Martin Uden - Times Past in Korea: An Illustrated Collection of Encounters, Customs and Daily Life Recorded by Foreign Visitors

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Times Past in Korea

AN ILLUSTRATED COLLECTION OF
ENCOUNTERS, EVENTS, CUSTOMS AND DAILY
LIFE RECORDED BY FOREIGN VISITORS

Martin Uden

TIMES PAST IN KOREA
AN ILLUSTRATED COLLECTION OF ENCOUNTERS. EVENTS, CUSTOMS
AND DAILY LIFE RECORDED BY FOREIGN VISITORS

First published 2003 by
Routledge

Martin Uden

Routledge is part of the Taylor and Francis Group
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers, except for the use of short extracts in criticism

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-903350-06-9

ISBN 978-1-136-64119-0 (epub)

Typeset in Stone 9.5 on 10.5 by Mark Heslington, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

Contents

Foreword

S ix years in Korea have left me with an abiding interest and love for the country. I found that one way I could keep this interest nourished was by collecting old books in Western languages on Korea. This volume attempts to bring that interest to a wider readership. Many of the early visitors kept the accounts of their trips in diary form, allowing the reader to follow their paths day by day. I hope, too, that arranging this anthology in calendar order will allow a wide range of Koreas history and foreign first-hand accounts of Korea in times past to be presented.

I have tried throughout to have only the eyewitness to speak through these pages, avoiding the all too numerous latter-day interpretations. My aim has been to present a mixture of historical and anecdotal pieces, giving the modern reader as vivid an impression as possible of the reality (at least as seen by the foreign observer) of Korea as she was. I have made my first priority extracts which shed light on important events or trends in Korean history, but have also tried to illustrate the interaction the foreign visitors have had with Koreans through the ages. I hope that the reader will also find of interest the more general touristic accounts of a Korea that exists no longer but of which many echoes can still be heard.

There have been occasions when the lack of an identifiable date has meant that I have used an entry for what may not have been the actual date of the extract but, for the most part, the works I have used have allowed me to slot them in appropriately. The reader can imagine, however, that the travellers of yesteryear indulged their own interest in Korea through travel in the beautiful seasons of spring and autumn, resulting in an embarrassment of riches for entries in May and October, but a large number of gaps to fill in August and December. Here the more general descriptions of Korea came into their own, and I have at times taken some liberties to maintain exact chronological order. In other words, not every description in this compilation belongs to the exact day and year allotted to it.

I have kept as close as possible to the original texts, manipulating punctuation a little, but keeping idiosyncracies of spelling and usage as far as possible. In particular, I have kept the spelling of place names as written and not attempted to change into current usage. While I have relied principally on English language sources, I must take responsibility for the translations of Vautier and Frandin from French and of Weber and Wunsch from German, and I have tried to keep something of the rather stilted language of the original.

My thanks are due to the colleagues from the Diplomatic Service with whom I have spent so many years in Seoul, to my editor Paul Norbury but above all to my wife and family whose forbearance has allowed me many hours in bookshops finding the material for this volume and, more recently, to complete this work.

I have drawn on many sources in the making of this book, including a few that have appeared in the post-war years, albeit from obscure presses, some of which have not been possible to contact. I am particularly grateful, however, to the Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, for access to J-P Buys translation of the Hendrik Hamel journal. All sources are separately listed below.

MARTIN UDEN

London

December 2002

Historical Introduction

W hat follows does not purport to be a definitive, if necessarily cursory, history of Korea. For the most part it is instead an attempt to place the entries in this book in an approachable historical context. The reader is therefore able to refer to entries which relate to a particular historical incident, or instead take each day as it comes.

Korean history is traditionally reckoned to have begun with the founding of the nation in 2333 BC by Tangun, the offspring of a bear turned woman and mythical progenitor of the Korean race. In spite of such long lineage, Koreas position between two larger neighbours meant that over the centuries the nation was the target of numerous invasions from both China and Japan. The threat from China was an important catalyst in allowing one of the three ancient kingdoms of Korea (Silla, Koguryo and Paekche) eventually to unify the peninsula as United Silla in 661. This was replaced in 918 by the Koryo dynasty (giving the Western world the name of Korea which, particularly in British accounts, was rendered as Corea until early in the twentieth century). But success in consolidating domestic rule on the peninsula failed to bring to an end the incursions from a variety of Chinese and non-Chinese states.

It was only with the establishment of the Yi dynasty in 1392 that, by acknowledging the suzerainty of Peking, incursions from the north diminished in exchange for tribute paid to the Ming court. But even this did not bring to an end all attacks from the Manchu tribes, or the unwelcome attentions and occasional attacks from Japan, which reached a climax with the invasion by Hideyoshi in 1592 eventually resisted after much destruction and loss of life.

While all these developments took place long before the events which feature in this collection, they were crucial in forming the Korean attitude towards foreigners. It is hardly surprising that, given the recurring experience that strangers simply came to invade the homeland, Koreans were wary of contact with foreigners. They were reinforced in this by the doctrine of the Middle Kingdom that there was nothing of worth to be gained by contact with barbarians. And indeed the very earliest Westerners to come to Korea had little to offer of immediate benefit. There are records indicating that a missionary was in Hideyoshis invasion force, but it is hard to credit he would have had much success in his efforts.

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