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Japan was continuously damaged. by the [act of aggression] and [distorted history], from S.Korea. I seek the truth, while tracking the anti-Japan of liar, expose the history distortion by anti-Japan. The South Korean government hides the truth of history. Korean school educates the history of the imitation. The Korean who criticized the imitation history by Korea was punished for a law of Korea. Therefore, Korea is a country with a great many falsehood and false evidence. Everyone, please do not be fooled into whether South Korea. Japanese language article: http://blog.livedoor.jp/yngvi_frey/  Yngvi Frey

Poverty

Isabella Bird - Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter II (First edition: UK, 1898year.)


Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter II(First edition: UK, 1898year.) - Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop


CHEMULPO, being on the island-studded estuary of the Han, which is navigable for the 56 miles up to Ma-pu, the river port of Seoul, it eventually occurred to some persons more enterprising than their neighbors to establish steam com-munication between the two. Manifold are the disasters which have attended this simple undertaking. Nearly every passen-ger who has entrusted himself to the river has a tale to tell of the boat being deposited on a sandbank, and of futile endeav-ors to get off, of fretting and fuming, usually ending in hail-ing a passing sajnpan and getting up to Ma-pu many hours be-hind time, tired, hungry, and disgusted. For the steam launches are only half powered for their work, the tTdes are strong, the river shallows often, and its sandbanks shift almost from tide to tide. Hence this natural highway is not much patronized by people who respect themselves, and all sorts of arrangements are made for getting up to the capital by "road." There is, properly speaking, no road, but the word serves. Mr. Gardner, the British acting Consul-General in Seoul, kindly arranged to escort me the 25 miles, and I went up in seven hours in a chair with six bearers, jolly fellows, who joked and laughed and raced the Consul's pony. Traffic has worn for itself a track, often indefinite, but usually straggling over and sterilizing a width enough for three or four highways, and often making a new departure to avoid deep mud holes. The mud is nearly bottomless. Bullock-carts owned by Chi-nese attempt the transit of goods, and two or three embedded in the mud till the spring showed with what success. Near Ma-pu all traffic has to cross a small plain of deep sand. Pack bulls, noble animals, and men are the carriers of goods. The redoubtable Korean pony was not to be seen. Foot passen-gers in dress hats and wadded white garments were fairly numerous.

The track lies through rolling country, well cultivated. There are only two or three villages on the road, but there are many, surrounded by fruit trees, in the folds of the adjacent low hills; stunted pines {Finns sinensis) abound, and often indicate places of burial. The hillsides are much taken up with graves. There are wooden sign or distant posts, with grotesque human faces upon them, chiefly that of Chang Sun, a traitor, whose misdemeanors were committed 1,000 years ago. The general aspect of the country is bare and monot-onous. Except for the orchards and the spindly pines, there is no wood. There is no beauty of form, nor any of those signs of exclusiveness, such as gates or walls, which give some-thing of dignity to a landscape. These were my first impres-sions. But I came to see on later journeys that even on that road th^re can be a beauty and fascination in the scenery when glorified and idealized by the unrivalled atmosphere of a Korean winter, which it is a delight even to recall, and that the situation of Seoul for a sort of weird picturesqueness com-pares favorably with that of almost any other capital, but its orientalism, a marked feature of which was its specially self-asserting dirt, is being fast improved off the face of the earth.

From the low pass known as the Gap, there is a view of the hills in the neighborhood of Seoul, and before reaching the Han these, glorified and exaggerated by an effect of atmos-phere, took on something of grandeur. Crossing the Han in a scow to which my chair accommodated itself more readily than Mr. Gardner's pony, and encountering ferry boats full of pack bulls bearing the night soil of the city to the country, we landed on the rough, steep, filthy, miry river bank, and were at once in the foul, narrow, slimy, rough street of Ma-pu, a twisted alley full of mean shops for the sale of native com-modities, of bulls carrying mountains of brushwood which nearly filled up the roadway ; and with a crowd, masculine solely, which swayed and loafed, and did nothing in particu-lar. Some quiet agricultural country, and some fine trees, a resemblance to the land of the Bakhtiari Lurs, in the fact of one man working a spade or shovel, while three others helped him to turn up the soil by an arrangement of ropes, then two chairs with bearers in blue uniforms, carrying Mrs. and Miss Gardner, accompanied by Bishop Corfe, Mr. M'Leavy Brown, the Chief Commissioner of Korean Customs, and Mr. Fox, the Assistant Consul, then the hovels and alleys became thick, and we were in extra-mural Seoul. A lofty wall, pierced by a deep double-roofed gateway, was passed, and ten minutes more of miserable alleys brought us to a breezy hill, crowned by the staring red brick buildings of the English Legation and Consular offices.

The Russian Legation has taken another and a higher, and its loftly tower and fine facade are the most conspicuous objects in the city, while a third is covered with buildings, some Korean and tasteful, but others in a painful style of architec-ture, a combination of the factory with the meeting-house, be-longing to the American Methodist Episcopal Mission, the American Presbyterians occupying a humbler position below. A hill on the other side of the town is dedicated to Japan, and so in every part of the city the foreigner, shut out till 1883, is making his presence felt, and is undermining that which is Korean in the Korean capital by the slow process of contact.

One of the most remarkable indications of tlie changes which is stealing over the Hermit City is tliat a nearly finished Roman Catholic Cathedral, of very large size, witli a clergy-house and orphanages, occupies one of the most prominent positions in Seoul. The King's father, the Tai-Won-Kun, still actively engaged in politics, is the man who, thirty years ago, persecuted the Roman Christians so cruelly and persist-ently as to raise up for Korea a " noble army of martyrs."

I know Seoul by day and night, its palaces and its slums, its unspeakable meanness and faded splendors, its purposeless crowds, its mediaeval processions, which for barbaric splendor cannot be matched on earth, the filth of its crowded alleys, and its pitiful attempt to retain its manners, customs, and identity as the capital of an ancient monarchy in face of the host of disintegrating influences which are at work, but it is not at first that one takes it in.." I had known it for a year before I appreciated it, or fully realized that it is entitled to be regarded as one of the great capitals of the world, with its supposed population of a quarter of a million, and that few capitals are more beautifully situated.^ One hundred and twenty feet above the sea, in Lat. 37° 34' N. and Long. 127° 6' E., mountain girdled, for the definite peaks and abrupt elevation of its hills give them the grandeur of mountains, though their highest summit, San-kak-San, has only an altitude of 2,627 feet, few cities can boast, as Seoul can, that tigers and leopards are shot within their walls ! Arid and forbid-ding these mountains look at times, their ridges broken up into black crags and pinnacles, ofttimes rising from among dis-torted pines, but there are evenings of purple glory, when every forbidding peak gleams like an amethyst with a pink translucency, and the shadows are cobalt and the sky is green and gold. Fair are the surroundings too in early spring, when a delicate green mist veils the hills, and their sides are flushed with the heliotrope azalea, and flame of plum, and blush of cherry, and tremulousness of peach blossom appear in un-expected quarters.

Looking down on this great city, which has the aspect of a lotus pond in November, or an expanse of overripe mushrooms, the eye naturally follows the course of the wall, which is discerned in most outlandish places, climbing Nam-San in one direction, and going clear over the crest of Puk-han in another, enclosing a piece of forest here, and a vacant plain there, descending into ravines, disappearing and reappearing when least expected.

I shrink from describing intra-mural Seoul. ^ I thought it the foulest city on earth till I saw Peking, and its smells the most odious, till I encountered those of Shao-shing ! For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable. Eti-quette forbids the erection of two-storied houses, consequently an estimated quarter of a million people are living on "the ground," chiefly in labyrinthine alleys, many of them not wide enough for two loaded bulls to pass, indeed barely wide enough for one man to pass a loaded bull, and further narrowed by a series of vile holes or green, slimy ditches, which receive the solid and liquid refuse of the houses, their foul and fetid margins being the favorite resort of half-naked children, be-grimed with dirt, and of big, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, which wallow in the slime or blink in the sun. There too the itin-erant vendor of "small wares," and candies dyed flaring colors with aniline dyes, establishes himself, puts a few planks across the ditch, and his goods, worth perhaps a dollar, thereon. But even Seoul has its " spring cleaning," and I en-countered on the sand plain of the Han, on the ferry, and on the road from Ma-pu to Seoul, innumerable bulls carrying pan-niers laden with the contents of the city ditches.

The houses abutting on these ditches are generally hovels with deep eaves and thatched roofs, presenting nothing to the street but a mud wall, with occasionally a small paper window just under the roof, indicating the men's quarters, and invari-ably, at a height varying from 2 to 3 feet above the ditch, a blackened smoke-hole, the vent for the smoke and heated air, which have done their duty in warming the floor of the house. All day long bulls laden with bruslnvood to a great height are entering the city, and at six o'clock this pine brush, preparing to do the cooking and warming for the population, fills every lane in Seoul with aromatic smoke, which hangs over it with remarkable punctuality. Even the superior houses, which have curved and tiled roofs, present nothing better to the street than this debased appearance.

The shops partake of the general meanness. Shops with a stock-in-trade which may be worth six dollars abound. It is easy to walk in Seoul without molestation, but any one stand-ing to look at anything attracts a great crowd, so that it is as well that there is nothing to look at. The shops have literally not a noteworthy feature. Their one characteristic is that they have none ! The best shops are near the Great Bell, be-side which formerly stood a stone with an inscription calling on all Koreans to put intruding foreigners to death. So small are they that all goods are within reach of the hand. In one of the three broad streets, there are double rows of removable booths, in which now and then a small box of Korean niello work, iron inlaid with silver, may be picked up. In these and others the principal commodities are white cottons, straw shoes, bamboo hats, coarse pottery, candlesticks, with draught screens, combs, glass beads, pipes, tobacco pouches, spittoons, horn-rimmed goggles, much worn by officials, paper of many kinds, wooden pillow-ends, decorated pillowcases, fans, ink-cases, huge wooden saddles with green leather flaps bossed with silver, laundry sticks, dried persimmons, loathsome candies dyed magenta, scarlet, and green, masses of dried seaweed and fungi, and ill-chosen collections of the most trumpery of foreign trash, such as sixpenny kerosene lamps, hand mirrors, tinsel vases, etc., the genius of bad taste presiding over all.

Plain brass dinner sets and other brass articles are made, and some mother-of-pearl inlaying in black lacquer from old designs is occasionally to be purchased, and embroideries in silk and gold thread, but the designs are ugly, and the color-ing atrocious. Foreigners have bestowed the name Cabinet Street on a street near the English Legation, given up to the making of bureaus and marriage chests. These, though not massive, look so, and are really handsome, some being of solid chestnut wood, others veneered with maple or peach, and bossed, strapped, and hinged with brass, besides being orna-mented with great brass hasps and brass padlocks 6 inches long. These, besides being thoroughly Korean, are distinctly decorative. There are few buyers, except in the early morn-ing, and shopping does not seem a pastime, partly because none but the poorest class of women can go out on foot by daylight.

In the booths are to be seen tobacco pipes, pipestems, and bowls, coarse glazed pottery, rice bowls, Japanese lucifer matches, aniline dyes, tobacco pouches, purses, flint and tinder pouches, rolls of oiled paper, tassels, silk cord, nuts of the edible pine, rice, millet, maize, peas, beans, string shoes, old crinoline hats, bamboo and reed hats in endless variety, and coarse native cotton, very narrow.

In this great human hive, the ordinary sightseer finds his vocation gone. The inhabitants constitute the sight" of Seoul. The great bronze bell, said to be the third largest in the world, is one of the few sights " usually seen by stran-gers. It hangs in a bell tower in the centre of the city, and bears the following inscription : —

" Sye Cho the Great, 12*^ year Man cha [year of the cycle] and moon, the 4'^ year of the great Ming Emperor Hsiian-hua [a.d. 1468], the head of the bureau of Royal despatches, Sye Ko chyeng, bearing the title Sa Ka Chyeng, had this pavilion erected and this bell hung."

This bell, whose dull heavy boom is heard in all parts of Seoul, has opened and closed the gates for five centuries.

The grand triple gateway of the Royal Palace with its double roof, the old audience hall in the Mulberry Gardens, and the decorative roofs of the gate towers, are all seen in an hour. There remains the Marble Pagoda, seven centuries old, so com-pletely hidden away in the back yard of a house in one of the foulest and narrowest alleys of the city, that many people never see it at all. As I was intent on photographing some of the reliefs upon it, I visited it five times, and each time with fresh admiration ; but so wedged in is it, that one can only get any kind of view of it by climbing on the top of a wall. Every part is carved, and the flat parts richly so, some of the tablets representing Hindu divinities, while others seem to portray the various stages of the soul's progress towards Nir-vana. The designs are undoubtedly Indian, modified by Chinese artists, and this thing of beauty stands on the site of a Buddhist monastery. It is a thirteen-storied pagoda, but three stories were taken off in the Japanese invasion three centuries ago, and placed on the ground uninjured. So they remained, but on my last visit children had defaced the ex-quisite carving, and were offering portions for sale. Not far off is another relic of antiquity, a decorated and inscribed tablet standing on the back of a granite turtle of prodigious size. Outside the west gate, on a plain near the Peking Pass, was a roofed and highly decorated arch of that form known as the pailow, and close by it a sort of palace hall, in which every new sovereign of Korea waited for the coming of a special envoy from Peking, whom he joined at the pailow, ac-companying him to the palace, where he received from him his investiture as sovereign.

On the slope of Nam San the white wooden buildings, sim-ple and unpretentious, of the Japanese Legation are situated, and below them a Japanese colony of nearly 5,000 persons, equipped with tea-houses, a theatre, and the various arrange-ments essential to Japanese well-being. There, in acute con-trast to everything Korean, are to be seen streets of shops and houses where cleanliness, daintiness, and thrift reign supreme, and unveiled women, and men in girdled dressing-gowns and clogs, move about as freely as in Japan. There also are to be seen minute soldiers or military police, and smart be-sworded officers, who change guard at due intervals ; nor are such pre-cautions needless, for the heredity of hate is strong in Korea, and on two occasions the members of this Legation have had to fight their way down to the sea. The Legation was occu-pied at the time of my first visit by Mr. Otori, an elderly man with pendulous white whiskers, who went much into the little society which Seoul boasts, talked nothings, and gave no promise of the rough vigor which he showed a few months later. There also are the Japanese bank and post office, both admirably managed.

The Chinese colony was in 1894 nearly as large, and dif-fered in no respect from such a colony anywhere else. The foreigners depend for many things on the Chinese shops, and as the Koreans like the Chinese, they do some trade with them also. The imposing element connected with China was the yamen of Yuan, the Minister Resident and representative of Korea's Suzerain, by many people regarded as ** the power behind the throne," who is reported to have gone more than once unbidden into the King's presence, and to have re-proached him with his conduct of affairs. Great courtyards and lofty gates on which are painted the usual guardian gods, and a brick dragon screen, seclude the palace in which Yuan lived with his guards and large retinue ; and the number of big, supercilious men, dressed in rich brocades and satins, who hung about both this Palace and the Consulate, impressed the Koreans with the power and stateliness within. The Americans were very severe on Yuan, but so far as I could learn his chief fault was that he let things alone, and neglected to use his unquestionably great power in favor of reform and common honesty — but he was a Chinese mandarin ! He possessed the power of life and death over Chinamen, and his punishments were often to our thinking barbarous, but the Chinese feared him so much that they treated the Koreans fairly well, which is more than can be said of the Japanese.

One of the <' sights" of Seoul is the stream or drain or watercourse, a wide, walled, open conduit, along which a dark-colored festering stream slowly drags its malodorous length, among manure and refuse heaps which cover up most of what was once its shingly bed. There, tired of crowds masculine solely, one may be refreshed by the sight of women of the poorest class, some ladling into pails the compound which passes for water, and others washing clothes in the fetid pools which pass for a stream. All wear one costume, which is peculiar to the capital, a green silk coat — a man's coat with the *' neck" put over the head and clutched below the eyes, and long wide sleeves falling from the ears. It is as well that the Korean woman is concealed, for she is not a houri. Wash-ing is her manifest destiny so long as her lord wears white. She washes in this foul river, in the pond of the Mulberry Palace, in every wet ditch, and outside the walls in the few streams which exist. Clothes are partially unpicked, boiled with ley three times, rolled into hard bundles, and pounded with heavy sticks on stones. After being dried they are beaten with wooden sticks on cylinders, till they attain a polish resembling dull satin. The women are slaves to the laundry, and the only sound which breaks the stillness of a Seoul night is the regular beat of their laundry sticks.

From the beautiful hill Nam-San, from the Lone Tree Hill, and from a hill above the old Mulberry Palace, Seoul is best seen, with its mountainous surroundings, here and there dark with pines, but mostly naked, falling down upon the city in black arid corrugations. These mountains enclose a valley about 5 miles long by 3 broad, into which 200,000 people are crammed and wedged. The city is a sea of low brown roofs, mostly of thatch, and all but monotonous, no trees and no open spaces. Rising out of this brown sea there are the curved double roofs of the gates, and the gray granite walls of the royal palaces, and within them the sweeping roofs of vari-ous audience halls. Cutting the city across by running from the east to the west gate is one broad street, another striking off from this runs to the south gate, and a third 60 yards wide runs from the great central artery to the palace. This is the only one which is kept clear of encumbrance at all times, the others being occupied by double rows of booths, leaving only a narrow space for traffic on either side. When I first looked down on Seoul early in March, one street along its whole length appeared to be still encumbered with the drift of the previous winter's snow. It was only by the aid of a glass that I discovered that this is the great promenade, and that the snowdrift was just the garments of the Koreans, whitened by ceaseless labor with the laundry sticks. In these three broad streets the moving crowd of men in white robes and black dress hats seldom flags. They seem destitute of any ob-ject. Many of them are of the yang-ban or noble class, to whom a rigid etiquette forbids any but official or tutorial occu-pation, and many of whom exist by hanging on to their more fortunate relatives. Young men of the middle class imitate their nonchalance and swinging gait.

There, too, are to be seen officials, superbly dressed, mounted on very fat but handsome ponies, with profuse manes and tails, the riders sitting uneasily on the tops of saddles with showy caparisonings a foot high, holding on to the saddle bow, two retainers leading the steed, and two more holding the rider in his place ; or officials in palanquins, with bearers at a run, amid large retinues. In the more plebeian streets nothing is to be seen but bulls carrying pine brush, strings of ponies loaded with salt or country produce, water-carriers with pails slung on a yoke, splashing their contents, and coolies carrying burdens on wooden pack saddles.

But in the narrower alleys, of which there are hundreds, further narrowed by the low deep eaves, and the vile ditches outside the houses, only two men can pass each other, and the noble red bull with his load of brushwood is rarely seen. Be-tween these miles of mud walls, deep eaves, green slimy ditches, and blackened smoke holes, few besides the male inhabitants and burden bearers are seen to move. They are the paradise of mangy dogs. Every house has a dog and a square hole through which he can just creep. He yelps furiously at a stranger, and runs away at the shaking of an umbrella. He was the sole scavenger of Seoul, and a very inefficient one. He is neither the friend nor companion of man. He is ignorant of Korean and every other spoken language. His bark at night announces peril from thieves. He is almost wild. When young he is killed and eaten in spring.

I have mentioned the women of the lower classes, who wash clothes and draw water in the daytime. Many of these were domestic slaves, and all are of the lowest class. Korean women are very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely so than the women of any other nation. In the capital a very curious arrangement prevailed. About eight o'clock the great bell tolled a signal for men to retire into their houses, and for women to come out and amuse themselves, and visit their friends. The rule which clears the streets of men occasionally lapses, and then some incident occurs which causes it to be rigorously reenforced. So it was at the time of my arrival, and the pitch dark streets presented the singular spectacle of being tenanted solely by bodies of women with servants carry-ing lanterns. From its operation were exempted blind men, officials, foreigners' servants, and persons carrying prescrip-tions to the druggists'. These were often forged for the purpose of escape from durance vile, and a few people got long staffs and personated blind men. At twelve the bell again boomed, women retired, and men were at liberty to go abroad. A lady of high position told me that she had never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight.

The nocturnal silence is very impressive. There is no human hum, throb, or gurgle. The darkness too is absolute, as there are few if any lighted windows to the streets. Upon a silence which may be felt, the deep, penetrating boom of the great bell breaks with a sound which is almost ominous.


http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Korea_%26_Her_Neighbours/Chapter_II%22%3EKoreaKorea & Her Neighbours/Chapter II
Isabella Bird - Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter I (First edition: UK, 1898year.)

Korea_and_Her_Neighbours1880 SeoulSeoulKorean

I used the sentence of the first edition for an author with respect.
※In addition, please warn because the imitation of the this book(Korea & Her Neighbours) is sold. Since the book of the imitation is altering by tampering the text without permission of the first edition, it completely differs from the contents of the first edition. (the thing which Korea translated and the thing which Korea reprinted).
Large tampering of the sentences is an act not to respect the intention of the author.

Isabella Bird - Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter I (First edition: UK, 1898year.)

Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter I (First edition: UK, 1898year.) - Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop



Seoul of Joseon eraSeoul of Joseon era
IsabellaIsabella Bird



IT is but fifteen hours' steaming from the harbor of Nagasaki to Fusan in Southern Korea. The Island of Tsushima, where the Higo Maru calls, was, however, my last glimpse of Japan ; and its reddening maples and blossoming plums, its temple-crowned heights, its stately flights of stone stairs lead-ing to Shinto shrines in the woods, the blue-green masses of its pines, and the golden plumage of its bamboos, emphasized the effect produced by the brown, bare hills of Fusan, pleasant enough in summer, but grim and forbidding on a sunless Feb-ruary day. The Island of the Interrupted Shadow, Chol-yong-To, (Deer Island), high and grassy, on which the Jap-anese have established a coaling station and a quarantine hos-pital, shelters Fusan harbor.

It is not Korea but Japan which meets one on anchoring. The lighters are Japanese. An official of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (Japan Mail Steamship Co.), to which the Higo Maru belongs, comes off with orders. The tide-waiter, however, is English — one of the English employes of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, lent to Korea, greatly to her advantage, for the management of her customs' revenue. The foreign settle-ment of Fusan is dominated by a steep bluff with a Buddhist temple on the top, concealed by a number of fine cryptomeria, planted during the Japanese occupation in 1592. It is a fairly good-looking Japanese town, somewhat packed between the hills and the sea, with wide streets of Japanese shops and various Anglo-Japanese buildings, among which the Consulate and a Bank are the most important. It has substantial retaining and sea walls, and draining, lighting, and roadmaking have been carried out at the expense of the municipality. Since the war, waterworks have been constructed by a rate of loo cash levied on each house, and it is hoped that the present abundant supply of pure water will make an end of the fre-quent epidemics of cholera. Above the town, the new Jap-anese military cemetery, filling rapidly, is the prominent object.

Considering that the creation of a demand for foreign goods is not thirteen years old, it is amazing to find how the Koreans have taken to them, and that the foreign trade of Fusan has developed so rapidly that, while in 1885 the value of exports and imports combined only amounted to ;£7 7,850, in 1892 it had reached ^^346, 608. Unbleached shirtings, lawns, mus-lins, cambrics, and Turkey reds for children's wear have all captivated Korean fancy; but the conservatism of wadded cot-ton garments in winter does not yield to foreign woollens, of which the importation is literally nil. The most amazing stride is in the importation of American kerosene oil, which has reached 71,000 gallons in a quarter ; and which, by displacing the fish-oil lamp and the dismal rushlight in the paper lantern, is revolutionizing evening life in Korea. Matches, too, have *' caught on" wonderfully, and evidently have *'come to stay." Hides, beans, dried fish, beche de mevy rice, and whale's flesh are among the principal ex-ports. It was not till 1883 that Fusan was officially opened to general foreign trade, and its rise has been most remarkable. In that year its foreign population was 1,500; in 1897 it was 5,564.

In the first half of 1885 the Japan Mail Steamship Co. ran only one steamer, calling at Fusan, to Wladivostok every five weeks, and a small boat to Chemulpo, calling at Fusan, once a month. Now not a day passes without steamers, large or small, arriving at the port, and in addition to the fine vessels of the Nippon Ytisen Kaisha, running frequently between Kobe and Wladivostok, Shanghai and Wladivostok, Kobe and Tientsin, and between Kobe Chefoo, and Newchang, all call-ing at Fusan, three other lines, including one from Osaka di-rect, and a Russian mail line running between Shanghai and Wladivostok, make Fusan a port of call.

It appears that about one-third of the goods imported is car-ried inland on the backs of men and horses. The taxes levied and the delays at the barriers on both the overland and river routes are intolerable to traders, a hateful custom prevailing under which each station is controlled by some petty official, who, for a certain sum paid to the Government in Seoul, ob-tains permission to levy taxes on all goods. ^ The Nak-Tong River, the mouth of which is 7 miles from Fusan, is navigable for steamers drawing 5 feet of water as far as Miriang, 50 miles up, and for junks drawing 4 feet as far as Sa-mun, 100 miles farther, from which point their cargoes, transhipped into light draught boats, can ascend to Sang-chin, 170 miles from the coast. With this available waterway, and a hazy prospect that the much disputed Seoul-Fusan railway may become an accom-plished fact, Fusan bids fair to become an important centre of commerce, as the Kyong-sang Province, said to be the most populous of the eight (now for administrative purposes thirteen), is also said to be the most prosperous and fruitful, with the possible exception of Chul-la.

Barren as the neighboring hills look, they are probably rich in minerals. Gold is found in several places within a radius of 50 miles, copper quite near, and there are coal fields within 100 miles.

To all intents and purposes the settlement of Fusan is Jap-anese. In addition to the Japanese population of 5,508, there is a floating population of 8,000 Japanese fishermen. A Japanese Consul-General lives in a fine European house. Bank-ing facilities are furnished by the Dai Ichi Gingo of Tokio, and the post and telegraph services are also Japanese. Japa-nese too is the cleanliness of the settlement, and the introduc-tion of industries unknown to Korea, such as rice husking and cleaning by machinery, whale-fishing, sake-making, and the preparation of shark's fins, deche de mer, and fish manure, the latter an unsavory fertilizer, of which enormous quantities are exported to Japan.

But the reader asks impatiently, Where are the Koreans? I don't want to read about the Japanese ! " Nor do I want to write about them, but facts are stubborn, and they are the out-standing Fusan fact.

As seen from the deck of the steamer, a narrow up and down path keeping at some height above the sea skirts the hillside for 3 miles from Fusan, passing by a small Chinese settlement with official buildings, uninhabited when I last saw them, and terminating in the walled town of Fusan proper, with a fort of very great antiquity outside it, modernized by the Japanese after the engineering notions of three centuries ago.

Seated on the rocks along the shore were white objects re-sembling pelicans or penguins, but as white objects with the gait of men moved in endless procession to and fro between old and new Fusan, I assumed that the seated objects were of the same species. The Korean makes upon one the impres-sion of novelty, and while resembling neither the Chinese nor the Japanese, he is much better-looking than either, and his phy-sique is far finer than that of the latter. Though his average height is only 5 feet 4^ inches, his white dress, which is vo-luminous, makes him look taller, and his high-crowned hat, without which he is never seen, taller still. The men were in winter dress — white cotton sleeved robes, huge trousers, and socks; all wadded. On their heads were black silk wadded caps with pendant sides edged with black fur, and on the top of these, rather high-crowned, somewhat broad-brimmed hats of black crinoUne" or horsehair gauze, tied under the chin with crinoline ribbon. The general effect was grotesque. There were a few children on the path, bundles of gay cloth-ing, but no women.

I was accompanied to old Fusan by a charming English ≪*Una," who, speaking Korean almost like a native, moved serenely through the market-day crowds, welcomed by all.
A miserable place I thought it, and later experience showed that it was neither more nor less miserable than the general run of Korean towns. Its narrow dirty streets consist of low hovels built of mud-smeared wattle without windows, straw roofs, and deep eaves, a black smoke hole in every wall 2 feet from the ground, and outside most are irregular ditches containing solid and liquid refuse. Mangy dogs and blear-eyed children, half or wholly naked, and scaly with dirt, roll in the deep dust or slime, or pant and blink in the sun, apparently unaffected by the stenches which abound. But market day hid much that is repulsive. Along the whole length of the narrow, dusty, crooked street, the wares were laid out on mats on the ground, a man or an old woman, bundled up in dirty white cotton, guarding each. And the sound of bargaining rose high, and much breath was spent on beating down prices, which did not amount originally to the tenth part of a farthing. The goods gave an impression of poor buyers and small trade. Short lengths of coarse white cotton, skeins of cotton, straw shoes, wooden combs, tobacco pipes and pouches, dried fish and sea-weed, cord for girdles, paper rough and smooth, and barley-sugar nearly black, were the contents of the mats. I am sure that the most valuable stock-in-trade there was not worth more than three dollars. Each vendor had a small heap of cash beside him, an uncouth bronze coin with a square hole in the centre, of which at that time 3,200 iwviinally went to the dollar, and which greatly trammelled and crippled Korean trade..
A market is held in Fusan and in many other places every fifth day. On these the country people rely for all which they do not produce, as well as for the sale or barter of their pro-ductions. Practically there are no shops in the villages and small towns, their needs being supplied on stated days by travelling pedlars who form a very influential guild.

Turning away from the bustle of the main street into a nar-row, dirty alley, and then into a native compound, I found the three Australian ladies who were the objects of my visit to this decayed and miserable town. Except that the compound was clean, it was in no way distinguishable from any other, being surrounded by mud hovels. In one of these, exposed to the full force of the southern sun, these ladies were living. The mud walls were concealed with paper, and photographs and other European knickknacks conferred a look of refinement. But not only were the rooms so low that one of the ladies could not stand upright in them, but privacy was impossible, invasions of Korean women and children succeeding each other from morning to night, so that even dressing was a spectacle for the curious. Friends urged these ladies not to take this step of living in a Korean town 3 miles from Euro-peans. It was represented that it was not safe, and that their health would suffer from the heat and fetid odors of the crowded neighborhood, etc. In truth it was not a ** conven-tional thing " to do.



On my first visit I found them well and happy. Small chil-dren were clinging to their skirts, and a certain number of women had been induced to become cleanly in their persons and habits. All the neighbors were friendly, and rude re-marks in the streets had altogether ceased. Many of the women resorted to them for medical help, and the simple aid they gave brought them much good-will. This friendly and civilizing influence was the result of a year of living under very detestable circumstances. If they had dwelt in grand houses 2^ miles off upon the hill, it is safe to say that the result would have been nil. Without any fuss or blowing of trumpets, they quietly helped to solve one of the great prob-lems as to " Missionary Methods," though why it should be a *' problem " I fail to see. In the East at least, every religious teacher who has led the people has lived among them, know-ing if not sharing their daily lives, and has been easily acces-sible at all times. It is not easy to imagine a Buddha or One greater than Buddha only reached by favor of, and possibly by feeing, a gate-keeper or servant.

On visiting them a year later I found them still well and happy. The excitement among the Koreans consequent on the Tong-hak rebellion and the war had left them unmolested. A Japanese regiment had encamped close to them, and, by permission, had drawn water from the well in their compound, and had shown them nothing but courtesy. Having in two years gained general confidence and good-will, they built a small bungalow just above the old native house, which has been turned into a very primitive orphanage.

The people were friendly and kind from the first. Those who were the earliest friends of the ladies are their staunchest friends now, and they knew them and their aims so well when they moved into their new house that it made no difference at all. Some go there to see the ladies, others to see the furni-ture or hear the organ, and a few to inquire about the '* Jesus doctrine." The "mission work" now consists of daily meet-ings for worship, classes for applicants for baptism, classes at night for those women who may not come out in the daytime, a Sunday school with an attendance of eighty, visiting among the people, and giving instruction in the country and surround-ing villages. About forty adults have professed Christianity, and regularly attend Christian worship.

I mention these facts not for the purpose of glorifying these ladies, who are simply doing their duty, but because they fall in with a theory of my own as to methods of mission work.

There is a very small Roman Catholic mission-house, seldom tenanted, between the two Fusans. In the province of Kyong-sang in which they are, there are Roman missions which claim 2,000 converts, and to promulgate Christianity in thirty towns and villages. There are two foreign priests, who spend most of the year in teaching in the provincial villages, living in Korean huts, in Korean fashion, on Korean food.

A coarse ocean with a distinct line of demarcation between the blue water of the Sea of Japan and the discoloration of the Yellow Sea, harsh, grim, rocky, brown islands, mostly unin-habited — two monotonously disagreeable days, more islands, muddier water, an estuary and junks, and on the third after-noon from Fusan the Higo Maru anchored in the roadstead of Chemulpo, the seaport of Seoul. This cannot pretend to be a harbor, indeed most of the roadstead, such as it is, is a slimy mud flat for much of the day, the tide rising and falling 36 feet. The anchorage, a narrow channel in the shallows, can accommodate five vessels of moderate size. Yet though the mud was eji evidence^ and the low hill behind the town was dull brown, and a drizzling rain was falling, I liked the look of Chemulpo better than I expected, and after becoming ac-quainted with it in various seasons and circumstances, I came to regard it with very friendly feelings. As seen from the roadstead, it is a collection of mean houses, mostly of wood, painted white, built along the edge of the sea and straggling up a verdureless hill, the whole extending for more than a mile from a low point on which are a few trees, crowned by the English Vice-Consulate, a comfortless and unworthy build-ing, to a hill on which are a large decorative Japanese tea-house, a garden, and a Shinto shrine. Salient features there are none, unless the house of a German merchant, an English church, the humble buildings of Bishop Corfe's mission on the hill, the large Japanese Consulate, and some new municipal buildings on a slope, may be considered such. As at Fusan, an English tide-waiter boarded the ship, and a foreign harbormaster berthed her, while a Japanese clerk gave the captain his orders.

Mr. Wilkinson, the acting British Vice-Consul, came off for me, and entertained me then and on two subsequent occasions with great hospitality, but as the Vice-Consailate had at that time no guest-room, I slept at a Chinese inn, known as ** Steward's," kept by Itai, an honest and helpful man who does all he can to make his guests comfortable, and partially succeeds. This inn is at the corner of the main street of the Chinese quarter, in a very lively position, as it also looks down the main street of the Japanese settlement. The Chinese set-tlement is solid, with a hsuidsome y amen and guild hall, and rows of thriving and substantial shops. Busy and noisy with the continual letting off of crackers and beating of drums and gongs, the Chinese were obviously far ahead of the Japanese in trade. They had nearly a monopoly of the foreign '* cus-tom " ; their large "houses" in Chemulpo had branches in Seoul, and if there were any foreign requirement which they could not meet, they procured the article from Shanghai with-out loss of time. The haulage of freight to Seoul was in their hands, and the market gardening, and much besides. Late into the night they were at work, and they used the roadway for drying hides and storing kerosene tins and packing cases. Scarcely did the noise of night cease when the din of morning began. To these hard-working and money-making people rest seemed a superfluity.

The Japanese settlement is far more populous, extensive, and pretentious. Their Consulate is imposing enough for a legation. They have several streets of small shops, which supply the needs chiefly of people of their own nationality, for foreigners patronize Ah Wong and Itai, and the Koreans, who hate the Japanese with a hatred three centuries old, also deal chiefly with the Chinese. But though the Japanese were out-stripped in trade by the Chinese, their position in Korea, even before the war, was an influential one. They gave " postal facilities" between the treaty ports and Seoul and carried the foreign mails, and they established branches of the First Na-tional Bank ' in the capital and treaty ports, with which the resident foreigners have for years transacted their business, and in which they have full confidence. I lost no time in opening an account with this Bank in Chemulpo, receiving an English check-book and pass-book, and on all occasions courtesy and all needed help. Partly owing to the fact that English cot-tons for Korea are made in bales too big for the Lilliputian Korean pony, involving reduction to more manageable dimen-sions on being landed, and partly to causes which obtain else-where, the Japanese are so successfully pushing their cottons in Korea, that while they constituted only 3 per cent, of the imports in 1887, they had risen to something like 40 per cent, in 1894.^ There is a rapidly growing demand for yarn to be woven on native looms. The Japanese are well to the front with steam and sailing tonnage. Of 198 steamers entered in-wards in 1893, 132 were Japanese; and out of 325 sailing vessels, 232 were Japanese. It is on record that an English merchantman was once seen in Chemulpo roads, but actually the British mercantile flag, unless on a chartered steamer, is not known in Korean waters. Nor was there in 1894 an English merchant in the Korean treaty ports, or an English house of business, large or small, in Korea.

Just then rice was in the ascendant. Japan by means of pressure had induced the Korean Government to consent to suspend the decree forbidding its export, and on a certain date the sluices were to be opened. Stacks of rice bags covered the beach, rice in bulk being measured into bags was piled on mats in the roadways, ponies and coolies rice-laden filed in strings down the streets, while in the roadstead a num-ber of Japanese steamers and junks awaited the taking off the embargo at midnight on 6th March. A regular rice babel prevailed in the town and on the beach, and much disaffection prevailed among the Koreans at the rise in the price of their staple article of diet. Japanese agents scoured the whole country for rice, and every cattie of it which could be spared from consumption was bought in preparation for the war of wdiich no one in Korea dreamed at that time. The rice bustle gave Chemulpo an appearance of a thriving trade which it is not wont to have except in the Chinese settlement. Its foreign population in 1897 was 4,357.

The reader may wonder where the Koreans are at Che-mulpo, and in truth 1 had almost forgotten them, for they are of little account. The increasing native town lies outside the Japanese settlement on the Seoul road, clustering round the base of the hill on which the English church stands, and scrambling up it, mud hovels planting themselves on every ledge, attained by filthy alleys, swarming with quiet dirty children, who look on the high-road to emulate the do-less Jiess of their fathers. Korean, too, is the official yamen at the top of the hill, and Korean its methods of punishment, its brutal flagellations by yameii runners, its beating of criminals to death, their howls of anguish penetrating the rooms of the ad-jacent English mission, and Korean too are the bribery and corruption which make it and nearly every yame?i sinks of in-iquity. The gate with its double curved roofs and drum chamber over the gateway remind the stranger that though the capital and energy of Chemulpo are foreign, the government is native. Not Korean is the abode of mercy on the other side of the road from the yamen, the hospital connected with Bishop Corfe's mission, where in a small Korean building the sick are received, tended, and generally cured by Dr. Landis, who himself lives as a Korean in rooms 8 feet by 6, studying, writing, eating, without chair or table, and accessible at all times to all comers. The 6,700 inhabitants of the Korean town, or rather the male half of them, are always on the move. The narrow roads are always full of them, sauntering along in their dress bats, not apparently doing anything. It is old Fusan over again, except that there are permanent shops, with stocks-in-trade worth from one to twenty dollars; and as an hour is easily spent over a transaction involving a few cash, there is an appearance of business kept up. In the settlement the Koreans work as porters and carry preposterous weights on their wooden packsaddles.


Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter I
Isabella Bird - Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter II (First edition: UK, 1898year.)



Related Documents:

Japan's annexation of Korea 1910-1945
http://youtu.be/4xWot6Ld5Gk

http://fact_of_liar-rok_comfort-woman.zhp.jp

Chaogong/朝貢

1898 Korea and her neighbors


I used the sentence of the first edition for an author with respect.
※In addition, please warn because the imitation of the this book(Korea & Her Neighbours) is sold. Since the book of the imitation is altering by tampering the text without permission of the first edition, it completely differs from the contents of the first edition. (the thing which Korea translated and the thing which Korea reprinted).
Large tampering of the sentences is an act not to respect the intention of the author.


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