Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/366

 trade reached extensive bounds. Many of these guilds were, and are, incipient or partial insurance companies, and loss by fire or death became a matter of mutual aid. These guilds were taxed, not regularly, but as occasion might demand. Whenever some sudden pressure was put on the royal household for money, a draft upon the guilds was always honoured.

Korean shops are of two kinds, open and closed ! The ordinary shop is hardly more than a stall, open directly upon the street, where the purchaser can pick up and examine almost any article in stock. The larger merchants, however, who handle silks, cotton, linen, grass-cloth, shoes and certain other goods, have nothing whatever on view. You enter and ask for what you want, and it is brought forth from the storeroom or closet. This seems very strange to foreigners, who always want to compare and select their goods. Often enough a truculent merchant, after showing one shade of silk, will refuse to show more, and say that if this is not what you want he has nothing that will suit you. You are expected to state exactly what you want, and when that is produced and examined, the price alone is expected to require consideration. Shopping in Korea is not reckoned one of the joys of life, as is so often the case in the West. When ladies of the upper class wish to make purchases of silk or other goods, they send out and have the merchants bring the goods to their residences. All foreigners who are aware of the peculiarities of the Korean merchants do likewise.

The great merchant houses in Seoul have no shop-signs whatever, but instead of this they have runners or agents on the street who solicit the attention of the passer-by and ask him to come in and look at the goods.

The sale and purchase of real estate in large towns is always effected through house-brokers, but fields change hands very commonly by direct communication between the parties interested. The legal rate of commission to the broker is one per cent of the purchase price of the house, and is paid by the seller. The purchaser furnishes two pounds of tobacco to be consumed