Chosön, the land of the morning calm

Preface

NE evening in August, 1883, I found myself arriving in Tokio, after a journey into the interior of Japan. The thousand lights and lanterns of the great city, as 1 sped through its miles of streets in a jinrikisha, never seemed so brilliant nor so welcoming before. I felt I had reached home. Of leaving it, of sailing for America, I had at that moment about as much idea as you have, good reader, of setting out to-morrow for Kamchatka. Coming events cast no shadows before them; for all was one vast shadow, — night. Four days from that time 1 was on the broad Pacific with the Korean Special Mission to the United States, and a little more than two weeks later I entered my native land as a foreigner.

It was at the end of October that we set sail again from San Francisco for Yokohama. A long passage across the Pacific and unavoidable delays in Japan made it the middle of December before we at last reached Korea. There, in its capital, Soul, as the guest of his Majesty, I spent the winter.

Now that you and I, indulgent reader, have journeyed so many thousand miles in company, we should surely have learned to know each other ; for nothing, we both admit, so reveals character as travel, — except marriage.

I would add two notes. In the first place, I wish to put in a plea for the right pronunciation of Korean words. In the transliteration of the Korean alphabet I have followed the scheme suggested by Messrs. Aston, Satow, and Chamberlain, the pioneers of the subject. The simple vowels a, i, o, and u are to be pronounced as in Italian. 0, an exceedingly interesting Korean vowel, lias a sound which varies from the French e mute, through short u, to a degenerated o. The best sound,

VI

PREFACE.

on the whole, to represent it is the German o (o umlaut). What have been written e, e, and e were originally Korean diphthongs, and are still so written, ai, ai , and oi ; but they are now pronounced as single vowel sounds, akin to the sounds the letters represent in French. The transliterated consonants are to be pronounced for the most part as in English, — the principal exceptions being r, which is a general, not a special liquid (that is, it suggests cither an r, an l , or an n, according to position) ; an intercalated h , which has the effect of increasing the aspiration of the preceding letter, — as, for instance, Whang, Chhung ; and lastly, a reduplication of certain letters, which simply increases the intensity of their pronunciation. Other foreign words have been spelled according to the consensus of scholars on the subject; for this reason Korea has replaced Corea , and in Manchuria all the vowels have the Italian sound.

Secondly, I would send with this a note of thanks. The thanks would have taken the form of a dedication had the names not seemed too many to share one book. To William Sturgis Bigelow, Gustavus Goward, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Ernest F. Fenollosa, and Edward S. Morse, 1 am indebted for kindness and help thanks cannot express : I would offer them instead this sketch. To Miyaoka Tsunejiro, Yu Kil Chun, Chcu Kyong Sok, Ni Si Ryom, Kim Nak Chip, Min Ycng Ik, and So Kwang Pom, I am under the greatest obligations. I would also thank most warmly Hon. Lucius H. Foote, C. L. Scuddcr, Esq., Herr P. G. von Mbllcndorff, T. Koyabashi, Esq., and Y. S. Yoshida, Esq., for the many happy days they gave me in both thought and feeling, the remembrance of which has lately, unhappily, been saddened by the death of Mrs. Foote ; while to Hong Yong Sik, the loyal friend, the true patriot, and at last the political martyr, I can now only ascribe a memory. To the Forbes Albertype Company 1 desire to express my thanks for the manner in which they have reproduced from my negatives the accompanying pictures. Finally, I would thank Mr. Stevens, of the University Press, for his many able suggestions.

Boston, November, 1885.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Where the Day Begins 1

II. The Geography of the Peninsula 11

Chapter I. Where The Day Begins

IT is fortunate that the one hundred and eightieth meridian falls where it does. From Siberia to the Antarctic Continent this imaginary line traverses nothing but water. The only land which it passes at all near is one of the archipelagoes of the South Pacific; and there it divides but a handful of volcanoes and coral reefs from the main group. These islands are even more unimportant to the world than insignificant in size. Those who tenant them are few, and those who are bound to these few still fewer.

The line is not only imaginary ; it has not even an astronomical reason for its existence, like the equator. It is purely and entirely an arbitrary convention ; and yet its position is of exceeding importance to mankind. From the very convenience of this position we are apt to forget its value ; for the line is the great day-origin. It sets, not the time of day merely, but the day itself. At the line two days meet. There, though time flows ceaselessly on, occurs that unnatural yet unavoidable jump of twenty-four hours ; and no one is there to be startled by the fact, — no one to be perplexed in trying to reconcile the two incongruities, continuous time and discontinuous day. There is nothing but the ocean ; and that is tenantless.

I

THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.

Had it been otherwise, — had the line crossed some continent where man dwelt, — there might have been two great towns, ten miles apart, with different days yet the same hour. “Nothing new under the sun ! ” Why, two days would be born with every sunrise. And persons induced to do so, from financial or other causes, could go skipping across the line, doubling certain days of their weeks while they forever obliterated others.

Now, as we pass this meridian westward, we simply drop a day into the deep; and but few of us pause to consider that we have in reality buried a cause of strife, — an immaterial something which, had it not been for the uninhabited ocean, would have thrown the world into inextricable confusion. The point at issue is nothing less than the agreement upon a common day for the whole world.

The form of the earth and her rotation give man a certain natural measure of time. As she turns upon herself, the sunlight and the shade mark out for him a division he calls a day ; and for any one place the darkness severs one day from the next, but for the earth as a whole the day sweeps endlessly round. There is no line to determine where this unending light shall cease to be the old day and become the new : the symmetry of the globe renders such a thing impossible. Man must place it for himself.

Now, so long as civilized nations — or at least all such as knew or cared about one another — lived close together, it mattered little whether they all agreed upon the same origin or not ; and it mattered less where they placed it, provided onty it was far enough away from all. But when they came to care about the antipodes, the case changed. Whether they had each made for themselves their own day, or had consented to worship at the common shrine of a convention, the problem would have been equally embarrassing. Indeed, had the world reached that stage of scientific and practical development in which the

WHEKE THE DAY BEGINS.

knowledge of its surface in its entirety became necessary, before man’s migrations had carried him to what we now call Europe, no little annoyance might have resulted from his position ; for, with himself as centre, the beginning of his day would lie at the one hundred and eightieth meridian, because as far a wav from him on the one side as on the other. If, then, his own meridian had lain not in Europe but in India, the other would have crossed the American Continent, to the great confusion of its present inhabitants. There would then have been no natural gap. An imaginary line only would make it Wednesday here and Thursday to him who stood a stone’s - throw away. Most fortunately, then, the impossible hiatus occurred where no continuity was needed. The attempt to make both ends meet — the end and the beginning — was rendered unnecessary by the great Pacific Ocean. Most fortunate was it, indeed, that opposite the spot where man was destined most to think there should have been placed so little to think about.

There is one loss which most travellers count a grain. It is the parting with that day which we drop from out the circle of our year into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. We fall asleep one night in the new world to awake on the after-morrow’s morning in the old. The day that knows no to-morrow — was yesterday.

And we are somehow glad. We vouchsafe the event a feeling, in our joy that we seem by so much nearer to our journey’s end. We hardly gave it a sober thought. Still less do we imagine that we shall meet its spirit in the land whither we are bound, — that we shall find that for once the fancies of far-Eastern superstition and the prosaic dictum of Western science are at one.

Long before such a thing as a prime meridian had entered the thoughts of men, before they could dream that their early

THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.

beliefs would later receive a certain sanction from science, the races of the Asiatic Continent had mused about the day’s beginning, and put its birthplace where we have agreed to find it to-day. Their myths, and the names those myths have left behind them, are a pretty, poetic forecast of our stern matter-of-fact convention. Modern science needed a starting-point for the day ; ancient fancy sought the place from which every morning came forth the sun : and the spot they fixed upon is the same. Our present fiction was an old-time fact. The sun rose from out the ocean ; to the far-Oriental it seemed that he must have slept there. To them his abode was a fairy palace ; to us it is a geometrical line. Thus sadly has scientific necessity caused illusion to narrow and disappear.

The continent upon which these early races found themselves did not girdle the globe. If it had they might perhaps have been endlessly pursuing and destroying one another round the circle. As it was, its general profile shaped their course to the sea. Their birthplace had much to do with the direction which they took ; but apparently the direction in itself, as that toward the rising or the setting sun, had little or nothing to do with it. Such thoughts came later. They went because they were driven, probably not by foes behind them, but by the restless spirit within. While the Aryans went westward, certain of the Turanian peoples struck east ; and from that moment the)7 separated, not by distance only, but in thought, in customs, in those ways of looking at things which we are too apt to call innate, once and forever. They had differed a little when they set out. There was a whole world of feelings between the two ere they had both completed their long journey. As with the west, so in the east. Horde after horde went forth, — at first, no doubt, to seek new pasture-lands. Like many a wanderer since, they forgot the object that had brought them, in the charms of their new surroundings.

o 7

WHEKE THE DAY BEGINS.

Arrived at the sea-coast, their material advance was stopped ; for they possessed neither the means nor the knowledge to venture upon the boundless bosom of the ocean. The land is man’s friend ; the ocean is at best but neutral. The mind must abet the wish, be it ever so strong, before man will become a sailor to lands beyond the sea. But if they went not in body, their dreams sped away to an earthly paradise beyond the water, — a happy material immortality where all was young and fair. The names they have left behind them bear witness to fond beliefs ; and so do the names of their lands to the journey that brought them thither.

The Japanese were among the first, and they went the farthest. They came, in all likelihood, through what is now the Korean Peninsula. Urged by the same desire that pushed our forefathers across the Asiatic Continent into Europe, they themselves at last ventured upon the sea. We can imagine them risking their way across the strait that separates what have since become their islands from the Korean Peninsula: first, to Tsushima, which, from the highlands of the hilly coast, they could see, — a streak of darker blue against the sky ; thence they made out Iki; and once there the islands would be a wall in front of them. But beyond these islands there was nothing but the restless, everlasting blue. To their watchful, anxious gaze, as they stood peering across the deep, no land was visible in the waste of waters. But every morning the sun rose in fiery splendor from out the ocean. Surely it was here that the day began. There could be nought beyond save the regions of the blessed, whence the day was born anew each morning for the dwellers upon this earth ; and so they named their land “The Day’s Beginning,”1 long, long ago in the morning1 of the ages.

O O

1 Nihon, from whose characters, as pronounced by the Portuguese, comes our word Japan, is the collective name of the islands that compose the Japanese Empire. It

G

THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.

But these beliefs were not confined to the Japanese. Both before they sailed, and long after the wanderers who never returned, and even the memory of their wanderings, had been utterly forgotten by those who remained behind, such beliefs existed. From before the time of history, the races along the Asiatic eastern watershed have turned their gaze, and imaginations that pierced beyond their gaze, toward the rising, as we do toward the setting, sun. All those longings, all those castles in the air, dreams of possibilities, — impossibilities, — which come unbidden to him who watches the sun as it sinks to rest, these peoples saw when it rose from out the deep. And so it happens that the peninsula which had been the pathway of the Japanese, and was destined later to become a dwelling-place permanent beyond its fellows, comes to our notice first as a mythical region of ultramundane bliss. It was called “The Land of the God-men.” In it grew, not the apple of the Hesperides, but the imaginary cactus that cured all ills, — that conquered disease, that brought immortality. “ The fairy palm” the Chinese called it; and the common people in Korea see it in the mountain ginseng to-day.

But a new horde from the north poured forth, and the gods took wings before them. Less adventurous than their predecessors, they crossed not the sea ; they tarried in the land and became a part of it. Yet they forgot not their old traditions ; and as year after year and century after century slipped away, we may imagine that they may almost

is commonly, but somewhat loosely, translated “ the rising sun.” “ Ni ” meant originally “ the sun,” and thence, by an easy transition, its signification was extended to mean “the day.” “Hon” means “origin.” The two together, therefore, mean “ the origin of the sun or day.” “ Nihon,” which is Sinico- Japanese, would, in pure Japanese, be expressed by “ hi no moto,” and not “ hi no de,” which is the expression for “sunrise.” The character signifying “to appear, to rise, as of the sun,” is quite distinct, from that which is read “ hon,” which denotes “ an origin, a beginning, a birth, as opposed merely to an appearance.” A strictly literal rendering bears out the mythological origin of the name, — to my thinking, even more poetic than “The Laud of the Sunrise.”

WHERE THE DAY BEGINS.

have looked upon themselves as the successors of the former myths. At any rate, the sun rose for them in the peaceful splendor that wraps the morning hours there even to this day, and the sunbeams fell into the valleys between the hills and nestled on the land. “Morning Calm” they called it; and it seemed not so much a name as its very essence. The drowsy quiet of the spot lulled them to rest, and they fell asleep. They were in the world, yet it was to them as if it had passed away. And so they slept on for ages.

Like the palace in the fairy tale, everything remained as it had been centuries before. Change knew them not, and time stood still. Individuals passed away and were forgotten, but the race seemed immortal. No alien might approach the place; and their neighbors to the north and west seemed quite disposed to respect their seclusion, exacting only a tribute for the privilege they enjoyed of being left alone. What they took into their sacred precincts that they kept. Albeit most of what they took had been borrowed from their neighbors’ customs, they clung to it as if it had been the fruit of their own ideas. And so it came to pass that we have here a most remarkable phenomenon, a living fossilification — the preservation intact in this world, the law of whose very existence is change — of the life, the thought, the manners, the dress, of centuries ago. In the Koreans of to-day we are not only looking upon what is strange, we are looking upon what has once been and has elsewhere passed away. Like the old Etruscan king, as he was seen for a moment when his tomb was exposed to view, they stand before us to-day just as they appeared on the day of their inhumation. Like him, too, will not the vision all crumble away to dust on contact with the air of the outer world ?

But Nature, as well as man, has singled out the peninsula for a charmed region of the past. When the long equinoctial summer drew to its close, and the icy hand of winter crept over

THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.

the north of Asia and entombed the mammoths where we find their skeletons at the present time, a mantle fell over what is now Korea and the countries round about. It may have been that the surrounding water for a time kept the fauna warm, or they may have been so hemmed in that Nature at bay fought for her life ; but whatever the cause, the fauna lived on. Whatever change there was, they acclimated themselves to it. The tiger kept his haunts in the jungle, and the great bustards continued to roam the plains. Even the crocodile clave to the muddy banks of the estuaries which for centuries had been his, in spite of any falling off in the temperature of his habitat.

Escape may have been cut off. At all events, it was easier for the fauna to remain, even under what at first were adverse circumstances, than to migrate. It is not a little singular that this should have been the case It is certainly surprising that the Bengal tiger, so called, — a beast that we habitually associate with the damp, hot jungle, — should be found in the dry and cold climate of Korea and Manchuria. Yet there he is; and his appearance is just what it is in the jungle of India, only that he is a trifle smaller. And yet he frequents, from preference, not the warmer valleys, but the forests on the sides of the mountains. To suit his condition, his hair has lengthened and his fur is all the handsomer. His pluck in remaining has met with its due reward. He is most highly honored, much more so than he would have been in the land where he more properly belongs. His name, it is true, is a household word on the lips of both peoples ; but in the north it commands not only dread but admiration. He is regarded as the archetype of strength and courage. His picture is the symbol of military greatness ; and on the old battle-flags it used to be borne before the army when the Korean soldiers marched to war.

The tiger did not remain alone ; his former associates

WHERE THE DAY BEGINS.

stayed likewise. The leopard continued to live where his race had lived before him. Even now, after centuries of persecution, he abounds there in such numbers that the skins form the most common of the insignia of official rank. Those from neighboring Manchuria — because to Manchuria, unlike Korea, there is access from the outer world — are to be met with, outranking the native product in lands whose specialty such things are supposed to be.

With the flora the case was different. Those species that covered the land in its early balmy days the peninsula knows no more. Their sun went south ; they could not follow, and they could not live without him. They died.

Perhaps no better criterion of the rank of an organism can be chosen than its strength to endure adversity, — physically speaking, its power of adaptability. To flourish when all is fair around it, when it meets with nothing but smiles, is of the lowest ; but to stand when everything compasses its destruction, “ hie labor, hoc opus est.” We praise it as it shows itself in the characters of men ; and we do well. But it is deeper than this. It is one of the fundamental laws of Nature. All alike, the lower with the higher, will thrive when given what they want ; but to mould what is given into what is wanted, this is an attribute only of the latter. “ Quand on ne pent avoir ce qu’on aime, il faut aimer ce qu’on a,” might truly be called the password to race immortality. Just in proportion as the range of the capabilities of any organism becomes extended, as the compass of its powers increases, so will it resist. Increase takes place first in the complexity of bodily structure, and then, as we ascend the scale, in that of mind ; and complexity in mind makes possible simplicity in matter : and this, it seems to me, renders it possible for us dimly to conceive how an infinite mind may, for its own existence, be independent of matter.

THE LAND OF THE MOKNING CALM.

The plants, then, could not adapt themselves. All remains of vegetable life, such as grow within the tropics, have long ago disappeared from Korea. It is now, for all its past, like any of its sister latitudes for vegetation. And man lias aided in the change : he has done his best to leave no aboriginal vegetation at all ; and in the southern half he has very fairly succeeded. He has completely domesticated the land. Indeed, it is not a little surprising to observe how completely what we must suppose to have been originally a shepherd people has transformed its business in life. Agricultural, sedentary, fixed, — such have become pre-eminently the characteristics of the race. What was once a tribe of nomads has entirely and peculiarly forgotten its wandering instincts. They journeyed centuries ago to the land of myths, and became a part of it, — they settled in the heritage of the gods, and were content ; and a halo as of immortality has rested upon them to this day.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA.

Chapter II. Tiie Geography Of The Peninsula

0 most minds there lurks a certain charm in the mysterious. The very fact that secrecy wraps a subject as witli a mantle renders us all the more eager to tear away the veil. The possession of this feeling is at once an exciting cause and a sanction to knowledge. We realize its power as regards persons, things, events ; less commonly is it a motive force to the study of a whole nation, and yet it is in this connection that I would call upon it now. I ask you to go with me to a land whose life for ages has been a mystery, — a land which from time unknown has kept aloof, apart, so that the very possibility of such seclusion is itself a mystery, and which only yesterday opened her gates. For cycles on cycles she has been in the world, but not of it. Her people have been born, have lived, have died, oblivious to all that was passing around them. They might have been denizens of another planet for aught they knew of the history of this. And the years glided into centuries, and the centuries grew to be numbered by tens, and still the veil remained as tightly drawn as at the beginning. It was but last year that Korea stepped as a debutante into the society of the world.

There is a certain natural fitness in beginning the description of a country by positing its geography. It is kindred to the way we commonly make one another’s acquaintance. We learn to

THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM.

recognize the form before we become familiar with the spirit; and though the land is not the people, as the body is not the person, yet both land and body have much to do with the character of those who tenant them.

If we will cast our eyes upon a large map of the world, or still better upon some large globe, we shall discover a peninsula just to the west of the Japanese islands. It is the peninsula of Korea. We shall know it, by inference, from the scarcity of names upon it. Of a land of which next to nothing was known, next to nothing could be represented ; and we shall hardly be glad to learn that almost all of what we shall read will be incorrect. Map compilers are artful. They put in much more information than they possess ; and then, when even that does not suffice to cover the paper, they reduce the scale of the drawing. By this artifice the areas unavoidably left blank are much diminished in extent. Unfortunately, then, all that we shall be able to make out from our atlas will be the existence of the peninsula, and the name Korea. We shall not dis cover that as much more country to the north of it is Korea* too ; for the frontier line on the map will not be such as would satisfy either China, on the one hand, or Korea on the other,, or Russia, that all-devourer of other people’s property in this part of the world, on both.

It is hardly surprising that our maps of Korea should be inaccurate. Where no one was allowed to land under pain of losing, not his theodolite alone, but his head, — an even more important instrument in the matter, — topographers were few. Over a century a^o the Jesuits in China, indeed, — who did and taught everything from religion to civil engineering, and whose career was more remarkable than the wildest imagination would have dared to paint it, — did make an attempt to survey Korea, but with scanty success. China was willing enough, but Korea was not.

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Ham Kyong To, or All Mirror Province.

Phyong An To, or Tranquil Province.

Whang He To. or Yellow Sea Province. KySng Keel To, or Capitol Boundaries Province Kydng Syang To, or Happiness, Honor Province.

Kang Won To. or River Origin Province. Chyung ChySng To. or Faithful. Pure Province. Choi La To, or Complete Network Province.

To (literally road), means Province.

MAP OF KOREA.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA.

The career of these French Jesuits in China was little short of supernatural, and it is a matter fraught with no small interest and wonder that their teachings in religion were not more successful than they were. If ever apostles came attended with miracles efficacious to the converting of the unbeliever, they did. They reformed the calendar ; they taught mathematics ; they designed bridges : in truth, it would be easier to enumerate what they did not do. They gained the imperial ear ; • their word on all practical subjects became law to a people as numerous as the whole of Europe was then. They became the wise men of the land, and yet they converted relatively few. It looks as if they were much more scrupulous abroad than at home about the dogmas of their divine mission. With all respect to so subtile a body, it would seem that here was a chance for the clothing of themselves with a little assumption of supernatural authority much more productive and none the less credible than infallibility at home, and such a chance as may never occur again. But peace to their ashes ! They did much good, and even to the most zealous of their opponents it must seem that they accomplished but little harm. And with all the folly and evil of their mistaken lives, they have exhibited examples of courage, of self-renunciation, of greatness, which cause us, as we read of their martyrdoms in that distant land of Korea, far away from all they held dear, to feel an answering throb in our own hearts. It is so easy to see the wrong in our fellow-man, and so hard to do honor to the truly good qualities of those we oppose. It is indeed a beautiful thing to have said of one what Coquelin (Aine) said of Jacques Xormand : “II a trop de coeur pour que son esprit soit jamais mediant et trop d’esprit pour que le sentiment soit jamais exagere.”