Page:In Korea with Marquis Ito (1908).djvu/53

Rh wherever architecture has reached a certain stage of development. The ceilings are low and devoid of decoration, but are made pleasing by being everywhere "beamed-over." This palace, too, has not escaped its history of violence and its bath of blood. Here it was that, in 1884, the party of Progressives, headed by Mr. Kim Ok-kiun, tried to enforce reforms by capturing the person of the King. But the conservative party of Koreans, helped by eight hundred Chinese soldiers under the leadership of the Major Yuan, who afterward became Li Hung Chang's successor, and is even to-day cutting an important figure in the complicated politics of China, finally drove out the Progressives and the one hundred and forty Japanese who were defending them.

Little else of the mildly exciting "sights" of Seoul remains besides the Great Bell and the Marble Pagoda. The former bears witness to an art in which the Koreans once excelled, but which is now, like all the other arts, either lost or neglected. At Nikko, it will be remembered, there is a Korean bell which was presented to one of the Japanese Shoguns. Setting aside all legends as to the time and incidents of its manufacture and hanging, a recently deciphered inscription on its own side tells the date as 1469 and gives the names of the prominent men connected with the undertaking. The report of a Chinese envoy of 1489, who says of the bell, "It calls all men to rest, to rise, to work, to play," taken in conjunction with the fact that, to avoid the troubles of faction and violence, men were forbidden on the streets after dark, probably gave rise to the report that women only were allowed to go abroad at night. And this is believed by natives and travellers until the present hour. But the bell, which once rung to open and close the massive city gates, now rings only to tell of midnight and mid-day. And, although it is about eight feet in diameter and ten feet high, it is no great sight as looked at by peeking through the bars of its surrounding