William Elliot Griffis

“ Now is their opportunity. The vessels are abreast the forts.
The Corean commander was one moment too late. From the parapet under the great flag a signal gun was fired. In an instant mats and screens were alive with the red fire of eighty pieces of artillery. Then a hail of shot from all the cannon, guns, and jingals rained around the boats. Forts, batteries, and walls were hidden for a moment in smoke. The water was rasped and torn as though a hailstorm was passing over it. Many of the men in the boats were wet to the skin by the splashing of the water over them. ”

“ The new doctrines delivered believers from the paralyzing thrall of demons and evil spirits, from ancestor worship, and from the sceptre held by the hand rising out of the grave. Into the Corea clamped as in iron bands by false economic notions entered the spirit of free competition. Into a land that knew no such thing as a foreign market the railway brings an eager purchaser to the farmer’s door, and by carrying his goods to the seaports it enables him to give to and receive manifold benefits from the world at large. ”

“ The massive swinging beam by which the tongueless bells, or gongs, of the Far East are made to boom out the hours, struck against a huge bronze lotus eight or nine feet in diameter. This sacred flower of the Buddhist emblem of peace and calm in Nirvana had in Corean art taken the place of the suspended bell, being most probably a cup-shaped mass of metal set with mouth upright, or like a bell turned upside down—such being the form often seen in the temples of Chinese Asia. Again did antiquity, religion, or the promptings of mercy fail to restrain the invaders. ”

“ Leaving the huge, cone-like island of Quelpaert in the distance, the freshening breeze bears us gallantly toward those unknown islands which form the Archipelago of Korea. As you approach them you look from the deck of the vessel and you see them dotting the wide, blue, boundless plain of the sea—groups and clusters of islands stretching away into the far distance. Far as the eye can reach, their dark masses can be faintly discerned, and as we close, one after another, the bold outlines of their mountain peaks stand out clearly against the cloudless sky. ”

“ Language comes at last with her revelations to furnish proofs of identity.
The mischievous Susanoō, so famous in the pre-historic legends, told in the Kojiki, half scamp, half benefactor, who planted all Japan with trees, brought the seeds from which they grew from Corea. His rescue of the maiden doomed to be devoured by the eight-headed dragon (emblem of water, and symbolical of the sea and rivers) reads like a gallant fellow saving one of the human beings who for centuries, until the now ruling dynasty abolished the custom, were sacrificed to the sea on the Corean coast fronting Japan. ”

“ He will imitate the grave tones and visage of the magistrate, the piteous appeals, the cries and groans and contortions of the victim under torture, the angry or grumbling voice of the husband, the shrill falsetto of the scolding shrew or the shower of tears and the piteous appeals of the wife. Smiles, frowns, surprise, sorrow, and all the emotions are simulated, and the accompaniment of voice is kept up with jokes, puns, bon-mots, irony, or well-expressed pathos. ”

“ The god of the hills is, perhaps, the most popular deity. The people make it a point to go out and worship him at least once a year, making their pious trip a picnic, and, as of old, mixing their eating and drinking with their religion. Thus they combine piety and pleasure, very much as Americans unite sea-bathing and sanctification, croquet and camp-meeting holiness, by the ocean or in groves. On mountain tops, which pilgrims climb to make a visit for religious merit, may often be seen a pile of stones called siong-wang-tang, dedicated to the god of the mountain. ”

“ For the coast-dwellers, the sea-shore, with the rocks which are the refuge of the shell-fish, is the inexhaustible playground of the children. Looking down in the clear deep water of the archipelago they see the coral reefs, the bright flower-gardens of marine plants, and shoals of striped, banded, crimson-tailed, and green-finned fish, which, in the eastern seas, glitter with tints of gold and silver. ”

“ In place of the spiritual bread of Buddhism, the new régime offered a stone. In government, instead of the egg for nourishment, they proffered a scorpion—even chronic extortion. A great gulf was fixed socially between the men to whom education meant the stifling of original thought, a ban on mental initiative and the oppression of the people. Monopoly of office and privilege, as held by one class, meant systematic robbery of the populace, the Government itself being an engine of oppression by which fewer than one-quarter million yang-ban subsisted upon eleven million of the common folk. ”

“ Those who think they have received unjust punishment enjoy the right of appeal to the sovereign. They stand by the roadside tapping a small flat drum of hide stretched on a hoop like a battledore. The king as he passes hears the prayer or receives the written petition held in a split bamboo. Often he investigates the grievance. If the complaint is groundless the petitioner is apt to lose his head. The procession for pleasure or a journey, as it leaves the palace, is one of the grandest spectacles the natives ever witness. His body-guard and train amount to many thousand persons. ”

“ With a tiger-skin for a saddle, a thong loop with only the rider’s great toe thrust in it for a stirrup, a string in the horse’s lower jaw for a bridle, armed with spear and cimeter, these conquerors who despised walls went forth to level cities and slaughter all who resisted. In their raids they found food ever ready in the beasts they rode, for a reeking haunch of horse-meat, cut from the steed whose saddle had been emptied by arrow or accident, was usually found slung to their pommels. ”

“ The whole situation was changed when Corea ceased to be a hermit land and began to be fertilized by foreign commerce and ideas. Confronted by new methods of trade, science, and religion, the thinking native was summoned to thought and action. Into the Corean mind, long held in bondage by Confucianism, which degrades woman and narrows man’s intellect, the universal religion entered to compel the Corean man to think of other lands and people besides his own, to search his own heart, to attempt to make himself and his neighbors better, and to take a new outlook on the universe. ”

“ At the smiting of the missionaries’ hand of faith gushed forth the waters of life and healing. The new messages of hope and salvation came to the people not only in their own tongue, but in their own script. Christian teachers, after long years of discouragement, have made, through the patience of hope, of love and sympathy, a real conquest of the Corean heart. The faces of men and women are lighted up with [520] a new glow of interest in life here and hereafter as they find both body and soul ministered to by their friends from afar. ”

“ She herself gladly leaves the drudgery of the kitchen, and the abject meanness of the hovel, to shine in the palace and the mansion. Her dress is of finest fabric, her luxuriant [291] black hair is bound with skill and grace, her skin is whitened by artificial cosmetics as far as possible, and with powder, paint, and pomatum, she spends much of her life before the looking-glass, studying in youth to increase, and in womanhood to retain, her charms. At home, she practises her music, occasionally enlivening a party of her humble neighbors. ”

“ Without reaching the point of demonstration, it seems highly probable that this wonderful personality, this marvellous intellect, was of Japanese origin.
Whoever this restless spirit was, it is certain that he gathered tribes once living in freedom like the wild waves into the unity of the restless sea. Out from the grassy plains of Manchuria rolled a tidal-wave of conquest that swept over Asia, and flung its last drops of spray alike over Japan, India, and Russia. Among the nations completely overrun and overwhelmed by the Mongol hordes was Corea. ”

“ In these latter days of the world’s brotherhood there is but one standard of civilization, and but one body of international law, which all must obey. The nation or kingdom that will not serve and obey this standard will pass out of history and perish. The signs that Corea realizes this truth and that her best men are seeking fraternity with their fellows for help and uplift are not wanting. Naturally they turn to the great republic, which since its beginning has steadfastly followed the policy of healing, helping, teaching, and uplifting the Asiatic nations. ”

“ Her independence would have been assured, had the virtue of her own sons responded to the opportunity.
On the contrary, the history of Corea since 1866, as outlined on these pages, reveals the fatal weakness of the ruling class in Corea. Instead of giving themselves to patriotic sacrifice and personal industry, the yang-ban, or men of privilege, have made their capital a hot-bed of intrigue and Corea the storm centre of the Far East. Instead of developing their own strength and the nation’s resources, they have plied the arts of cunning and the crafts of the weak. ”

“ To this work of reforming Corea, Nippon gave her ablest son, one who, both in feudal and constitutional Japan, had dedicated his life to promoting the evolution of the modern man. The statesmanship of Ito was that of a lover of humanity, who might well, after long and multifarious labors, have taken the rest which he craved and which his physical condition demanded. Nevertheless, with his unique experience and amazing abilities, he applied himself with unremitting toil to lead the once hermit nation into the twentieth century. ”

“ As from a fountain, rich streams of knowledge flowed from the capital of Shinra, both over the peninsula and to the court of Japan. Even after the decay of Shinra’s power in the political unity of the whole peninsula, the nation looked upon Kion-chiu as a sacred city. Her noble temples, halls, and towers stood in honor and repair, enshrining the treasures of India, Persia, [49] and China, until the ruthless Japanese torch laid them in ashes in 1596. ”

“ There was no political or social unity in the Corean peninsula until the tenth century. The chief force in welding together the various tribes and peoples into the astonishing unity and similarity now visible among the people and villages from Quelpart to the Ever White Mountain was Buddhism. The missionaries of this faith, coming from Thibet and China, gave the peninsulars art, architecture, literature, folk-lore, a noble path of morals for guidance in this life, vast consolations for the future, and pretty much everything that means culture, refinement, and civilization. ”

“ The government of His Majesty cannot permit so bloody an outrage to be unpunished. The same day on which the king of Corea laid his hands upon my unhappy countrymen was the last of his reign; he himself proclaimed its end, which I, in turn, solemnly declare to-day. In a few days our military forces are to march to the conquest of Corea, and the Emperor, my august Sovereign, alone has now the right and the power to dispose, according to his good pleasure, of the country and the vacant throne. ”

“ The i-sium, a colossal marine creature, is purely imaginary, like the “earthquake-fish” of the Japanese, which causes the continent to shake. The word is pure Corean, and may answer to our symbol of vastness and uncertainty—the sea-serpent. Mr. Fergusson would doubtless find a new chapter for his “Tree and Serpent Worship” in Chō-sen, for, in the peninsula, not only are trees reverenced as the abode of spirits, but the sa, or snakes, are rarely, if ever, harmed. The people feed, venerate, and even worship them as the guardian genii of their households. ”

“ In travelling over the high roads one meets a variety of characters that would satisfy a Corean Dickens, or the Japanese author who wrote the Tokaidō Hizakurigé (Leg-hair, i.e., “Shanks’ mare,” on the East Sea Road) . Bands of students on their way to the capital or provincial literary examinations, some roystering youths in the full flow of spirits, are hastening on, others, gray-headed and solemn, are wending their way to fail for the twentieth time. Pompous functionaries in umbrella-hats, on horseback, before whom ordinary folks dismount or kneel or bow, brush past with noisy attendants. ”

“ Allied with Chinese bigotry of race and ignorance of the world, Corean Confucianism degenerated still further into the savagery of conceit, of which the Tai-wen Kun seemed an incarnation, and made Chō-sen, as a body politic, a country eaten up with parasites—one-tenth of the population living on the other nine-tenths. In the persecution of the Christian converts to that form of Christianity which entered in 1777, Corean Confucianism showed itself as barbarous and as devilish as the Spanish Inquisition, or anything else in history which masks man’s lower nature under the garb of noble pretexts. ”