BOOKS.
THE LAND OF MORNING CALM.0 THE peninsula which we call Corea, first noticed in Western writings by an Arab geographer of the ninth century, who called it Sila, was known to the Japanese as Shinra, and afterwards as Korai (whence Corea) ; the latter being the official title of the nation from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. It is probably the least familiar portion of the great Eastern world to travellers, and in imagination the least known to the general reader. Here is its position, briefly stated :—" The peninsula, with its outlying islands, is nearly equal in size to Great Britain. Its area is between eighty and ninety thousand square miles. It hangs down between the Middle Kingdom and the Sunrise Land (Japan), separating the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea. When looked at from the westward on a map, Corea resembles the outspread wings of a headless butterfly, the lobes of the wings being toward China, and their tops toward Japan." The Chinese now call Corea the Eastern Kingdom, but the native name of the country, which appeals strongly to the imagination by its immense antiquity and its resolute seclusion, is the poetical one of Cho-sen, or "Morning Calm," bestowed upon it by Ki Tsze (Kishi, or Kicius), who invaded the unknown region of the northeast of China, after the deposition of the Yin dynasty, B.C. 1122, accompanied by several thousand Chinese emigrants, and became its king. If anything could ever conquer the sense of strangeness, of other-planet-like unapproachability, in all things Chinese, that leaves them curious, indeed, but hinders them from being heroic or pathetic to us, it might be the story of Ki Tsze, for he was a scholar, a sage, a great soldier, a wise counsellor to a cruel and foolish tyrant, and so loyal that when Chow Sin, "the Nero of China," perished in the flames of his palace, he would not serve the conquering usurper Wa-wang, but set forth to carry the civilisation of China to the aboriginal tribes whose history is lost in the mists of time. The people whom he found in the northeast were ignorant savages ; they lived in caves and holes, dressed in leaves, and were ignorant of morals, manners, cooking, and agriculture. Kishi taught them reading, writing, medicine, the political principles of feudal China, and many of the arts. The country over which he reigned, and where his descendants ruled until the fourth century before the Christian era, was destined to give Buddhism to Japan, a country for a long period far inferior in Chinese-originated civilisation to Corea, whence it also derived literature, the art of printing, and in comparatively recent times, the art of pottery, afterwards carried to such perfection by the workers of Satsuma and Hizen. The names and the deeds of the forty-one generations
of Kishi's descendants, making a blood-line of eleven hundred and thirty-one years, are unknown ; but the sage and soldier is accepted and honoured as the founder of Corean social order ; civilisation that is one of the very oldest in the world, being contemporaneous with that of Egypt or Chaldea. The contempt of the natives of " the Little Kingdom " for Western civilisation is as the contempt of the Hindoos and Chinese. " When the American Admiral, John Rodgers, in 1871, entered the Han River with his fleet, hoping to make a treaty, he was warned off, with the repeated answer that 'Corea was satisfied with her civilisation of four thousand years, and wanted no other.' The
perpetual text of all letters from Seoul to Peking, of all proclamations against Christianity, of all death warrants of converts, and of the oft-repeated refusals to open trade with foreigners, is the praise of Ki Tsze as the founder of the virtue
andorcler of the Little Kingdom, and the loyalty of Corea to his doctrines."
In one of the titles of the ancient sovereigns of Corea, "Lord of Ten Thousand Isles," we have an indication of the physio
gnomy of the hermit kingdom. The archipelago contains an amazing number of fertile and inhabited islands, rising out of deep water ; the mainland consists of eight provinces, and the rulers of the country have striven to convert it from a peninsula into an inaccessible island : " Corea," says Mr. Griffis, " has not built a great wall of masonry., but a barrier of sea and river flood, of mountain and devastated land, of palisades, and cordons of armed sentinels. Frost and snow, storm and winter, she hails as her allies. Not content with the sea border, she desolates her shores, lest they tempt the mariner to land. Between her Chinese neighbour and herself, she has placed a neutral space of unplanteci, unoccupied land. This strip of Brest and plain, twenty leagues wide, stretches between Corea and Manchuria. To form it, four cities and many villages were suppressed three centuries ago, and left in ruins. And only wild beasts, fugitives from justice, and outlaws from both countries, have inhabited this fertile but forbidden territory."
The aggressions of Japan upon Corea, and the fixed Japanese idea that the Land of Morning Calm is, and always has been since the invasion of Queen Jingu (A..D. 202), a tributary and dependency of Japan, form a large portion of the history of the two countries, and are illustrated by the leading features of the pictorial and plastic art of bath, in whose designs we find the Corean tiger, the dragon of the Western Kingdom, and the Japanese dog, repeated in a multitude of fantastic forms. On the whole, the history is a prosaic one, and tedious to follow ; but it has its gleams of romance, and its touches of poetry, in the legendary time, and in the later days of the Dutch ex plorers, whose tales were no more believed than those of the long-suffering, late-rehabilitated Mendez Pinto, or those of the
Jesuit missionaries who first " caught something like a Pisgah glimpse of the country which, before a century elapsed, was to become a land of promise to French Christianity." It was but a glimpse then ; the French priests were forbidden by the Emperor to cross the Tunen (in 1707), and when the Mission afterwards made its way in, it was destined to encounter and
record some of the most awful trials and sufferings that find a place in the long roll of Missionary experiences. Here is a passage which puts a vivid picture before us :—
" At Hnn-cbun, on the Manchiu and Kion-wen, on the Corean side of the river, once a year, alternately, a fair was held, up to 1860, where the Coreans and Chinese merchants exchanged goods. The lively traffic lasted only half a day, when the nationals of either country were ordered over the border, and laggards were hastened. at the spear's point. Any foreigner, Manchiu, Chinese, or even Corean suspected of being an alien, was, if found on the south side of the Tunen, at once put to death, without shrift or pity. Thus the only gate of parley with the outside world on Corea's northern frontier resembled an embrasure or a muzzle. When at last the Cossack lance flashed, and the Russian school-house rose, and the church spire glittered beyond the Tunen, this gateway became the terminus of that `underground railroad' through which the Corean slave reached his Canada beyond, or the Corean Christian sought freedom from torture and death."
Through all the centuries of Chinese suzerainty, and those of Japanese occupation, succeeded, in 1627, by the withdrawal of the Japanese from the peninsula, and the acknowledgment by the Corean King of the Manchu supremacy ; through the two centuries of peaceful self-government and absolute isolation which were disturbed by the Missionaries in 1866, and the Japanese in 1875, the author carries his readers, conveying an impression that this hidden people have remained unchanged since they first received the Chinese impress. Of the eight provinces, six are poetically named ; these are, the Province of Serene Loyalty (the scene of frightful cruelties practised on the Missionaries and the native Christ
ians), the Province of Peaceful Quiet, that of Complete Network, that of Respectful Congratulation, and the River Meadow and Complete View Provinces. Only the Capital and Yellow River provinces descend to common-place. The mountains have also poetical names, which reveal the fears and the faith of the people, for we find among them the Yellow Dragon, the Hidden Dragon, and the Flying Phoenix. There is much natural beauty in the country, the beauty of mountain, forest, and prairie, of profuse vegetation, and plentiful rivers and cataracts. And the people are not indifferent to these beauties ; they are a " seeing " race, and proud (among themselves) of their marine and mountain views. The country is fertile, but the climate has great extremes of heat and cold. The Indian story of "the tiger that owns my village" would be thoroughly appreciated in Corea, where a very large and fierce species of that terrible animal abounds, and the idea of it pervades all works of art. To Japanese children, Chosen is known as ‘` the land of the tiger." Leopards, bears, and wolves are also very numerous, the wild deer and the wild hog abound, monkeys are found in the southern provinces, and alligators and salamanders in the rivers. The people are large eaters, especially of meat ; small oxen in great numbers supply them in the south, and dogs are eaten commonly. Tea and rice are rare luxuries, and fish is chiefly devoured raw. Altogether, the " diet " chapter is an uncomfortable one. Sheep are imported from China for sacrificial purposes only, and goats are rare. The poorer classes are meagrely fed ; they live, like the Japanese, on millet and beans. All classes use tobacco very much. We may take it that the manners and customs which Mr. Griffis describes as existing now are just the same as they have been for ages ; domestic slavery in its mildest form, for instance, the position of women, the fraternal principles on which trades and industries are conducted, and the curious ceremonies of marriage, burial, and mourning. Women are not so ill off in Corea as in many other less secluded heathen countries. They have no rights, and are disposed of like the other animals ; but they are not ill-treated by their owners, and though their personal insignificance actually extends to their having no names, they receive titles of honour in public, their apartments are secure from intrusion, they cannot be punished for any crime, the males of the family being responsible for them, and they are free (and safe) to go about at all hours. Widows of position are not supposed to marry again, and are -expected to mourn all their lives, but a man whose wife dies wears half mourning for a very short time. It is a breach of good manners to be vehemently sorry for one's wife, and the sex that makes every law finds that one easy to keep. A Corean king is a rather absurd personage; nobody must touch him unbidden, and any one who accidentally does so has thenceforth to wear a red cord round the neck. Metal, also, must never approach the royal person. The King has despotic power, but it is tempered by many kindly customs ; he hears the complaints of his subjects, and is in constant communication with the populace, by means of commissioners. The Royal outings are tremendous affairs, with caparisoned horses, dragon flags, and the sacred fan and umbrella. The nobles are a bad and cruel class, according to all accounts of them the officials and magistrates are " literary." Literature has from time immemorial been held in honour in Corea, from whence the Japanese adopted printing in the twelfth century, when a work of the Buddhist canon was printed from wooden blocks. "A Corean book is known which dates authentically from the period 13171324, over a century before the earliest printed book known in Europe." The Coreans are Buddhists, but Shamanism has never lost its hold upon them, and the old gods are reverenced still, just as the old myths remain in modern Greece. The air is not empty for a Corean, and every month has its three unlucky days, the fifth, the fifteenth, and the twenty-fifth. The worship of ancestors, and the Chinese system of ethics, or Confucianism, are their ruling principles, and the fulfilment of the parental and filial relations in an admirable manner is the -distinguishing virtue of the hermit race.
They accept their tradition of thirty centuries as undoubted history, and it cannot be denied that in the attitude of the people there is grandeur and poetry. They will be forced to change that attitude, no doubt ; the several interests of Japan and the United States will lead to a combined pressure which they will be unable to resist ; we read already that " the friendly whistle of Japanese steamers is heard in the harbours of two ports in which are trading settlements?' Mr. Griffis is hopeful for the
future of the strange and hidden country whose ancient story he relates to us in detail that indicates a vast amount of study. "The near future," he says, " will see Corea open to the world. Commerce and pure Christianity will enter to elevate her people, and the student of science, ethnology, and language will find a tempting field, on which shall be solved many a yet obscure problem." The prophetic precedence given to commerce over pure Christianity may be accidental, but we fear it is ominous ; for violence and injustice have marked the enterprises of commerce in Corea up to the present time. We are more struck by the cheerful complacency of Mr. Griffis than by his powers of observation and reasoning, when we find him expressing simultaneously his conviction that Corea is the pivot of the future history of Eastern Asia, that on her soil the problem of supremacy by those jealous rivals, China, Japan, and Russia, will be decided, and also his hope that " whatever may be the issue upon the map of the world, paganism, bigotry, and superstition in Corea, may disappear, and that the Christian religion, science, education, and human brotherhood may find an abiding dwelling-place." It may be so, but we confess the " friendly whistle " seems to us to pipe all hands to the active preparation of a bad time for the big-hatted people of the Land of Morning Calm.
Previous page
