CHAPTER II

SOME KOREAN SCENES AND CUSTOMS

It was our good fortune to dwell out over the hills beyond Seoul rather than in the hot and often breathless city itself. The half-hour walk led up past the big granite Bible School, along a little stream with its inevitable clothes-paddling women, flanked the grave-mound of a little prince, then climbed steeply over another half-wooded ridge from which stretched a wide-spreading mountainous view, everywhere deep green except for the broad brown streak of the River Han and here and there a mushroom patch of village. An American mission college was building in a big hilly pine-grove that owed its preservation to the tomb of a king’s concubine. Pines as fantastic and sturdy as any in Japan stood out against the sky-line; here and there a group of stinking chestnut-trees kept them company. Before they were granted this semi-sacred site the missionaries from our almost mythological land of “Mi-guk” had to agree not to build anywhere overlooking the grave; they had already been asked to close a path used as a short cut by students and an occasional faculty member, because it ran along the brow of the hill above the tomb. To look down upon a royal burial site is the height of disrespect in Korea, hence they are all arranged after a fixed pattern designed to avoid this sacrilege.

Out beyond the Todaimon, or East Gate, on the opposite side of the city, is the tomb of a more famous queen; but we preferred what we called our own, which is identical in form and size, and in a solitude much less often broken. Besides, “ours” really contained the mortal remains, while even the finger and a few bones which were all that remained after the brutal assassination and burning of Korea’s last queen were now buried elsewhere. Quite like ours are all the royal graves scattered up and down the peninsula of Cho-sen, in the several regions where succeeding dynasties built their capitals, flourished for a while, and fell, so that leisurely to visit it was worth a hasty glimpse of many others.

We could wander up over the pine-clad hill to the grave, for all the injunction against it; things are not so strict as all that in Korea, unless something Japanese is involved. But it was more convenient, and not merely more respectful, to approach the sanctuary from the bottom. On a level space in the forest, wholly cleared of trees but thick with grass, there was first of all the caretaker’s residence, a high-walled compound set off in the edge of the woods to the left. In a direct line down the center of the grassy rectangle stood first a _torii_, a square arch made of three light tree-trunks painted red, the upper crosspiece decorated with crude and fanciful carvings, a gateway without contiguous fence or wall. The Koreans are sensitive about the use of this symbolic entrance to their royal tombs; the caretaker of the little prince’s tomb we passed on our way in or out of Seoul told us one day, when we found that arch newly closed with barbed wire, that we might still pass through the grounds, but not beneath the _torii_. A hundred feet or more through this isolated entrance to her last resting-place stood the concubine’s prayer-house, so to speak—a large building by Korean standards, with a roof of highly colored tiles and four flaring gable-peaks, along which sat as many rows of porcelain monkeys to guard against evil spirits, as is the Korean custom. Through the many holes that had been torn by time or inquisitive fingers in the oily paper serving as glass between the slats of the many padlocked doors, one could dimly make out a bare wooden floor, scattered with dust and bits of rubbish, and a bare table-like altar on which, no doubt, boiled rice and other foods are at certain intervals offered to the spirit of the dead. It was plain that no such thoughtfulness had been shown recently, for dust and dinginess and faded paint were the most conspicuous features of the edifice, inside and out.

Two smaller but similar chapels flanked this main building, behind which the grass-rug-ed ground rose gradually to the burial mound, another hundred feet back and some ten feet high. In front of this plain grass-covered hillock stood a huge stone lantern, like those in Japanese temple grounds, in the opening of which the reverent or the superstitious sometimes place offerings of rice. Directly behind this graceful receptacle rose what we of the West would call a tombstone, a high upright granite slab standing on a big stone turtle and carved with Chinese ideographs briefly extolling the departed lady’s alleged virtues. More fantastic still were the figures about the mound, duplicated on either side. First came two large stone horses, such as might be chiseled by some aspiring but untalented school-boy. Then a pair of stone men, priests, or gods, recalling similar figures in the ruins of Tiahuanaco beyond Lake Titicaca, gazed at each other with a sort of smirking, semi-skeptical benignity. Two lions, two rams, and two mythological beasts, even more crudely fashioned than the rest, completed the menagerie, all these last with their backs turned to the mound, out of respect for the departed. Finally an ancient stone wall with tiled roof threw a protective semicircle close about all this at the rear, beyond which the rather thin pine forest, gnarled and bent with age, climbed the hill-slopes across which only disrespectful mortals ever pass.

About the only Korean thing which moves rapidly is a funeral, and even this may have been a concession to the incessantly sweltering summer. We met one rather frequently in the streets of Seoul,—a barbarously decorated palanquin in blazing reds and yellows, borne by eight or ten coolies in nondescript garb, who jog-trotted as if in haste to be out of reach of the evil spirit that had laid low the inert burden inside. If the latter had been a man of standing and sufficient wealth, there were two palanquins, the second bearing the actual remains, the first a false bier meant to deceive the wicked beings of the invisible world. The rest of the procession was made up of priests in fantastic robes and flaring head-dresses, leaning back at contented ease in their rickshaws, and a varying string of relatives and perhaps friends, most of them in sackcloth and on foot. Just where these incongruously hurrying cortèges finally brought up we never learned to a certainty until we ourselves moved out over the hills.

In a hollow not far from our suburban residence rose the ugly red brick chimney of what we at first took to be a small factory, but which turned out to be one of the several crematories in the outskirts of Keijo. Across the valley below us, by the little dirt road that wandered through the flooded rice-fields, came several funeral processions a day, announcing themselves by the shrieking auditory distresses which the Koreans regard as music. The unseemly pace may have slackened somewhat by this time for it is nearly five miles around the hills by the route that even man-drawn vehicles must follow; but the clashing of colors was still in full evidence, standing out doubly distinct against the velvety green of newly transplanted rice. Now and again a procession halted entirely for a few moments, while the carriers and pullers stretched themselves out in the road itself or along the scanty roadside above the flooded fields. We drifted down one day to one of them that was making an unusually long halt, and found the chief mourner, a lean old lady of viperous tongue, in a noisy altercation with the carriers over the price of their services. But those who halted, or indulged in such recriminations along the way were, no doubt, of the class that could not pay for unchecked speed.

Several times, too, when whim took us to town over the high hill from which an embracing view of Seoul was to be had, we saw processions returning. Then they were quite different. The chief burden, naturally, had been left behind, and the palanquins are collapsible, so that mourners and carriers straggled homeward by the steep direct route as the spirit moved them, the latter at least contentedly smoking their long tiny pipes, and musing perhaps on the probability of soon finding another victim. But the end and consummation of all this gaudy parading to and fro remained to us only an ugly red brick chimney, standing idle against its hilly background or emitting leisurely strands of yellowish-black smoke, according to the demand for its gruesome services.

Then one evening curiosity got the better of our dislike for unpleasant scenes, and we strolled out to the uninviting hollow. In it, a little above the level of the plain, sat a commonplace brick building with half a dozen furnace-chambers not unlike those of a brick-kiln. Several Koreans of low class, stripped to the waist, were languidly working about it, now and then producing discordant noises, which was their manner of humming a tune. Close before the principal building stood a smaller one, from which rose the loud chanting of a single voice that would have won no fame on the Western operatic stage. This, we learned, belonged to the priest whose duty it was to give each client the spiritual send-off to which he was entitled by the price of admission to the furnaces. The cost of cremating a body, explained one of the workmen, was twelve yen (nearly six dollars), but it included an hour-long prayer by the priest. The latter was too steadily engaged in his duties to be interrupted, but the cremators were openly delighted at the attention of foreigners, and at the opportunity of helping us make the most of what they called our “sight-see.” Into the ears of the articulate member of our party, born in Korea, they poured the details of their calling without reserve. _That_, inside the rude straw-mat screen which stood between the house of prayer and the door to the ovens, had come early in the afternoon, they explained, but he was only a poor man and had to give precedence to his betters. We peered over the top of the screen and saw a corpse completely wrapped in straw and fastened to a board with ropes of similar material. Did we care to see what was left of the last job? one of the coolies wished to know. It was time that was finished, anyway. He led the way to the back of the furnaces, opened an iron door, and, catching up a crude, heavy iron rake, hauled out half a peck of charred bones and ashes. This, he explained, unnecessarily, as he turned up one still glowing remnant of bone after another, was a rib, that was a piece of what the man walked on, and so forth. It was a rich man, he chattered on—to be rich in his eyes did not, of course, imply being a millionaire—and he had been sent here all the way from Fusan. The dead man’s relatives, he continued, as he carelessly raked the still smoking débris into a tin pan and set it aside to cool, had paid him to keep some of the ashes for them, instead of dumping them in the common ash-heap. Rich people always did that. But it was time to get that other fellow there out of the way, and go home to supper.

“What did he die of?” we asked, as the straw screen was thrown aside and the planked corpse fully disclosed to view.

“Of a stomachache,” replied one of the two coolies, as they caught up plank, straw wrapping, and all, and thrust the last “job” into the furnace, then salvaged the plank with a dexterous twist and jerk. No flames were visible in the depositing-chamber itself; the heat was applied externally, so to speak, perhaps as a sort of survival of the olden days when Korean dead were wrapped in a mat and left to bake and fester in the sun. We were turning away, satisfied for a lifetime with one “sight-see” of that kind, when a sound, so out of keeping with the matter-of-fact tone of the workmen as to be startling, brought us back again. Out of the semi-darkness had appeared a Korean of the peasant or porter class, past forty, lean and sun-browned; and with a wail that had in it something of an animal in extreme distress, he flung himself at the furnace door as if he would have torn it open and rescued the form it had for ever swallowed up. We had never suspected the rank-and-file Korean capable of showing such poignant grief. Nor was it seemly in one of his standing, evidently, for almost at his second wail the three carriers who had brought the body rushed down upon him and demanded forthwith the price of their services. Their strident bargaining rose high above the dismal, discordant droning of the so-much-a-yard prayers that had never once ceased during our stay. The surly porters made it plain that there was no time for vain mourning while the serious matter of their hire was unsettled.

“He was my older brother,” wept the man, “the last of my family. Have I any one left? Not one. And now....”

The unsatisfied carriers were still cruelly bullyragging him when we left, and the sound of their quarreling voices, intermingled with the never ending droning of the priest, came to us through the night after we were well on our way home.

It is only the Buddhists who cremate by choice in Korea, and by no means the majority of the people are of that faith. Many are mere ancestor-worshipers, or placaters of evil spirits, or have a mixture of several Oriental faiths and superstitions which they themselves could not unravel. The non-Buddhists bury their dead, and thereby hangs, as in China, a serious problem. For definitely circumscribed public cemeteries will not do. The repose of the departed and the fortune and happiness of his descendants depends upon the proper choice of a burial-place, which is by no means a simple matter. It calls for the services of sorceresses, necromancers, and other expensive professionals; it may take much time; and the final indications may point to a most unlikely and inconvenient spot. Green mounds, wholly unmarked except in the rarest of cases, but each known to the descendants whose most solemn duty it is to tend them, cover hundreds of great hillsides throughout the peninsula, to the detriment of agriculture, Korea’s main occupation. The Japanese took the Western utilitarian point of view and ordered prescribed areas set aside for graveyards; but this was one of the most hated of their reforms, and the right to lay away their dead at least in private cemeteries has once more been granted to the Koreans.

Tucked away in the pine-clad hills about us were several little Buddhist monasteries. The last word is deceiving, however, for there was hardly anything monasterial about these semi-isolated retreats. In theory the Buddhist monks and priests of Korea live in celibacy; in practice few even of their most devout coreligionists pretend to believe that they do so. About the tile-roofed clusters of buildings, varying mainly in pretentiousness from the thatched homes of laymen, there was no dearth of women and children; and the monks were the last in the world to deny themselves the pleasure of wandering to the near-by city or up and down the country as the mood came upon them. The brilliant saffron robe that distinguishes the followers of the Way in central Asia, and adds so vividly to the picturesqueness of lands farther west, is unknown in Korea. A shaven head in place of the precious topknot is almost the monk’s only difference in appearance from the ordinary layman; when whim or a sincere desire to tread in the path marked out by Gautama sends him out into the Korean world, the distinguishing hat of woven ratan may be superimposed, but even the symbolic pretense of a begging-bowl hardly marks him out from his more toilsome fellow-countrymen. For a long period in the history of Korea, Buddhist monks were rated lower in the social scale than even the peasants of the fields, and this attitude toward them has survived, perhaps unconsciously, in a marked lack of deference, almost an indifference to them, except in their official capacity, or among an unusually superstitious minority.

In these monasteries the principal living-room—to use the word very loosely—is floored with the thick oily brownish paper universal in private dwellings, and the scant furniture is of a similar type. Perhaps one of the big half-oval drums that call such of the monks as happen to be within hearing to their not very arduous duties swings from the center of the low ceiling; about the walls may sit a few bronze ornaments or figures of some significance which totally escapes the uninformed visitor. Certainly Gautama himself would not recognize the barbarous gaudiness, the crowds of fantastic figures which clutter the adjoining temples, as having been inspired by his simple teachings. Big golden Buddhas in the center, behind a kind of altar and offering-table in one, are flanked on either side clear around the three walls of the room with hybrid manikins of Chinese mythology and demonology, often of human size, which would outdo the phantasmagoric imaginings of any child in terror of the dark. Fourth wall is there none, but only a long series of double doors, which first open and then lift up to the horizontal, where they are supported by quaint Oriental substitutes for hooks. If the discreet rattling of a few small coins succeeds in accomplishing the complete opening of the doors, the more than dim religious light of the musty interior gives way to the glaring radiance of cloudless Korea, and a myriad of details that are otherwise only suspected, if even that, make their appearance. One discovers, for instance, that in addition to the score or more of large figures in the gaudiest of greens, reds, and all possible clashings of colors there are several times as many figurines, knee-high or less, interspersed among them, as if these queer puppets had their human quota of offspring. Like their adult companions, these little effigies wear expressions varying all the way from that of terrorizing demons to a smirking gentleness which suggests a well spent babyhood. Mere words, however, are useless pigments with which to attempt to picture the color-splashed paintings that cover the walls behind the row of stodgy standing figures. All the chaos of Oriental mythology seems to have been thrown together here, in battle scenes, in court processions, in helter-skelter throngs of human beings in garbs that were antiquated long before the Christian era, all fleeing in terror from the mammoth central figure of some wrathful monarch, his wildly bearded face painted jet-black to suggest the horror that his countenance sheds upon all beholders. Every feature of these silent temple denizens, be it noted, are Chinese, not Korean; and history tells us that as late as the Boxer Rebellion it was not so much the European troops as their black auxiliaries who put terror into the hearts of the fleeing Celestials.

Gautama, the Buddha, as I have said, would puzzle in vain to find the connection between the strange beings which clutter these Buddhist temples and his own gentle doctrine. The medieval Christian, on the other hand, should find himself perfectly at home in certain corners of them, where are depicted such scenes as sinners fastened between two planks in order to simplify the task of assistant devils nonchalantly sawing them down the middle from crown to hips, in exactly the same way that Oriental workmen turn logs into lumber to this day. Perhaps the most surprising thing about these monasteries, to visitors from Christian lands, is the complete lack of sanctity toward the objects they worship which marks the outward behavior of the inmates. Casual callers of other faiths, or of the absence thereof, are as freely admitted to the most sacred corners as the monks themselves. The elaborate genuflections and throaty chantings of a group of bonzes in full barbaric regalia at the behest of a group of peasants come to lay offerings of rice and copper coins before a favorite figure may be followed a moment later by the tossing of a dirty altar-cloth or a dusty old rag over the head of the same god to whom they have just been appealing so grovelingly. Whatever their faults, there is always something charming about the tolerance of Buddhists. No small number of Christian missionaries in Korea spend their summer furloughs in the monasteries of this gentle rival faith.

We struck out one Sunday afternoon over the high hill directly north of us, to visit the famous White Buddha, carved and painted on a great stream-washed rock cliff in the outskirts of the capital. It needs much less of a climb beneath the blazing sun of midsummer Korea to leave one drenched, but the view from the crest soon made that a half-forgotten detail. Of the hills rolling away into mountains on every hand, or the broad brown Han flecked with its rectangular junk-sails, little need be said; such scenes are commonplace in Cho-sen. But the complete panorama of Keijo, erstwhile Seoul, beginning at the very base of the perpendicular rock cliffs below us and stretching from the “Peking Pass” to far beyond Todaimon Gate, from ill sited Ryuzan to the section of old city wall along a mountain ridge which the Japanese have permitted to stand, called for a longer breathing-spell. Ancient Chinese-roofed palaces, efforts at modern buildings which somehow still seem unacclimated, the mainly Japanese city to the south of Shoro-dori—that broad street which distinctly separates Keijo into two nearly equal portions—the acres of yellow-brown thatched Korean huts of the northern half so compact as almost to seem a great hayfield, all stand out with the clearness of an illuminated engraving. Most incongruous, as well as most conspicuous, of all the details of the picture are the homes and other structures of the Christian missionaries, of red brick, and standing forth, if the time-worn comparison is legitimate in such a connection, like sore thumbs. Statistics assert that of the quarter of a million dwelling in Seoul only two hundred are Caucasians, a statement which there is no good reason to question, but which nevertheless seems strange from any such point of vantage above the city, for the big twin-spired Catholic cathedral alone, on the commanding site it has been true to form in choosing, seems to imply far more than that number. It was not merely the sounds of washing and ironing coming up to us in a great muffled chorus from the city below on this brilliant Sunday afternoon, however, which reminded us that for all these obvious edifices we were in no Christian country.

At the foot of the swift jungle-clad descent to the narrow suburb along the northern highway our ears were suddenly assailed by a great jangling hubbub. We crowded into the little courtyard of the square-forming house from which the sounds arose, and found that we had stumbled upon a sorceress performance. Numbers of men and children and many women were jostling one another along the wall-less fronts of two rooms on opposite sides of the yards, inside which the typical native hocus-pocus was at its height. On the papered floor of each room a sorceress was hopping, posturing, grimacing, and from time to time shrieking, with an activity which at least could not leave her open to the charge of physical laziness. I am no custodian of fancy-dress ball costumes, hence I can do little more than appeal to the vivid imaginations of those better fitted for the task to picture to themselves the incredible regalia in which these two middle-aged females, with the worldly wise faces, were swathed, though I can throw in the hint that they would not have suffered from cold six months thence, and that head-dresses which seemed to have been built, and then improved upon and built some more, about sections of stovepipe formed the crowning feature of their make-up.

We gave our attention mainly to the older, more agile, and more demoniacal of the pair. In one hand she swung incessantly a curved knife half as long as herself, and in the other a big clumsy iron three-pronged spear not unlike the one attributed to Father Neptune, one of her principal objects evidently being to slash and prod and swing as near the credulous beings who crowded about her as she could without inflicting actual physical injury upon them. In one corner sat half a dozen dejected-looking men picking at native musical instruments as they howled, and seeming to resent that the despised sex occupied the center of the stage. Several ordinarily dressed women stood or squatted along the walls. These, it was explained to us, had sick children and had come to have the malignant devils that had entered their little bodies exorcised and driven out. From time to time the sorceress called upon them to rise and join in the dance, particularly to posture in the center of the room while she made wild lunges at them with her two weapons. At other times they were ordered to kneel and bow their heads to the mats before what seemed to be imaginary gods or devils behind the displays of food set around the edges of the room. Now and again they ate bits of this, and at certain rather regular intervals the sorceress ceased her hopping, lunging, and posturing to partake copiously of some native drink respectfully tendered her by women of the house, or by those who had come to get the benefit of her ministrations. Through it all the dejected male orchestra, squatted on the floor in a corner, screeched incessantly some incredibly discordant Korean conception of music.

Half an hour or more after our arrival the sorceresses simultaneously changed their costumes to something quite different but equally fantastic, and after a deep drink and a long breath each they sprang again into the fray. They had already been at it for hours and might continue until dark. For these ceremonies seem to be rather of a wholesale nature, to which come all those who happen that day to have a devil to be exorcised, and the price of that service available. The bystanders made themselves comfortably at home, as is commonly the custom in the easy-going East, unawed by the great feats that were taking place before their eyes. Children played in and out of the throng; men, and some women too, placidly smoked their long tiny pipes; the sturdy fellow who had brought the paraphernalia of the sorceress calling slept babe-like on the box in which it had come, waiting for the word to carry it away again. Apparently there was nothing to be feared, except by the evil spirits which were being cast forth from within their absent or present victims. For some of the women had brought their ailing children in the flesh and were subjecting them to the noisy balderdash in ways that should have increased rather than diminished the demons of illness within them. How many mothers of sick infants came to that day’s ceremony was only suggested by the dozen or more present at one time. How many worldly-wise women of Korea, some of the most famous of them blind or boasting some other infirmity reputed to increase such powers, win their livelihood and even lay up small fortunes as sorceresses, even the statistics-loving Japanese overlords probably could not tell. One runs across them in wayside villages, in little valleys hidden by brush and rocks out among the hills all over the country—and in nearly every case there is a modern hospital run by missionaries or the Government no great distance away, sometimes, as here in Seoul, right on the road to the performance, where ailing infants would be readily admitted, probably at less cost than the fee of a sorceress.

The Japanese are so often accused of having no ideas of their own that perhaps I am mistaken in believing that they did not copy from some other nation their Railway School in Seoul. It is their own impression that the idea originated with the general manager of the Korean part of the South Manchuria Railway, and their opinion ought at least to be worth those of passing strangers. The plan is to recruit young boys after the usual six years of preliminary schooling and gather them together into a kind of railway West Point, where future employees of the railway shall be trained not merely in the immediate and mechanical things of their calling, but in general citizenship, in _esprit de corps_, in all those things which a body of men charged with so important a job as running a great railway system should have and be. There was already great eagerness to enter the school, though it was only in its third year, since the future for which it prepares is not only moderately bright but is definite and certain. At intervals competitive examinations for admission are given. The latest one had been attended by one thousand and eighty candidates, of whom a hundred and fifty were admitted to the school. The Japanese officials asserted, and seemed sincerely to believe, that, given equal preliminary training, Korean youths have equal opportunities for admission to the school and for preferment in what lies beyond. But the bare fact that of the five hundred and thirty-eight students only eighty were Koreans did not make it easy to accept this statement without question. It would scarcely be natural in any nation, let alone one of so tight a national feeling as Japan, to let such prizes get to any extent out of the hands of their own people.

The school is a big red-brick building, or compact cluster of them, down at Ryuzan, where the railroad community lives in an orderly, well built town of its own, and it has everything which even the most exacting peoples of the West expect a school to have. The principal is not a railroad man, but an M.A. and a famous pedagogue from Japan, and the whole curriculum is laid out with the idea of giving the future trainmen as broad a training as could possibly be of use to them in the line of work toward which they are heading. All of them take, for instance, six hours of English a week. They are taught the importance of courtesy in its practical as well as its ethical aspects—a point which seems to have been largely missed by the labor-union brotherhoods of the West. To the strictly utilitarian Occident some of the things taught would seem highly fanciful. We would hardly expect our engine-drivers to take fencing, samurai style, as well as jiu-jitsu, however handy these accomplishments might be in ridding their trains of hoboes. But the Japanese idea is to develop health and physique and a well-rounded personality as well as mere mechanical ability, the spirit of fair-play, character and _esprit de corps_, as well as mere laborers’ qualities, that there may be a railway morale, as there is in most countries an army and a navy morale. Thereby the founder of the school hopes to avoid what he calls “labor-union madness,” and at the same time to have men properly fitted to come into contact with the public; not merely pullers of throttles and takers of tickets. The school, as I have said, is barely three years of age, so that one could scarcely expect any distinctly visible results of the policy as yet in the railway itself, but the scheme strikes even the layman observer as at least one thing Japanese well worth imitating.

When the Russians and the Japanese grappled with each other a couple of decades ago, the railways of Korea, it will be recalled, were not linked up with those of Manchuria, destined to be the chief battleground. The little islanders pushed them quickly through, first in hastily constructed emergency form for military use, and later in a more finished manner. To this day they are straightening out curves and moving higher up from flooding areas that were ill chosen in war-time haste, and here and there along the way lie bits of the old road-bed and the abandoned abutments of a bridge that is gone. Like the railways of Japan, those of Korea are government owned; but they are not government operated. The South Manchuria Railway system, comprising all the Treaty of Portsmouth transferred from the Russians to their victors, has been given, as a private corporation, the complete control of the lines in Cho-sen for a long term of years, so that both comprise virtually one system, and operate as two trunk lines—from Fusan to Mukden and from Dairen and Port Arthur to Changchun, with their various branches. There is nothing of the Japanese model about these railways; they are almost exact copies of those in the United States, with standard gage, American cars with only minor hints of European influence, even the deep-voiced whistle which so instantly carries any wandering one of us back to his home-land. There is no railroad in the world at which the carping traveler cannot now and then find fault, but on few will he be harder put to it to find just cause for grumbling often than on these two systems operated as one from Dairen.