Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/144

 fortress were literally starving to death, and every effort on the part of the Korean troops outside had proved unavailing, and after Kang-wha had been stormed and the entire royal family captured, the King surrendered and came out of Namhan. The Manchus made him go through a long and humiliating ceremony of surrender, erected an imposing monument upon which the disgraceful details were inscribed, and, after seizing hundreds of the people to carry away as slaves, they permitted the King to return to his capital ; and the Manchu army, glutted with a surfeit of booty, moved northward. This finished the matter, for the Manchus had already won their fight with the Ming dynasty and were seated on the throne of China. To this day Korea has continued to look upon the Manchus as semi-savages, and she casts back longing eyes to the days of the Mings. The dress of Korea to-day and the coiffure are those of the Ming dynasty. The Manchus forced the people of China to change these, but the Koreans were allowed to retain them. So that the dress of Korea to-day is more Chinese than that of China itself. It cannot be doubted that if the Chinese people could cast off the Manchu yoke they would gladly return to the' customs of the Ming dynasty. It was about the middle of the seventeenth century that the ill-fated sailing-vessel Sparwehr sailed from Holland, with Hendrik Hamel as supercargo. There seem to have been sixty-four men on board, and when she went to pieces on the shore of Quelpart only thirty-six reached land alive. They were taken to Seoul by the authorities, and for fourteen years they lived either upon the royal bounty or by the work of their own hands, being driven, upon occasion, even to beggary. At last a remnant of them escaped and made their way to Nagasaki. Hamel afterward wrote an account of his experiences in Korea.

The remainder of the century passed without incident of special note, excepting the meeting of Koreans with Roman Catholic missionaries in Nanking, and the slight beginning of