like monkeys, very little like men, and some of them very much like pigs. They are absurd and impossible to a degree, and yet, for all that, they are rather life-like, and, on a weird moonlight night, decidedly startling. These are the protectors of the houses; and what the scarecrow which the European or American farmer manufactures out of his oldest trousers, his most ragged coat, and his most disreputable hat, is to the blackbirds and the crows of the Occident, these grotesque figures are to the evil spirits of Korea. They frighten away the devils, the gods of misfortune, and the demons of disease that would fain light upon the roofs, and curse the dwellers of the houses. Socially they belong with the demons and the imps and the witches, with the monks and the nuns, and the hundred other personages of Korea’s queer religious or irreligious spiritualistic community. But physically they are a striking and a fascinating detail of Korea’s remarkable architecture.
I have spoken of the khans, which are the furnaces of the Korean houses. They are not altogether underground, and so every Korean house rests, as it were, upon a pedestal—a pedestal of stone or of earth. But the house is almost never built of stone. Wood and paper are its only materials, and few of the countries in the world are richer in woods, and no country is so rich in paper as Korea.
The fame of Korea’s paper is more world-wide than the fame of any other Korean product. But admirable as it is, superior for many purposes as it is to all other papers, it is really for her woods, and for their quality, that Korea should be noted more than for any other thing which she grows or manufactures. Bamboo is there, of course, in abundance, and abundantly used. Find me the country in Asia where bamboo does not grow, and I’ll vow to you that that country has been an iceberg and in some strange way become detached from its anchorage at the North Pole, drifted down to the southern seas, and after centuries become overgrown with all sorts of green and gay things, and so come to think itself, and to be thought, a part of the Orient. When I say that bamboo grows in Korea I am saying that Korea is in Asia, and I am saying no more. The temples, the palaces, the shrines, and the lumber-yards of China and Japan were for many years, and now largely are, dependent for the most choice of their woods upon the forests of Korea. And many of the most valued of the tree species in Japan have sprung up from seeds that were gathered in Chosön. In the palaces, and in the joss-houses of Pekin, and in the famous temples of Tokio and Kioto, columns and ceilings of especial beauty and of great value, commercially and artistically, have been hewn from trees that grew in Korea. Korea is rich in willow, in fir, in persimmon, in chestnut, and in pine—pine which the Chinese prefer above all other woods for many of the parts of waggons, boats, and ships. Korea is rich in ash, in hornbeam, in elm, and in a dozen other hard, very hard, enduring timbers. The flag that flies above the yamun of a Chinese mandarin is in all probability attached to a pole of Korean wood, and, beyond doubt, the white flags that so recently fluttered upon the ill-fated ships outside the forts of Wei-Hai-Wei, had not those ships been built in Europe, would have made their signals of defeat from the top of what once had been trees in Chei-chel-sang or in Hoang-hai. Korea is splendid with oaks, and with maples, and is well supplied with larch and with holly. And at one season of the year many of her hill-slopes are purple with mulberries. The juniper-tree grows there in vast numbers; the cork-tree and the Korean varnish-tree, from the sap of which comes the golden-hued lacquer, which is one of the important materials of Korean art. This sap is poisonous, so poisonous that the men who work with it are paid above the rates usually received by Korean art-artisans. There is another tree in Korea which has so disagreeable a name that I won’t name it, but from it a very fine white wax is extracted. And there are trees that are pricked for the oil that gushes from them—oil from which one of the great national drinks—a hot, peppery drink—is made, and which is almost the only oil used in the toilet of a Korean woman.
So the Korean architect and the Korean builder have the choice of many woods in the erecting of Korean edifices. A marvellous species of oak grows plentifully in Korea—oak whose timbers have been known, and proved to have been, under water for a century at least, and without decaying. But perhaps the most famous of the woods of Korea are the wonderful red and black woods that grow on the island of Quelpaert.
Paper forms a larger part, and is almost as indestructible a part of the Korean house as is wood. This paper is made from cotton—cotton whose fibre is exceptionally long, soft, satiny, and fine. Most Korean papers are beautiful to look at, delightful to touch, and incredibly strong. It is almost impossible to tear them, especially when they are oiled as they are for all architectural purposes. The varieties of Korean papers are almost endless. One kind is an excellent substitute for cloth, and is used for the making of garments, and for linings, and in many ways it takes the place of leather, of woods, and of metals, and of all sorts of woollen things. There is a very thick paper which is made from the bark of the mulberry-tree. It is soft and pliable, and is as glazed as satin. It is almost, if not quite, the most easily washed substance I have ever seen, and ispar excellencethe Korean choice for table-cloths.
Glass is almost unknown in Korea, and until recent years was quite unknown there. And as we are all very apt to prize most that with which we are least familiar, and the use of which we least understand, so Koreans set great value upon glass. Old bottles, washed ashore from some European shipwreck, often form the most prized bric-a-brac in a mandarin’s dwelling, and any Korean who can get a square foot or two of glass to insert in one of the paper windows of his house is a very proud householder indeed.
In the house of a noble the front or outer apartment is used as a reception-room. Here his friends and acquaintances (indeed, all whose rank entitle them to mingle with him) gather night after night for gossip, for tobacco, and for drink. These rooms take the place of clubs, of bar-rooms, and of the smoking-rooms of hotels, all of which are unknown in Korea.
Background and environments are so studied by every architect in the Far East that landscape-gardening may almost be said to be a part of Korean architecture. No Korean building of any importance lacks courtyards, lotus ponds, groves of trees, and tangles of flowers, through all of which are scattered elaborate little summer-houses. And what the rich Korean does for the surroundings of his house and his city, nature almost invariably does for the surroundings of the house of the poor Korean, who does not live in one of the crowded cities. The Korean hut is sometimes half covered with vines, and is altogether cool and delightful from the shade and the perfume of trees that are heavy with flowers, with fruits, and with nuts. No Korean need be roofless. If a house be burned down, or be blown down, the entire community are more than ready to assist at its re-erection, and the poorest man in the village, the hardest-worked, will spare some fraction of his time to help in the re-building. If a new-comer appears in a Korean village, the inhabitants go to work to help him build, or, if necessary, build for him a where-to-lay-his-head.
Such are a few of the characteristics, the most vivid characteristics, I think, of the architecture of Chosön,—an architecture which is even more significant than architecture usually is. Korean architecture is significant of Korean artisticness. It is significant of Korean good sense; for the architecture of Chosön is invariably well-adapted to the climate of the peninsula. But far beyond this, Korean architecture is significant of the Korean love of seclusion, and of the Korean faith in the efficacy of appearances. The Koreans, more perhaps than any other people, realize that fine feathers make fine birds, and the most studied, the most elaborated, and architecturally the most important part of a Korean house is its fence; which of course is not a part of the house at all. This fence may be a hedge, it may be a wall encircling the domains of a magistrate, or engirdling the city. It may be a series of hedges, of moats, of walls, and of gates. The Koreans are exclusive and seclusive to a degree. This should command for them the sympathy of English people. All Koreans strive heroically to put their best feet forward, personally, financially, and architecturally. This should command them the sympathy of Americans. The Korean farmer screens his house inside a quadrangle of hedges, hedges as sweet as are the hedges of North Wales in the month of July. A Korean king hides his palace behind an externity of many walls that are splendid in height, in colour, in detail, in outline, and in material. Walls between which a score of flowers fight each other for the glory of killing every inch of the grass,—walls between which marble-outlined ponds sleep cosily beneath their green and pink and white coverlets of lilies, and of lotus. And the Koreans who are neither princes nor peasants, but who stand between the two, spend a world of thought, and a good deal of money upon the fences—floral or stone—thrown about their homes. Only the poorest of Korean houses—of which there are many—and only the shops—of which there are few—lack some sort of a wall, some manner of a barrier between the private family life, and the public life of the going and coming community.
Korean walls (I mean the walls of masonry which mark the boundaries of a city or the limits of a gentleman’s grounds, and not the paper walls of a Korean house) are, without exception, Chinese in character. But even more important than these walls are the gateways with which they are broken, and above all, the gateways or gates that stand some distance outside the walls. In Far Asia gates have a significance which they never have had, even in our own old Norman days, and never can have, in Europe. Gates are the architectural ceremonies of the East. They frame many of the most ceremonial ceremonies of the East, and it necessarily follows that they are big and gorgeous. For never did a picture justify more lavish framing than does the picture of Eastern ceremony. There are three great classes of gates in the Far East: the torii of Japan, the red-arrow gates of Korea, and the pailow of China. But before I try to say something of these three gates, there are two or three pleasant things to be said of the gates that ordinarily pierce the wall of a Korean city. The gates themselves are heavily built of wood, are elaborately ornamented with metal, and slowly swing in a rusty sort of way at sunrise, and at sunset—swing at sunrise to let the people of the city out, and the people of the country in; swing at sunset to let the people of the country out, and the people of the city in. Korea not being a land of machinery, it becomes necessary for a certain number of officials to tend these gates. They are not called gate-keepers, but are officers, rather important officers, if I remember, of the Korean army. Now, an army officer, all the world over, does not mind where he lies, what he eats, or how he suffers—when he is on active service: but when debarred from fighting, the soldier, all the world over, and especially the officer-soldier, wants to be well-housed, well-roomed, well-fed, and above all, well-amused. This seems to be the one military trait which Korea has not yet forgotten. Above the gates that open into Söul, and into every other walled Korean city, are built very cosy little stone houses. In these the soldiers on guard—the gate keepers—play cards, eat rice, munch sweetmeats, and sip arrack. Above the gateways that lead into the houses of Korean magistrates, Korean nobles, and of Korean millionaires, just such houses are built. They are the concert halls of Korea. In them the band of the Korean magistrate, the Korean noble, or the Korean millionaire discourses more or less discordant music, and at delightfully respectful distance from its employer’s house. They never play in the cold weather. It has been said that this is so, not because the Korean in whose service they are cares a whit whether their fingers freeze to their instruments or not, but because he is unwilling to open the paper walls of his house wide enough to hear the music that is being played in the gate-houses of his outer walls. I doubt this. A rich Korean, who is covered with layers and layers of silk and wadding, and who sits upon a khan in full fire, and who is surrounded by braziers of charcoal, and whose house is deplorably lacking in ventilation, does not, I think, as a rule, shrink from having his front door or his side wall opened once in a while. Beneath the guard-house building, above the gate of a Korean wall; there can be no khan, for the guard-house is above the gate, and many feet from the ground in which the Khan must be embedded. And so I put it down to the humanity of the average well-to-do Korean that he never makes his band play, on his walls, save in fairly warm weather.
These rooms, these little houses built above the gates of a Korean walled city or the gates of a great man’s domain, have been in years past the scenes of many a Korean romance, and even now they are often the favourite retreats or lounging places of Korean poets and philosophers. They are usually furnished with considerable comfort. They are cosy in the autumn and in the spring, and delightfully cool in the summer. They’re well above the city’s sights, and high above any unpleasant intrusion of the city’s sounds, and so are fit resting-places for one who wants to meditate or dream or write poetry, or be at rest, or escape from the hundred nagging vexations of daily life.
Korean walls are adjuncts to Korean gates, and not, as with us, the gates adjuncts to the walls. The walls are built to emphasize the importance of the gates, to supplement them, and to attract attention to them. To the Korean mind the walls are so much less important than the gates that the gates are often built and the walls omitted altogether. Such gates are the torii of Japan, the pailow of China, and the red-arrow gates of Chosön. Every Korean gate has a name, a name that is meant to be impressive and poetical, symbolical of beauty and of good. And doubtless these names are so to Korean ears, but they are apt to strike the European mind of average stolidity as amusing or silly. In Korea, indeed, every edifice of any pretension has a name. The people of the Far East personify their buildings to a great extent, and endue them with individuality, and with human attributes. Royal gateways are often flanked by two immense Chinese lions, or, as they are more generally called, Korean dogs. These dogs are but one of the many most universal expressions of Korean art. They are the one expression of Korean art with which we, in Europe, are very familiar.
There is nothing else in picturesque Korea so picturesque as the red-arrow gates. I wish I might devote a chapter to them, and I am rather appalled at undertaking to at all clearly describe them in a few paragraphs. A dozen or more of the most eminent European authorities on Korea unanimously declare the red-arrow gates to have either been copied from, or to have been the originals of the Japanese torii. Why, in the bulk of literature that has been written about these strange gates of the Far East, little or no mention has been made of the Chinese pailow puzzles me. There can, I think, be no doubt that the three gates are three generations of one architectural family, or that they have had a common origin. The pailow of China are memorial arches, erected, as a rule, to commemorate the virtue and the character of women who have slaughtered themselves that they might follow their husbands to the grave. These arches are heavier than the Japanese torii, or the Korean red-arrow gates, but they are like both in their general outlines and in situation. And all Chinese architecture is very much heavier than the architecture of Korea or of Japan. The torii of Japan marks the approach to a temple, or to some sacred place. It is formed of two upright columns or pillars which lean slightly toward each other at the top, and are crossed by two or three graceful bars; the upper of which is slightly, but very beautifully curved. The word “torii” is most usually translated “birds’ rest,” from “tori” a “bird,” and “I” “to be” or “rest.” And the theory has been that they were originally built as convenient resting-places for birds: as birds, with all other animals, were sacred in the eyes of the Buddhists. This translation is unsatisfactory. The etymology of the word itself, like that of so many other Japanese words, is hidden in a good deal of mystery, and though to-day we find the torii outside of every Buddhist temple in Japan, we also find one outside every Shinto temple in Japan, and it is easily proved that they were first reared outside the Shinto, and not outside the Buddhist temples. Long before Buddhism was introduced into Japan, the torii stood outside numerous Shinto temples. The most plausible translation of the word “torii,” though it is not a translation altogether convincing, is “a place of passing through.” It is Mr. Chamberlain, I believe, who gives this translation, but his book is not at my hand, and I am not positive. Certainly both in Korea and in Japan the birds make a very general resting-place of the torii, and of the red-arrow gates. But then so do they in China of the pailow, and so do they in America and Europe of the telegraph wires. It is very possible that from this habit of theirs “torii” has come to mean, or has been thought to mean, “birds’ rest.” The red-arrow gates of Korea are taller and narrower than the torii of Japan. The red-arrow gate never stands outside a temple, but outside a palace or some high magistracy, and it denotes the approach to a house of the king, or to the house of one of almost kingly authority. So in Söul we find a red-arrow gate standing outside the yamun of the Chinese Resident, one of the many silent, but clearly legible proofs that Korea has long regarded herself as a vassal of China. These gates are painted a most brilliant red, which is the Korean royal colour. The upright columns of a red-arrow gate are crossed by two horizontal bars. These bars are quite straight, and unlike the cross-bars of the torii, the upper one does not extend quite to the top of the perpendicular column. These gates are called arrow-gates because of twenty or more speared-shaped bits of wood that are embedded in the lower of the two horizontal bars, pierce through the upper bar, and extend a little higher than the shaped ends of the perpendicular columns. They are simplicity itself, these red-arrow gates, except for their gorgeous colouring, and altogether lack the elaboration of the Japanese torii. They are thirty feet high at least, often much higher. But however simple in themselves they make wonderful frames for wonderful bits of Korean landscape. On the exact centre of the upper cross-bar rests a peculiar design which represents the positive and negative essences—the male and female essences of Chinese philosophy. This again is surmounted by tongue-shaped or flame-shaped bits of wood, which are supposed to, in some way, represent the power of the king. The two symbols together signify Korea’s king as omnipotent, since he is under the protection of China, and has espoused the religion of Confucius. It is noticeable that the torii of Japan invariably marks the vicinity of a temple, or of some building, or some place sacred to one or more of the Japanese deities; while in Korea the red-arrow gate invariably signifies the proximity of the dwelling of temporal power. I am inclined to think that the Koreans borrowed the idea of their red-arrow gates from the Chinese, and that the Japanese seeing them, translated them into torii. If this is so, it is presumable that in both instances the borrowers erected the gates in front of what was to them the most important places in their own countries. The Emperor of Japan is the nominal head of the Shinto religion. In the days when the torii was introduced into Japan, religion was probably a great force in the three islands, and the temples seemed to the Japanese the most appropriate places to be honoured by this arched sign of importance. In Korea, on the other hand, religion is, and for many years has been, under a social and governmental ban. In Korea the king is all, and the gods are naught, so—as a matter of course—the red gates reared their graceful, arrow-crowned heads outside the house of a king, or of a deputed representative of the Chinese emperor.
The bridges of Korea, the big bell at Söul, and a dozen other characteristic details of Korea’s rich architecture, all rise up before me and seem to reproach me for passing them by without a word. To touch upon them with anything approaching adequacy would require pages and not words, and the pages at my disposal are growing few. But I can heartily recommend their study and the study of Korean architecture in general to all who are interested in the East, and in architecture, and who are fascinated by the quaint and the symbolical.
CHAPTER VIII.
HOW THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE, AND THE KOREANS AMUSE THEMSELVES.
There is nothing else, I think, that so positively proves the intimate relationship of China, Japan, and Korea, as does the great similarity between their games and their amusements—a similarity which almost amounts to identicalness. If it is true that “in vino veritas,” it must be equally true that men are most natural when they are happiest, freest from care, and have neither business nor duties beyond recreating themselves. So when we study the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans at play, and find that they all play very much alike, appreciate the same or kindred amusements, have the same methods of feasting, of resting, and of enjoyment, we are justified in concluding that these three peoples are very near of kin. But if they be children of the same parents, they are not the children of one birth, and this to me, at least, is proved by the few but sharp differences between each of their three ways of amusing themselves.
China, Korea, and Japan! And the greatest of these is China. Let us watch them, beginning with China, at their recreations, and then let us note how in those recreations they differ.
Feasts naturally form an important part of the happiness of a people, the majority of whom commonly go hungry. A Chinese dinner is in more than one way startling—to the average European mind. But it is a very good dinner for all that.
I have been at many a Chinese dinner. Sometimes I have sat with the quaint Chinese women, behind the shelter of the lattice. Sometimes I have feasted brazenly with the men; and more than once the women of a Chinese household have, out of courtesy to me, come forth from the prized seclusion of their lattice-screened coign of vantage, and joined me in eating with the commoner faction of the family herd; in breaking bread with men.
Chinese festivals! The subject is so intricate and so interesting that I have not the impertinence to dismiss it in a sentence. But, in passing, I may say that no people enjoy festivals more, no people indulge in them more discreetly, less frequently than do the Chinese.
Chinese ceremonials! Funerals, weddings, and a hundred others! I know, in all the East, nothing more incomprehensible to the average, well educated European mind; nothing more philosophically pregnant to minds that are exceptionally industrious and exceptionally open.
Chinese recreations are almost myriad. They fly kites; they let go perfumed, brightly-lit balloons of silk and of silk-like paper; they light their fire-fly-lit land with a hundred thousand lanterns, and in honour of those lanterns, in indulgence of themselves, they hold a feast.
The dramatic is the chief of all arts. In China dramatic performances take the precedence of all entertainments. A Chinese theatre, at the best, is a barn-like place. It is devoid of scenery. Only men take part in Chinese theatrical performances.
In China, actors are looked down upon as social pariahs, and their sons may not enter for the competitive examinations which are the birthright of almost every Chinaman.
But nevertheless the Chinese have a god of play-acting, and they pay him no small homage. Indeed, all the Chinese deities are supposed to be great theatre-goers; and for their benefit theatrical performances are frequently held in the courtyards of the temples. The people (who have a freeentrée) flock to these performances and enjoy them as much or even more than the gods are supposed to do.
To almost no Chinese dramatic performance is admission charged. A number of people club together, hire the actors, engage the musicians, put up a shed—on the street, in a field, anywhere, anyhow—invite the entire community—which needs no urging—and the performance begins. Or a rich man is the momentary impresario. But even then the people expect to be admitted, and usually are.
The Emperor of China is a great devotee of the drama. He often commands a play at eight in the morning. Indeed, the day is the more usual hour for all theatrical performances in China.
But the most well worth seeing of Chinese Thespian entertainments are those that take place in the temple courtyards. No need of scenery there! Behind the bamboo stage rise the not unimpressive walls of the queerly-architectured Chinese temple. Where we are wont to have glaring footlights there is a soft, rosy glow, for there great rhododendrons lift their proud and heavy heads. The courtyard is partly surrounded by a wall so old and broken that it might be the veritable old wall of China. From its sides lean double-flowering apricots and the sweet yu-lan, with its thousand blooms of pale peach colour. From the wall’s top strange Chinese grasses nod and flower-heavy vines hang. Among the vines and grasses primroses nestle cosily. Beside the wall tulips flaunt, and great clumps of mignonette grow among the hibiscus flowers. The actors are very fine with their crowns of tinsel and their robes of silk. The audience, too, is well worth watching, with their intelligent yellow faces, and their glittering black eyes. They are tense with interest, those Mongolian play-goers. And the Chinese orchestra! Ah! that is droll indeed.
We are apt to think of Chinese music as being noise pure and simple. Certainly very much Chinese music is superlatively noisy. But even Chinese music has its softer side, its refined moments. I remember a little band in Canton that used to make very pleasant lullaby music, and to handle their odd instruments with most considerable taste.
When Noah was learning something of boat-building, the Chinese were, in their Chinese way, expert musicians. Their principal instrument was made of twelve tubes of bamboo. Six tubes were for the sharps, and six for the flats.
To-day the Chinese have over fifty musical instruments—instruments made of stone, of metal, and of wood.
Chinese dramatic literature is unusually interesting. To study it is no mean mental tonic, and it is, I believe, the best way to study the Chinese people, unless one can live among them with some little intimacy.
But I must not linger too long by the wayside of my pleasant subject. Yet I must touch—if only with a sentence—upon four or five of the many other ways in which the Chinese recuperate their overburdened bodies and their jaded minds.
They take great joy in Nature. Picnics are a most Chinese institution. They are invariably planned to be at some spot where there is an exceptional view. And the picnic party will sit for hours, and watch the hills, or masses of fruit trees in bloom, or the sunset—sit silently too; for the Chinese, though the noisiest nation on earth, are apt to be hushed in the presence of nature, however much they chatter in the presence of their gods.
The Chinese are intensely fond of gardening. Every Chinaman that can afford it has a flower garden, and in nothing, save the graves of his ancestors, does he take more pride. In the garden’s centre there will be a lake—a very round, funny lake—and on its rippleless bosom great drowsy lien-hoas will sleep away their perfumed lives.
The lien-hoa is the Chinese water-lily. There are many varieties. They are single and double. They are red, they are rose, they are white. And some are of an indescribably lovely pale red, delicately streaked with white.
In almost every Chinese garden you will find a summer-house, its roof heavy with festoons of the wisteria. And there will be a pansy bed, a bosque of bamboo, a grove of camellias, a field of chrysanthemums, a world of peonies, trees of peaches, of plums, and of apricots, parallelograms planted with hydrangeas, and clumps of azaleas.
There are two other Chinese pleasures that I must at least mention—opium-smoking and gambling. Both are ineradicable characteristics of the Chinese.
The poppy gives the Chinese masses inestimable alleviation, and does them, I believe, the veriest minimum of harm.
Gambling, I fear, has a more baneful effect upon them. But it is their most positive and commonest diversion, and it will, I fancy, always be their national habit.
I have spoken of Chinese amusements, and now my trouble begins. I am at an entire loss to know how to speak of Korean amusements without repeating myself almost word for word. I can think of but two Chinese amusements which are not as general in Chosön as in Cathay—card-playing and theatre-going. In Korea it is not good form to play cards, and they are not played openly, except by the soldiers, and the lowest grades of society. Soldiers are allowed to play cards as much as they like, and for a very quaint reason. A soldier is often called upon for night duty. Now after eating, the thing dearest to the average Korean is sleeping, and the Korean government, which is not, from the Far Asiatic point of view, so merciless after all, has decreed that, as the playing of games of chance is more likely than any other thing to keep a man from being sleepy, the Korean soldiers may indulge in any and every game of chance, including those that are played with cards.
Korea is not without theatrical performances, no Eastern land is; but the theatrical performances of Korea are very different from the theatrical performances of China and of Japan. Indeed, in no branch of amusements do the three countries so differ as they do in the branch dramatic. With the possible exception of the Hindoo and the Mohammedan, the Japanese dramatic school approaches our own more than that of any other Oriental country. I have seen performances in Yeddo that seemed to me to quite merit classification with London productions at the Lyceum, and at the Savoy. Chinese dramatic art is a thing apart, and a law unto itself. It makes little or no appeal to European intelligence, or to European imagination. It is for the Chinese, and takes as little concern as the Chinese themselves voluntarily do of other peoples.
Korean dramatic art, if it is at all akin with the dramatic art of Europe, approaches most nearly the art methods of the high-class music halls, and the best French variety theatres. Every Korean actor is a star, superior to, indifferent to, and independent of scenery.
More often than not, the Korean actor is not only the star, but the entire company. He plays everything—old men, juveniles, low comedians and high tragedians, leading ladies,ingénueux, and rough soubrettes—plays them with little or no change of costume, plays them in quick succession, and wholly without aid of scenery. And very clever, indeed, he is to do it. Closely allied as all the three great peoples of the far Orient are in their amusements, the amusements of the Koreans resemble the amusements of China very much more than they do the amusements of Japan; and yet Korean acting is very much more like Japanese than like Chinese acting. This is especially worthy of note, I think, because in every nation in the world, the theatrical is the highest form of amusement.
Korean acting would come, perhaps, more properly under the heading of Korean art than under the head of Korean amusements, or quite as appropriately, perhaps, under the head of Korean religion. For in Korea, as in every other country, acting is not only an exquisite, and one of the highest expressions of a nation’s intellectuality, but is the child, almost the first-born child, of that country’s religion. It is, perhaps, because Korea has ceased to have a religion that Korea has no theatre, at least, no permanent theatre. The Korean actor gives his performance on the bare paper floor of some rich man’s banqueting hall, or at the street corner. The actors of Japan are surrounded with every possible accessory, and with the perfection of accessories. The most faultless stage setting I ever saw, the utmost nicety of properties that I ever saw, and the best trained supers I ever saw, I saw on the stage of a Tokio theatre. The Korean actor has no stage setting, he has no properties, and he never heard of supernumeraries. His theatre—for, after all, I am inclined to withdraw what I said, and to maintain that wherever an artist acts there is a theatre—his theatre consists of a mat beneath his feet, and a mat over his head, and four perpendicular poles separating the two mats. And yet the Korean actor shares very largely the polish, the definiteness of method, and the convincing artisticness of the Japanese actor. If religion had flourished in Korea as it has flourished in Japan, it is probable that, under the sheltering patronage of religion, Korean acting would now equal, if not excel, the best acting of Japan. As it is, the Korean actor is remarkable for his versatility, for his mastery of his own voice, his mastery of facial expression, and his comprehension of, and his reproducing of, every human emotion. A Korean actor will often give an uninterrupted performance of some hours length. He will recite page after page of vivid Korean history; he will chant folk-songs; he will repeat old legends and romances, and he will give Punch and Judy-like exhibitions of connubial infelicity and of all the other ills that Korean flesh is heir to. And he will intersperse this dramatic kaleidoscope with orchestral music of his own producing. Perhaps he has pitched his theatre of mats in the full heat of the noon-day sun, but even so, he only pauses to take big, quick drinks of peppery water, or of a very light, rice wine, in which good-sized lumps of hot ginger float. If the actor is performing at a feast of some mandarin or other wealthy Korean, he is, of course, paid by an individual employer; and the audience which has, in all probability, been amply dined and amply wined, sit near him, sit at their ease, and in an irregular semicircle. If the performance is given in the street, it is purely a speculation on the part of the actor. The audience sit about on queer little wooden benches, or squat on mats, or stand. And when the actor knows (and this is something which an actor always does know, the acting-world over) that he has struck the high-water mark of his momentary possible histrionic ability, he pauses abruptly and collects such cash as his audience can or will spare. The result is usually very gratifying to the actor. The audience want to see the play out, and the player won’t play on until he is paid. A street audience appreciates the play highly, appreciates it none the less, perhaps, because it—the audience—eats and drinks from the first scene until the last. It is an interesting sight to see in front of the temporary temple of a Korean actor a concourse of men with eyes a-stark with pleasure, and faces a-bulge with refreshment, but it is a sight which is not too open to the criticism of the people in whose own theatres ices and coffees and sweetmeats are hawked about between the acts. It always seems to me that we insult art grossly when we tacitly admit that we cannot sit through a fine dramatic performance without the stimulant of meat or of drink. The Japanese also eat between the acts, but then they have the excuse of sitting through performances that are sometimes twelve hours long. We lack that excuse in Europe. And though the Koreans munch and sip through the intensest moments of a Korean theatrical exhibition, no dramatic performance in Korea lasts, unless I mistake, for more than three, or at the utmost, four hours. A Korean actor, to attain to any eminence in his profession, must be able to improvise, and probably in no Eastern country, certainly in no Western country, is the art of improvising carried to so high a degree of perfection as it is in Korea. The Korean actor also approaches somewhat to the Anglo-Saxon clown. He must be quick with cheap witticisms, glib jests, and jokes that would be coarse if they were not above all stupid. He must be ready with topical quips, for the Korean crowd will have its laugh, or it won’t pay. This branch of his trade he is seldom called upon to ply when he performs at private entertainments.
The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans are all inveterate picnickers. They are all intensely fond of Nature, and of feasting out of doors. All three of these peoples take the greatest delight in tobacco. Opium is smoked in Korea more than in Japan, but far less than in China. But all the Koreans, whatever their age, whatever their station, whatever their sex, smoke tobacco almost as perpetually as do the Burmese. The Koreans use a pipe, of which the bowl is so small that it only holds a pinch or two of tobacco, and the stem of which is so long that it is almost impossible to light one’s own pipe. When not in use, a gentleman’s pipe is carried in his sleeve, or tucked into his girdle. The labouring man or the coolie usually thrusts his down his neck between his coat and his back. All three of these peoples are great patrons of professional story-tellers, and of magicians. The Japanese excel the others in magic, and the Koreans excel in story-telling.
It is a favourite pastime both in Japan and Korea to watch trained dancers. There is no dancing in China.
In Korea fights are the occasions of great national joy. In Japan skilful wrestlers and fencers give really artistic exhibitions, but never carry them to the point of brutality. But in Korea a fight is a real fight. Blow follows blow; limbs are bruised, dislocated, and broken. During the first month of the year it is legal, and is the height of Korean good form, to indulge in as many fights as possible. Antagonistic guilds, numbering hundreds of men, face each other at some convenient and appointed spot, and in the sight of thousands of enthusiastic spectators, fight out an entire year’s debt of envy and hatred. Men engage in the roughest of personal combat; men who during the other eleven months of the year scarcely fight upon the gravest provocation. A considerable fight between two Korean women of the poorest class is not unknown, and some of them fight extremely well. Mothers often devote considerable time training their small sons in the art of defence, and of fisty attack. Every Korean town, almost every Korean village, has a champion fighter. Prize-fights are to Korea what the race-course is to Europe and to Anglo-Asia. The spectators bet until they have nothing left to bet with, and then very often start an amateur fight of their own. Korean gentlemen do not as a rule fight, nor are they apt to attend a public fight. They often, however, go to very great expense in engaging professionals to give private exhibitions of their prowess. There is one rather comical side to a Korean fight. Every Korean wears an abundance of big clothing, and the antagonists never dream of disrobing in the least. And so two fighting Koreans, from a little distance, look as much like two fighting feather beds as anything else. Debt is said to be the cause of nine out of ten of the fights that are not exhibitions of skill. In Korea, as in China, it is a great disgrace not to pay all your debts on, or before the New Year; and any Korean who fails to do so is very apt to find himself involved in a pugilistic reckoning. Club fights and stone fights are very common. When a stone fight is proposed the friends or admirers of the combatants spend some hours in collecting two mounds of small rough stones. Then the battle begins, and it is a battle. Sometimes it is a duel, and sometimes fifty or even a hundred take an active part in it, pelting each other as rapidly and as roughly as possible.
But the most important, and the most popular of all amusements in Korea is that of eating and drinking. Intemperance, I fear, is very common, and is so little condemned by public opinion that it is quite as much a national recreation as a national vice, but it is seldom or never indulged in by women, and even the geisha girls are sobriety itself. The Koreans drink everything and anything of an intoxicating kind that they can get. They are improving, however, in this respect, of late years. Japanese beer is somewhat displacing the heavier rice liquors, and among the very wealthiest people both claret and champagne are popular. But the Koreans eat as much as ever they did, and no other people extract so much genuine enjoyment from eating. The Koreans season their food more highly, and use more chillies, more mustard than any other people in Asia. They are very fond of the taro, a smooth, small, sweet potato. They devour sea-weed by the pound, and eat lily-bulbs by the bushel. Here is themênuof a very elegant Korean dinner:—