Korea & Her Neighbours/Chapter X

A GRAY and murky morning darkening into drizzle, which thickened into a day's pouring rain, was an inauspicious beginning of a long land journey, but the crawling up the north Han had become monotonous and change and action were desirable. Being an experienced muleteer, I had ar- ranged the loads for each pony so equitably as to obviate the usual quarrel among the mapu or grooms at starting ! The men were not regular inaptly and were going chiefly to see the Diamond Mountain. One was well educated and gentlemanly, and the bystanders jeered at them for “loading like scholars.” They were a family party, and there were no disputes.

My first experience of the redoubtable Korean pony was not reassuring. The men had never seen a foreign saddle and were half an hour in getting it “fixed.” Though a pony's saddle, it was far too large for the creature's minute body, the girths were half a yard and the crupper nearly a foot too long. The animal bit, squealed, struck with his fore and hind feet, and performed the singular feat of bending his back into such an inward curve that his small body came quite near the ground. The men were afraid of him, and it was only in the brief inter- vals of fighting that they dared to make a dash at the buckles. It was “tight-lacing” that he objected to.

The Korean pony is among the most salient features of Korea. The breed is peculiar to it. The animals used for burdens are all stallions, from lo to 12 hands high, well formed, and singularly strong, carrying from 160 to 200 lbs. 30 miles a day, week after week, on sorry food. They are most desperate fighters, squealing and trumpeting on all oc- casions, attacking every pony they meet on the road, never becoming reconciled to each other even on a long journey, and in their fury ignoring their loads, which are often smashed to pieces. Their savagery makes it necessary to have a mapu for every pony, instead of, as in Persia, one to five. At the inn stables they are not only chained down to the troughs by chains short enough to prevent them from raising their heads, but are partially slung at night to the heavy beams of the roof. Even under these restricted circumstances their cordial hatred finds vent in hyena-like yells, abortive snaps, and attempts to swing their hind legs round. They are never allowed to lie down, and very rarely to drink water, and then only when freely salted. Their nostrils are all slit in an attempt to im- prove upon Nature and give them better wind. They are fed three times a day on brown slush as hot as they can drink it, composed of beans, chopped millet stalks, rice husks, and bran, with the water in which they have been boiled. The mapu are rough to them, but I never saw them either ill-used or petted. Dearly as I love horses, I was not able on two journeys to make a friend of mine. On this journey I rode a handsome chestnut, only lo hands high. He walked 4 miles an hour, and in a month of travelling, for much of it over infamous mountain roads, never stumbled, but he resented every attempt at friendliness both with teeth and heels. They are worth from 50s. upwards, and cost little to keep.

Their attendants, the mapu, who are by no means always their owners, or even part owners, are very anxious about them and take very great care of them, seeing to what passes as their comfort before their own. The pack saddle is removed at once on halting, the animals are well rubbed, and afterwards thick straw mats are bound round their bodies. Great care is given to the cooking of their food. I know not whether the partial slinging of them to the crossbeams is to relieve their legs or to make fighting more difficult. On many a night I have been kept awake by the screams of some fractious animal, kicking and biting his neighbors as well as he was able, till there was a general plunging and squealing, which lasted till blows and execrations restored some degree of order.

After I mounted my steed, he trudged along very steadily, unless any of his fellows came near him, when, with an evil glare in his eyes and a hyena-like yell, he rushed upon them teeth and hoof, entirely oblivious of bit and rider.

A torrent of rain fell, and the day's journey consisted in splashing through deep mud, fording swollen streams, because the bridges which crossed them were rotten, getting wet to the skin, and getting partially dry by sitting on the hot floor of a hovel called an inn at the noonday halt, along with a steam- ing crowd of all sorts and conditions of men in clean and dirty white clothes.

The road by which we travelled is the main one from Seoul to the eastern treaty port of Won-san. It passes through rice valleys with abundant irrigation, and along the sides of bare hills. Goods and travellers were not to be looked for in such weather, but there were a few strings of coolies loaded with tobacco, and a few more taking dried fish and dried seaweed, the latter a great article of diet, from Won-san to the capital. Pangas, or water pestles for hulling rice, under rude thatched sheds, were numerous. These work automatically, and their solemn thud has a tone of mystery. The machine consists of a heavy log centred on a pivot, with a box at one end and a pestle at the other. Water from a stream with some feet of fall is led into the box, which when full tips over its contents and bears down one end of the log, when the sudden rise, act- ing on the pestle at the other end, brings it down with a heavy thud on the rice in the hollowed stone, which serves as a mortar. Where this simple machine does not exist the work is performed by women.

Denuded hillsides gave place to wooded valleys with torrents much resembling parts of Japan, the rain fell in sheets, and quite in the early afternoon, on reaching the hamlet of Sar- pang Kori, the mapu declined to proceed farther, and there I had my first experience of a Korean inn. Many weeks on that and subsequent journeys showed me that this abominable shel- ter, as I then thought it, may be taken as a fair average speci- men, and many a hearty meal and good sound sleep may be enjoyed under such apparently unpropitious circumstances.

There are regular and irregular inns in Korea. The irregu- lar inn differs in nothing from the ordinary hovel of the vil- lage roadway, unless it can boast of a yard with troughs, and can provide entertainment for beast as well as for man. The regular inn of the towns and large villages consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumble-down gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, mapu, hangers-on, and travellers' loads make up a busy scene.

On one or two sides are ramshackle sheds, with rude, hol- lowed trunks in front, out of which the ponies suck the hot brown slush which sustains their strength and pugnacity. On the other is the furnace-shed with the oats where the slush is cooked, the same fire usually heating the flues of the kang floor of the common room, while smaller fires in the same shed cook for the guests. Low lattice doors filled in with torn and dirty paper give access to a room the mud floor of which is concealed by reed mats, usually dilapidated, sprinkled with wooden blocks which serve as pillows. Farming gear and hat boxes often find a place on the low heavy crossbeams. Into this room are crowded mapu, travellers, and servants, the low residuum of Korean travel, for officials and yang-bans receive the hospital- ities of the nearest magistracy, and the peasants open their houses to anybody with whom they have a passing acquaint- ance. There is in all inns of pretensions, however, another room, known as “the clean room,” 8 feet by 6, which, if it existed, I obtained, and if not I had a room in the women's quarters at the back, remarkable only for its heat and vermin, and the amount of ang-paks, bundles of dirty clothes, beans rotting for soy, and other plenishings which it contained, and which reduced its habitable portion to a minimum. At night a ragged lantern in the yard and a glim of oil in the room made groping for one's effects possible.

The room was always overheated from the ponies' fire. From 80° to 85° was the usual temperature, but it was frequently over 92°, and I spent one terrible night sitting at my door be- cause it was 105° within. In this furnace, which heats the floor and the spine comfortably, the Korean wayfarer revels.

On arriving at an inn, the master or servant rushes at the mud, or sometimes matted, floor with a whisk, raising a great dust, which he sweeps into a corner. The disgusted traveller soon perceives that the heap is animate as well as inanimate, and the groans, sighs, scratchings, and restlessness from the public room show the extent of the insect pest. But I never suffered from vermin in a Korean inn, nor is it necessary. After the landlord had disturbed the dust, Wong put down either two heavy sheets of oiled paper or a large sheet of cot- ton dressed with boiled linseed oil on the floor, and on these arranged my camp-bed, chair, and baggage. This arrange- ment (and I write from twenty months' experience in Korea and China) is a perfect preventative.

In most inns rice, eggs, vegetables, and a few Korean dain- ties, such as soup, vermicelli, dried seaweed, and a paste made of flour, sugar, and oil, can be procured, but tea never, and the position of the well, which frequently receives the soakage of the courtyard, precludes a careful traveller from drinking aught but boiled water. At the proper seasons chickens can be pur- chased for about 4d. each, and pheasants for less. Dog meat is for sale frequently in the spring, and pork occasionally.

The charges at Korean inns are ridiculously low. Nothing is charged for the room with its glim and hot floor, but as I took nothing for “the good of the house,” I paid 100 cash per night, and the same for my room at the midday halt, which gave complete satisfaction. Travellers who eat three meals a day spend, including the trifling gratuities, from 200 to 300 cash per diem. Millet takes the place of rice in the northern inns.

The Korean inn is not noisy unless wine is flowing freely, and even then the noise subsides early. The fighting of the ponies, and the shouts and execrations with which the inapu pacify them, are the chief disturbances till daylight comes and the wayfarers move on. Travelling after dark is contrary to Korean custom.

From this slight sketch, the shadows of which will bear frequent and much intensifying, it will be seen that Korean travelling has a very seamy side, that it is entirely unsuited to the “globe trotter,” and that even the specialist may do well to count the cost before embarking upon it.

To me the curse of the Korean inn is the ill-bred and un- manageable curiosity of the people, specially of the women. A European woman had not been seen on any part of the journey, and I suffered accordingly. Sar-pang Kori may serve as a specimen.

My quarters were opposite to the ponies, on the other side of the foul and crowded courtyard. There were two rooms, with a space under the roof as large as either between them, on which the dripping baggage was deposited, and Wong es- tablished himself with his cooking stove and utensils, though there was nothing to cook except two eggs obtained with diffi- culty, and a little rice left over from the boat stores. My room had three paper doors. The unwalled space at once filled up with a crowd of men, women, and children. All the paper was torn off the doors, and a crowd of dirty Mongolian faces took its place. I hung up cambric curtains, but long sticks were produced and my curtains were poked into the middle of the room. The crowd broke in the doors, and filled the small space not occupied by myself and my gear.

The women and children sat on my bed in heaps, examined my clothing, took out my hairpins and pulled down my hair, took off my slippers, drew my sleeves up to the elbow and pinched my arms to see if they were of the same flesh and blood as their own; they investigated my few possessions mi- nutely, trying on my hat and gloves, and after being turned out by Wong three times, returned in fuller force, accompanied by unmarried youths, the only good-looking “girls” ever seen in Korea, with abundant hair divided in the middle, and hanging in long plaits down their backs. The pushing and crushing, the odious familiarity, the babel of voices, and the odors of dirty clothing in a temperature of 80°, were intolerable. Wong cleared the room a fourth time, and suggested that when they forced their way in again, they should find me sitting on the bed cleaning my revolver, a suggestion I accepted. He had hardly retired when they broke in again, but there was an immediate stampede, and for the remainder of the evening I was free from annoyance. Similar displays of aggressive and intolerable curiosity occurred three times daily, and it was hard to be always amiable under such circumstances.

The Koreans travel enormously, considering that they sel- dom make pilgrimages. The pedlars, who solely supply the markets, are always on the move, and thousands travel for other reasons, such as the gatherings at ancestral tablets, rest- lessness, ennui, ku-kyong or sightseeing, visits to tombs, place-hunting, literary examinations, place-keeping and at- tempting to deprive others of place, litigation, and business. The fear of tigers and daemons prevents people from journey- ing by night, which is as well, as the bearers of official pass- ports have the right to demand an escort of torchbearers from each village. If necessity compells nocturnal travel, the way- farers associate themselves in bands, swinging lanterns, waving torches, yelling, and beating gongs. The dread of the tiger is so universal as to warrant the Chinese proverbial saying, “The Korean hunts the tiger one half of the year, and the tiger hunts the Korean the other half.” As I have before re- marked, the mandarins and yang-bans, with their trains, quarter themselves on the magistracies, and eat the fat of the land. Should they be compelled to have recourse to the dis- comforts of an inn and the food of a village, they appropriate the best of everything without paying for it. Hence the visit of a foreigner armed with a kwan-ja is such an object of dread, that on this land journey I never let it be known that I had one, and on my second journey discarded it altogether, trust- ing in both to the reputation for scrupulous honesty which I at once established with my men to overcome the repugnance which the innkeepers felt to receiving me.

The roads along which the traveller rides or trudges, at a pace, in either case, of 3 miles an hour, are simply infamous. There are few made roads, and those which exist are deep in dust in summer and in mud in winter, where they are not polished tracks over irregular surfaces and ledges of rock. In most cases they are merely paths worn by the passage of animals and men into some degree of legibility. Many of the streams are unbridged, and most of the bridges, the roadways of which are only of twigs and sod, are carried away by the rains of early July, and are not restored till the middle of October. In some regions traffic has to betake itself to fords or ferries when it reaches a stream, with their necessary risks and detentions. Even on the “Six Great Roads” which centre in the capital, the bridges are apt to be in such a rot- ten condition that a mapu usually goes over in advance of his horses to ascertain if they will bear their weight. Among the mountains, roads are frequently nothing else than boulder- strewn torrent beds, and on the best, that between Seoul and Chemulpo, during the winter, there are tracts on which the mud is from one to three feet deep. These infamous bridle tracks, of which I have had extensive experience, are one of the great hindrances to the development of Korea.

Among the worst of these is that part of the main road from Seoul to Won-san which we followed from Sar-pang Kori for two days to Sang-nang Dang, where we branched off for the region known as Keum-Kang San, or the Diamond Mountain. The earlier part of this route was through wooded valleys, where lilies of the valley carpeted the ground, and over the very pretty pass of Chyu-pha (1,300 feet), on the top of which is a large spirit shrine, containing some coarsely painted pictures of men who look like Chinese generals, the usual of- ferings of old shoes, rags, and infinitesimal portions of rice, and a tablet inscribed, “I, the spirit Song-an-chi, dwell in this place.” There, as at the various trees hung with rags, and the heaps of stones on the tops of passes, the mapu bowed and expectorated, as is customary at the abodes of daemons.

More than once we passed not far from houses outside of which the mutang or sorceress, with much feasting, beating of drums, and clashing of cymbals, was exercising the daemon which had caused the sickness of some person within. Por- tions of the expensive feast prepared on these occasions are offered to the evil spirit, and after the exorcism part of the food so offered is given to the patient, in the belief that it is a curative medicine, often seriously aggravating the disease, as when a patient suffering from typhoid fever or dysentery is stuffed with pork or kimshi ! Recently a case came under the notice of Dr. Jaisohn (So Chai pil) in Seoul, in which a man, suffering from the latter malady, died immediately after eating raw turnips, given him by the mutang after being offered to the demons at the usual feast at the ceremony of exorcism.

There is much wet rice along the route, as well as dry rice, with a double line of beans between every two rows, and in the rice revel and croak large frogs of extreme beauty, vivid green with black velvet spots, the under side of the legs and bodies being cardinal red. These appeared to be the prey of the graceful white and pink ibis, the latter in the intensified flush of his spring coloring.

A descent from a second pass leads to the Keum-San Kang, a largish river in a rich agricultural region, and to the village of Pan-pyong, where they were making in the rudest fashion the great cast-iron pots used for boiling horse food, from iron obtained and smelted 33 li farther north.

On two successive days there were tremendous thunder- storms, the second succeeded, just as we were at the head of a wild glen, by a brief tornado, which nearly blew over the ponies, and snapped trees of some size as though they had been matchwood. Then came a profound calm. The clouds lay banked in pink illuminated masses on a sky of tender green, cleft by gray mountain peaks. Mountain torrents boomed, crashed, sparkled, and foamed, the silent woods re- joiced the eye by the vividness of their greenery and their masses of white and yellow blossom, and sweet heavy odors enriched the evening air. On that and several other occasions, I recognized that Korea has its own special beauties, which fix themselves in the memory; but they must be sought for in spring and autumn, and off the beaten track. Dirty and squalid as the villages are, at a little distance their deep-eaved brown roofs, massed among orchards, on gentle slopes, or on the banks of sparkling streams, add color and life to the scenery, and men in their queer white clothes and dress hats, with their firm tread, and bundled-up women, with a shoggling walk and long staffs, brought round with a semicircular swing at every step, are adjuncts which one would not willingly dis- pense with.

Before reaching the Paik-yang Kang, a broad, full river, an affluent of the northern Han, with singularly abrupt turns and perpendicular cliffs of a formation resembling that of the Palisades on the Hudson River, we crossed one of the great lava fields described by Consul Carles. (1.)

This, which we crossed in a northeasterly direction, is a rough oval about 40 miles by 30, a tableland, in fact, surrounded by a deep chasm where the torrents which encircle it meet the mountains. Its plateaux are from 60 to 100 feet above these streams, which are all affluents of the Han, and are supported on palisades of basalt, exhibiting the pris- matic columnar formation in a very striking manner. In some places the lava, which is often covered either with conglomerate or a stiffish clay, is very near the surface, and large blocks of it lie along the streams. It is a most fertile tract, and could support a large population, but not being suited for rice, is very little cultivated, and grows chiefly oats, millet, and beans, which are not affected by the strong winds.

There are two Dolmens, not far from the Paik-yang Kang. In one the upper stone is from 7 to 10 feet long, by 7 feet wide, and 17 inches deep, resting on three stones 4 feet 2 inches high. The other is somewhat smaller. The openings of both face due north.

After crossing the Paik-yang Kang, there 162 yards wide and 16 feet deep, by a ferry boat of remarkably ingenious con- struction, rendered necessary by the fact that the long bridge over the broad stream was in ruins, and that the appropriation for its reconstruction had been diverted by the local officials to their own enrichment, we entered the spurs or ribs of the great mountain chain which, running north and south, divides Korea into two very unequal longitudinal portions at the vil- lage of Tong-ku.

The scenery became very varied and pretty. Forests clothed many of the hills with a fair blossoming undergrowth untouched by the fuel gatherers' remorseless hook; torrents flashed in foam through dark, dense leafage, or bubbled and gurgled out of sight; the little patches of cultivation were boulder-strewn; there were few inhabitants, and the tracks called roads were little better than the stony beds of streams. As they became less and less obvious, and the valleys more solitary, our tergiversations were more frequent and prolonged, the mapu drove the ponies as fast as they could walk, the fords were many and deep, and two of the party were unhorsed in them, still we hurried on faster and faster. Not a word was spoken, but I knew that the men had tiger on the brai7i /

Blundering through the twilight, it was dark when we reached the lower village of Ma-ri Kei, where we were to halt for the night, two miles from the Pass of Tan-pa-Ryong, which was to be crossed the next day. There the villagers could not or would not take us in. They said they had neither rice nor beans, which may have been true so late in the spring. How- ever, it is, or then was, Korean law that if a village could not entertain travellers it must convoy them to the next halt- ing-place.

The mapu were frantic. They yelled and stormed and banged at the hovels, and succeeded in turning out four sleepy peasants, who were reinforced by four more a little farther on ; but the torches were too short, and after sputtering and flaring, went out one by one, and the fresh ones lighted slowly. The mapu lost their reason. They thrashed the torchbearers with their heavy sticks ; I lashed my mapu with my light whip for doing it ; they yelled, they danced. Then things improved. Gloriously glared the pine knots on the leaping crystal torrents that we forded, reddening the white clothes of the men and the stony track and the warm-tinted stems of the pines, and so with shouts and yells and waving torches we passed up the wooded glen in the frosty night air, under a firmament of stars, to the mountain hamlet of upper Ma-ri Kei, consisting of five hovels, only three of which were inhabited.

It is a very forlorn place and very poor, and it was an hour before my party of eight human beings and four ponies were established in its miserable shelter, though even that was wel- come after being eleven hours in the saddle.

(1.) “Recent Journeys in Korea,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, May, 1896.