Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/324

 300 COREAN SOCIAL CUSTOMS. but I have seen ten Coreans with a yellowish brown beard for every Chinaman I have seen whose hair was not a decided black. The colour of the skin, the contour of the face, and often the form of the eye, all point to a relationship more akin to the west than the Chinese can claim, though the eye is decidedly the Mongolic oval. I have seen many grey-headed and bearded men «,mong them, not one of whom, in foreign dress and with silent toDgue, who would not pass for respectable and passable, if not handsome, westerns But like the Japanese, and all the nations of eastern Asia, the Coreans have always bowed down before the greatly superior mental power of the Chinese ; and have borrowed from them some of their customs, more of their words, and, perhaps, all the principal books in use between the YaJoo and the western shores of the Pacific. Having already glanced at Corea's history, we shall now describe the principal social customs of this little known people. Houses. The houses of the Coreans, in the cities in their western provinces, are chiefly of stone ; and as the land is one of "mountains and valleys," the valleys narrow enough everywhere, there can be little doubt that the houses in the several hundred oities of Corea^ as well as the better class of houses in their thousands of villages, are all of stone. The house is built in very much the same style as the Chinese, — a roofed gateway and gatehouse in the outer wall; a compound or yard; a second wall, with smaller covered gate leading into a second or, perhaps, even a third compound, each inner compound having several rows of houses,— the main portion looking south, the secondary rooms flanking in two lines of houses facing east and west There are never two different families living in the same compound, or entering by the same gate, though there may be over a hundred individuals, forming four generations, in the one family ; for the married sons, as in China, live on with the father if they can afford it ; but even then, unlike the Chinese, each wife has her own room or rooms, in which her husband is the only man she