Seoul

“ The lofty crags that lift their heads three thousand feet into the air and almost overhang the city of Seoul are alpine in their grandeur. There is always distance, openness, sweep to a Korean view which is quite in contrast to the picturesque coziness of almost all Japanese scenery. This, together with the crystal atmosphere, make Korea, even after only a few years' residence, a delightful reminiscence. No people surpass the Koreans in love for and appreciation of beautiful scenery. ”

“ Ten o’clock, and Bethell and I riding through the ghostly streets of Seoul in our curtained rickshas. Never did that old charnel house of dead grandeur appear so unworldly as on that night. Black gables of temples, the great bronze belly of the old bell, the mushroom growth of thatched housetops everywhere like fungus in a witches’ fen: all melting and blending into shadows—shadows! Not a soul stirring on the streets. Hardly a streak of light slipping through the clink of some unbarred door to make the streets seem real. Seoul at night is mournful enough ”

“ The first day spent in the capital of Korea is nearing its end. Quietness penetrates the night—such profound quietness as can only be enjoyed in Seoul. The alley leading to the legation is dark and deserted. And as I walk home I try to recall to my memory all that I have perceived and heard; all that was new to me and striking; all the contrasts and the incoherency of earliest perceptions. ”

“ When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural) . Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day—monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his appetites and his love. ”

“ The attractions of Seoul, as a city, are few. Beyond the poverty of the buildings and the filth of the streets, I do not know of much else of any great interest to the casual globe-trotter, who, it must be said, very seldom thinks it advisable to venture as far as that. No, there is nothing beautiful to be seen in Seoul. ”

“ There is attraction enough, however, in a Korean street for any one who is in search of strange sights. Looking down one of the broad thoroughfares of Seoul from a point on the city wall, the sun’s rays, falling on the light-colored gowns of the pedestrians as they saunter along amid the bulls and ponies, produce a kaleidoscopic effect that is certainly charming. ”

“ The narrow, dirty lanes have been widened; gutters have been covered, and roadways broadened; until, with its trains, its cars, and its lights, its miles of telegraph lines, its Railway Station Hotel, brick houses and glass windows, Seoul is within measurable distance of becoming the highest, most interesting, and cleanest city in the East. It is still not one whit Europeanised, for the picturesqueness of the purely Korean principles and standards of architecture has been religiously maintained, and is to be observed in all future improvements. ”

“ And when to these more essential matters there is added the cultivation of the native love of nature and taste for flowers, it is not an extravagant hope to picture Seoul as becoming, in many respects, a not undesirable place for residence, before many years are past. Even now, with the spring covering of bloom from plum, apricot, apple, and cherry, and with the profusion of flowering shrubs which adorns the valleys and the mountain-sides, one feels inclined to overlook, at least for the months of April and May, the foul sights of the gutters and the surrounding hovels. ”

“ It is always hoped that something may be “picked up” in Seoul. Hence there is a constant permanent or temporary gravitation towards it, and the larger proportion of the youths who swing and lounge on sunny afternoons along the broad streets, aping the gait of yang-bans, are aspirants for official position. Gusts of popular feeling which pass for public opinion in a land where no such thing exists are known only in Seoul. ”

“ Seoul—The City Wall—A large image—Mount Nanzam—The fire-signals—women's joss-house—Foreign buildings—Japanese settlement—An anecdote—Clean or not clean?—The Pekin Pass—The water-carrier—The man of the Gates.
MOUNT NANZAM
The ground in and around Seoul is very hilly. The wall that surrounds the capital uncoils itself, like a gigantic snake, up and down the slopes of high bluffs, and seems a very marvellous work of patient masonry when it is borne in mind that some of the peaks up which it winds its way are so steep that even climbing on foot is not an easy task. ”

“ Indeed, it is quickly evident that this second city of the peninsula is more industrious than Seoul. Knitting-machines clash incessantly in hundreds of huts; yangbans and high hats and spotless white garments seem conspicuously rare to the traveler still having the capital in mind, and everywhere are evidences that here life has not been for centuries a holiday broken only by occasional languishing in government offices. ”

“ Men are, however, no longer excluded from the streets at such hours. The spectacle of these white spectres of the night, flitting from point to point, their footsteps lighted by the rays of the lantern which their girl-slaves carry before them, is as remarkable as the appearance of Seoul by daylight, with its moving masses all garmented in white. A street full of Koreans aptly suggests, as Mr. Henry Norman, M.P., once wrote, the orthodox notion of the Resurrection. It cannot be denied that the appearance of both men and women makes the capital peculiarly attractive. ”

“ There too the itinerant vendor of “small wares,” and candies dyed flaring colors with aniline dyes, establishes himself, puts a few planks across the ditch, and his goods, worth perhaps a dollar, thereon. But even Seoul has its “spring cleaning,” and I encountered on the sand plain of the Han, on the ferry, and on the road from Ma-pu to Seoul, innumerable bulls carrying panniers laden with the contents of the city ditches. ”

“ One of the “sights” of Seoul is the stream or drain or watercourse, a wide, walled, open conduit, along which a dark-colored festering stream slowly drags its malodorous length, among manure and refuse heaps which cover up most of what was once its shingly bed. There, tired of crowds masculine solely, one may be refreshed by the sight of women of the poorest class, some ladling into pails the compound which passes for water, and others washing clothes in the fetid pools which pass for a stream. ”

“ The heart of every Korean is in Seoul. Officials have town houses in the capital, and trust their business to subordinates for much of the year. Landed proprietors draw their rents and “squeeze” the people on their estates, but are absentees living in the capital. Every man who can pay for food and lodging on the road trudges to the capital once or twice a year, and people who live in it, of whatever degree, can hardly be bribed to leave it even for a few weeks. To the Korean it is the place in which alone life is worth living. ”

“ My journey lay towards Tong-ko-kai, the German mines, several days’ journey from Seoul. Life, in the capital, is not destitute of that monotony which characterises the Land of the Morning Radiance. But beyond the precincts of the Imperial Palaces, out of sight and hearing of the countless little coteries of Europeans, the contrast between the moving, soft-robed, gentle masses of people who congregate within her gates, and the mountain reaches and valleys of the open country is refreshing. For the moment the pleasure of such an experience ranks high among the joys which life holds. ”

“ Few country folks ever visit the large cities, and in regions near the capital few have seen Seoul. Custom is the eternal law to the rustic, who is patient, bearing extortion until flesh and blood can stand it no longer, when he rises in revolt against his oppressor. Yet it is against the bad man, not the system itself, that he protests. ”

“ When I first looked down on Seoul early in March, one street along its whole length appeared to be still encumbered with the drift of the previous winter’s snow. It was only by the aid of a glass that I discovered that this is the great promenade, and that the snowdrift was just the garments of the Koreans, whitened by ceaseless labor with the laundry sticks. In these three broad streets the moving crowd of men in white robes and black dress hats seldom flags. They seem destitute of any object. ”

“ A city of 60,000 people, lying to the south of Sang-dan San, with a wall ten miles in circumference running irregularly over heights, and pierced by double-roofed gateways, with a peaked and splintered ridge extending from Sang-dan San to the northeast, its higher summits attaining altitudes of from 2,000 to 3,000 feet, it has a striking resemblance to Seoul. ”

“ My sedan-chair is covered with green silk, and, with the bearers in dark purple, makes quite a patch of colour in the whitewashed streets.
Seoul might be called the white city. The houses are white, and every living being, young and old, man and woman, is clad in white cotton. I should really think that the absence of colour [264] and sound is the most striking feature of the Land of the Morning Calm.
The reception takes place at the New Palace. There are four palaces in Seoul, the Eastern, Northern, Western, and the one I am just entering. ”

“ There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course, although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home; no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an American would expect to crush them. ”

“ The two hours' railway ride between Chemulpo and Seoul affords quite diversified scenery.
The situation of Seoul is beautiful. It is a walled city, the entire circumference of which is twelve miles, and in this wall are eight arched gateways. While the wall itself is not high, it seems to cling near to the sides of the foothills and the mountains. These mountains are quite bare of vegetation, but the little valleys between the hills are green, rice being one of the products cultivated. ”

“ Seoul is Korea for most practical purposes, and the working of the Western leaven, the new impulses and modes of thought [Pg 450] introduced by Western education, the inevitable contact with foreigners, and the influence of a free Press are through Seoul slowly affecting the nation. Under the shadow of Chinese suzerainty the Korean yang-ban enjoyed practically unlimited opportunities for the extortions and tyrannies which were the atmosphere of patrician life. ”

“ The Seoul seen from the surrounding mountain-sides, and the Seoul of so-called palaces, is not the city in which the people live. Apart from a few of its inhabitants—such as the missionaries, certain foreign business men and diplomatic agents, together with a small number of native officials who have acquired a taste for foreign ways—the Seoul of the people is disgustingly filthy and abjectly squalid. ”

“ All boys and men must be off the streets. Any male person caught by the police would be taken to the magistrate’s office and there receive a severe beating with wooden paddles by the public spankers. Then the women and grown-up girls, old and young, went outdoors, breathed the air, took their walks, made their visits, and had a delightful time with play and chat and gossip. But by midnight every one must be indoors.
It was no wonder then that in the country the farmers and the village folk thought that Seoul, the capital, was the most splendid city on earth. ”

“ The situation of the chief city of modern Korea becomes more and more impressive and, in every important respect, satisfactory, the greater the frequency of one’s reflective observation from any one of numerous favorable points of view. There is no natural reason why, under the governmental reforms and material improvements which are now being put into effect, Seoul should not become as healthy, prosperous, and beautiful a place of residence as can be shown anywhere in the Far East. ”

“ Seoul has also a paper, the Kanjo Shimbo, or Seoul News, in mixed Japanese and Korean script, published on alternate days, and there are newspapers in the Japanese language, both in Fusan and Chemulpo. All these, and the admirable Korean Repository, are the growth of the last three years.
The faculty of combination, by which in Korea as in China the weak find some measure of protection against the strong, is being turned to useful account. ”

“ As the Queen’s procession passed by on the day of the Duke of York’s marriage, I heard a workingman say, “It’s we as pays, and we likes to get the valey for our money.” The Korean pays in another and heavier sense, and as in tens of thousands he crowds in reverential silence the route of the Kur-dong, he is probably glad that the one brilliant spectacle of the year should be as splendid as possible.
The monotony of Seoul is something remarkable. Brown mountains “picked out” in black, brown mud walls, brown roofs, brown roadways, whether mud or dust, while humanity is in black and white. ”