Korea

by Simon Winchester

  The park’s maze of footpaths was crowded with ordinary Koreans enjoying the sun, the warm smell of pine needles, and the slightly sultry breeze that blew up from the river. There were quarters of old men in their pale silk hangbok, baggy, ankle-length trousers called paji, and chogori shirts, all fastened with strings and ribbons; there were women in their more vividly coloured chima chogori; young girls in their best Western dresses; soldiers in uniforms, and student-cadets in their curious jungly camouflage—Korea on a holiday afternoon is like the paseo on an evening in Barcelona, everyone kitted up to the nines to show off to the neighbours.

  At the hill’s summit are the various Paekche relics—exquisite little pavilions and shrines and temples that were used by the great kings for the ceremonials that accompanied their kinghood. Yongil-lu, the Pavilion for Greeting the Sun, is as lovely as any and stands facing east on the site where the monarchs would traditionally watch the morning sun rising over their lands; Songwol-tae, or Seeing the Moon Go Home Tower, faces west, for precisely the opposite reason. Most of the pavilions are open to the elements, have two floors, and are made of massive oak timbers the bosses of which have been carved and painted into extraordinary figures; the mansard roofs are tiled and have elaborately carved and chased antefixes; there are finial plates and a gablet and false rafters—the whole of each pavilion painted and lacquered in deep reds, sky blues, yellow, gold, black: a Korean pavilion is at once fantastical and serene—great fun to see, not at all serious, and yet despite its apparent frivolity, possessed of a profound beauty and inner meaning.

  I passed the summit of the mountain, which then rather abruptly fell away to the river, glittering in the early evening sun. To my right was a well—the Chinese characters called it the Kum River Great Water Supply Raise Water Place; below me and also slightly to the right down a flight of granite steps was a much smaller Raise Water Place, a tiny spring that trickled from the mountainside by a temple called Koran-sa. It takes its name from a medicinal herb, the koran-cho, which grows beside the water; the herb was used by the old Paekche kings as a guarantee that a particular pitcher of water did come from this particular, very pure spring—a sprig of koran-cho was placed in each vessel, a sixth-century version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

  And then I came to the Rock of Falling Flowers, the saddest memorial in town, and for that reason above all, the most popular. It is a bluff, a hundred feet or so below the Seeing the Moon Go Home Tower, and is reached by steps cut into the mountainside. Old ladies had set up stalls under pine trees beside the path and were selling balloons and tins of orange juice and wooden snakes. At the top of the bluff is a small pavilion, and knots of people—many carrying balloons, tins of orange juice and wooden snakes—were having their pictures taken or were gazing down the sheer rock face into the fast-moving waters of the White Horse River two hundred feet below. A fence prevented them from falling.

  Whether or not a fence existed in AD 660 is not known. The last of the Paekche kings chose the mountaintop as the site of his last stand, trying in vain to beat off a joint attack that had been mounted against him by the armies of Shilla and T’ang China, the latter led by the dragon-catching general, Su Ting-fang. The king’s courtiers were around him as Su’s forces steadily advanced from the eastern hills. But when it became clear that his position was hopeless, and he and all his followers were likely to become prisoners of the Chinese, his women made a collective decision to commit suicide. They leaped in the hundreds from the top of the bluff and died on the sharp rocks or in the waters below.

  It is said that three thousand of the Paekche women died—more than the Jews who killed themselves at Masada, more than the Japanese soldiers who threw themselves off the cliffs of Saipan. And it is when you see the prettily dressed Korean women of today that the image becomes so aptly macabre: it is easy to imagine their colourful dresses billowing up as the figures tumbled through space: from a distance a waterfall of rainbow-coloured petals would be falling down the cliff face—hence the Rock of Falling Flowers, Nakhwa-am.

  I had my doubts. I spent a few moments at the top of the bluff, watching the young boys lean dangerously out into space, pretending to push their girlfriends the way the Paekche women had gone thirteen hundred years before. And then I went down more stone stairs to the ferry station beside Koran-sa and bought myself a beer and sat in the prow of a skiff that swept its way slowly, with the stream, back to town. I lingered briefly at the base of the Nakhwa-am and wondered if the legend could be true. I thought the bodies would bounce or be caught up in the many ash and willow trees that sprouted from fissures in the face. Few enough would make it all the way to the river, and fewer still would be dead. But their dresses probably would billow and flare, and there would be flashes of colour as the women twisted and tumbled through the air. Three thousand of them? But still, who cared? It was a good and adequately said little tale, just the sort of thing the descendants of Paekche would like.

  There was by now one other man in the youth hostel, a small and rather taciturn man named Mr Sung. Ten years before he had lived in Baltimore, and took a job working on the General Motors assembly line in nearby Dundalk. Dundalk, it turned out, was a place with which I had a more than nodding acquaintance, since over the years I had lived in the United States I had taken various cars and motorbikes to Dundalk port for passage to Liverpool. Mr Sung had come to Puyo with little enough idea that he would find someone at his breakfast table who could name the streets and bars of Dundalk, Maryland, and perhaps because of this he quickly became a friend and guide-companion, though not so intimate as to permit the use of his first names, which were Kwang Ok.

  He persuaded the hostel owner to reduce the price of the room. He found me the most erotically pleasing saunatang in town. He took me to the best bulgoki-jip in Puyo, and we feasted more than once on beef and oysters and cucumber kimchi and quails’ eggs and pickled garlic—the robust fare of the Korean countryside, so magnificently different from the insipidly elegant toy food eaten in Japan. Mr Sung loathed Japan with a passion. ‘I wouldn’t eat sushi if it was the only food left on earth,’ he once declared.

  He also introduced me to a girl. I was never quite certain of his relationship with Miss Ko, a pretty artist who rented a shop near the entrance to the National Museum and did a modest trade in calligraphers’ brushes, ink pads, pieces of lacquer-covered driftwood, and pots of polished basalt. Miss Ko displayed a skittishly filial affection for Mr Sung, which suggested that he might have been a distant uncle; he behaved as though he were intensely proud of Miss Ko, almost as though he were trying to advertise the remarkable charms of Korean womanhood to this idiot stranger who had blown into town.

  And Miss Ko Seouk-young was, by any standards, a remarkable young woman. She was extremely attractive and dressed very eccentrically, with a large straw hat plumped on her head. She drove a large car very fast and daringly. She painted with great skill, and her sculptures and framed sketches were all around her shop, but she did not want to sell any of them. She ate and drank with great gusto, her favourite tipple being a foul concoction that she called a soju cocktail, which included soju, 7-Up and slices of cucumber. ‘If ever I go to your country, I give it to barman to make,’ she threatened.

  I liked her, which was either what Mr Sung had wanted or else he didn’t object; he was so impassive about it I never knew if I was poaching and he was being polite. But he appeared quite content when, one sunny afternoon, Miss Ko suggested that she take me up to Chonggak-sa, a small nunnery in the hills south of Puyo. She drove very well along a perilous mountain trail I would be reluctant to tackle, and an hour after starting we drew up below a vast mass of cherry blossom, at one of the most exquisite temples in all Korea.

  Only four nuns lived there, grey-robed and shaven-headed in the T’ang Chinese style. On this afternoon eight women from a nearby village had walked up for a visit, and the temple’s tiny living room was filled with the recumbent forms of the ladies taking their siestas. A few
sat quietly, hulling strawberries or peeling apples for afternoon tea. They all scattered when we arrived and sat around by the walls, watching with fascination the nuns’ courtesies towards me.

  I was asked to remove my shoes and sit cross-legged on the floor. A small black lacquer table was set before me, with tiny rice cakes, slices of orange and apple, fresh strawberries (which Koreans grow under plastic sheets, endless tubes of which extend over all the fields in these parts), and a fist-size pottery cup filled with fragrant pine liqueur that tasted like an unusually strong retsina. The abbess introduced herself as Lee Seunim—Lee Soon Woo in the days, ten years ago, before she made the decision to take the Buddhist equivalent of holy orders.

  She was tall and well built and graceful to a fault. Her hair was shaved down to a fine stubble—every full moon the women shaved again, she said, and it would be a full moon next night, so she had to travel down to the valley to buy razor blades. It would provide a welcome interlude—her life and that of her three colleagues could be austere, especially in the winter when the temple might be cut off for weeks, as it had been until very recently, by the ice and blowing snow. Even now the women were chopping the wood for the next winter’s fires—this past winter had exhausted their stock, and there was no man about to help with the heavy work of replenishing it.

  The routines of temple life at Chonggak-sa were much the same as those at Paekyang-sa or in any other Chogye temple, and involved long hours of study and meditation, hard work, simple food, and little by way of entertainment. The women, who like Miss Lee were all in their mid-thirties, were intelligent and well informed about the condition of the modern world. They were all philosophy graduates from various universities across the country, and their evenings, I imagined, were spent in constructive contemplation of mankind’s follies.

  Their temple was something like a common room at a small but excellent country college, perched high up among the cherry blossoms, with the tinkling sound of the wind chimes at the Buddha hall a few yards above us and the murmur of a stream a few yards below. The old temple dog snored gently in the sun. I could hear two of the nuns talking softly as they chopped the chunks of wood for the next cold season. The ladies from the valley muttered among themselves. And then, among all this heaven-sent peace, came the bang.

  It was a loud double thud, like a sudden clap of thunder, that sounded from somewhere up in the sky, stopping us all in mid-conversation. The dog woke with a start and raised its head with an expression of canine perplexity. The sound of chopping wood halted. The birds stopped singing. Only the wind chimes and the stream were oblivious to the interruption. And then, after a self-conscious pause, everything resumed, and the dog stretched itself and lay down once more, and work and talk began again. ‘Pay no attention,’ said Miss Lee, glancing at her watch. ‘It’s only the Blackbird.’

  An American surveillance plane had just raced across the mountain chain. It was made by Lockheed—how very alien that name sounded up here!—and it was ten miles high above us, hurtling along at twenty miles a minute. The thunderclaps had been its supersonic bangs as it tore northwards to the borderline, where the pilot’s duties called for him to point his radars at the northern armies and make sure they were staying put for another peaceful day.

  ‘You have to get used to it up here,’ the young abbess said, rather wistfully. ‘If we were in Seoul, we wouldn’t give it a thought. Down here, where it is so peaceful, it sounds much worse. It reminds us of things that have nothing to do with Buddhism—and not much to do with Korea, either. I used to find it a very sad sound. Every afternoon at three we heard it. It was very confusing during meditation—it set you thinking about things that had nothing to do with the hwadu we had been set. But now it seems part of the natural order. It has a certain Zen quality about it, too. It is a reminder of the frailty of our state, and of our existence. Just like the cherry blossoms; you know that although we appreciate their loveliness we mourn their existence because we know of their coming extinction. Well, the explosion we hear every afternoon is the same, in a way; we hear it, and it reminds us that all is not as perfect or as stable and secure as it looks. It is easy to become lulled into feeling that all is right with the world—just look at the view! Listen to the sounds! Smell the air! But then—bang!—and you remember the imperfection of it all. So this is how I have made use of the American jet. I doubt if the pilot thinks of it the same way.’

  It was tricky getting into the ginseng factory. Mr Sung knew the manager and telephoned him to ask for access, but he had been told the processes were confidential, and visitors were not too welcome. I made some telephone calls to Seoul, however, to the institution known as Office of Monopoly (no definite article is ever used in its title) that regulates all matters relating to red ginseng. An official said they would retire to consider the matter, then telephoned the Youth Hostel: a Mr Ha—‘Ah! my friend!’ cried Mr Sung—would receive me at four. No cameras, please.

  Although I have half-facetiously suggested that the most apt symbol for modern Korea would be the tiger-striped security barrier—you see them everywhere, potent reminders of the heavy hand of state—there can be no argument about the most readily recognizable icon on the peninsula. You see it under bell jars in ancient pharmacies. You see it on the labels of sweets and cigarettes, on hair restorers and after-shaves, on chewing gums and face creams. Huge posters carry its image. If Korea were run by Californians I daresay somewhere there would be a statue. The ginseng root is a curiously anthropomorphic thing, anyway—a thick, pinkish root with a fat body, two elephantine ‘legs’, a couple of thinner ‘arms’ and an assortment of lesser limbs—a ‘head’ with hairs and on some specimens a navel, a penis and knees. Sometimes it stands erect; other specimens are bent at the midriff and seem to sit back, contentedly dispensing their magicks. The Chinese character for ‘gin’ is ‘man’, though to confuse matters the word ginseng is not actually used in Korea: the Korean word for what the Chinese call jensheng and for what the English-speaking world calls ‘ginseng’ is actually insam—hence if you ask for a cup of ginseng tea in Korea the phrase is insam-cha chuseyo, putokkhamnida, and if you asked for ginseng tea you would get very blank looks indeed.

  Semantics aside, ginseng is Korea: thanks to the efforts of the monopoly that musters and markets it, the world now firmly associates Korea with ginseng and ginseng with Korea. Not many people beyond the Orient know exactly what it is; there is the vaguely terrifying (but not wholly wrong) assumption that it has something to do with the curious activities of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (a figure of quasi-religious bizarrerie, well known in the West, who is either despised or unknown in Korea). Few people can be precisely certain if ginseng will do them good or harm, if it is an aphrodisiac, a life-extension drug, a sleeping draught, a Menace to Society, or some cunning fungus through whose use the sinister East will subtly extend its dominance over a bewildered and drug-fuddled West. But whatever, it is the symbol of Korea, without a doubt, and it is all made, processed and packed in Puyo, behind the high white walls and guard towers of Number 200, Naeri Street.

  It was once all made in Kaesong and exported in huge quantities to a China that had been fascinated with yin-yang restoratives (in which field ginseng claims pre-eminence) since the third millennium BC The Koryo kings were forced to pay levies to the Yuan Dynasty’s Mongol emperors: gold and silver; cloth and grain; falcons, eunuchs, young women—and ginseng, always ginseng. Ginseng was stiff with yang energy: no Chinese, no Mongol, could possibly function well without it. The principal factory for its mass production was established in Kaesong in 1908, a branch office of the Ginseng Division of the Royal Ministry of Finance.

  But Kaesong was swallowed up by North Korea in 1953, and the factory was moved south to Puyo. Kaesong still makes some ginseng and exports it under the historically accurate name of Koryo ginseng (since Kaesong was the Koryo capital). A little is made in China, and both the Russians and the Americans grow the plant and toy with processing it. The biggest e
xporter in the world, by far, is Korea, and all the export quality red ginseng comes from the factory at Puyo.

  There are two kinds of Korean ginseng. There is paeksam, or white ginseng, which is grown for four years, then washed, sorted, graded and sold. This type of ginseng is regarded as inferior enough for private enterprises to make and market, and such magisterial characters as Puyo’s Mr Ha have no interest in it at all. Red ginseng, or hongsam, on the other hand, is the real McCoy of the insam world. It is exactly the same ginseng, except it has been matured in the earth for two years longer than that selected as white ginseng, and it has been steamed and dried. This curing process, then, and the two years’ maturation in the field, is all that separates two ginsengs that are treated as differently as gold from pyrite. Red ginseng—stronger, more concentratedly beneficial—is the subject of the hugely powerful Office of Monopoly, and on that subject Mr Ha waxed lyrical indeed.

  He was a fat man with bulging black circles under his eyes—not the best advertisement, perhaps, for so efficacious an elixir. He sat in his office with four colleagues, and they nodded and smiled broadly as servants trooped in with a steaming silver pot. ‘You are very welcome,’ said Mr Ha. ‘You will take some red ginseng extract, please?’ And a servant poured a deep red liquid into an egg-shaped china cup that had handpainted flowers on its side. Mr Ha stood and made a short and rather formal speech: ‘Red ginseng is good for your life, Mister Simon. It will purify you. It will help your body to make more blood. It will clean your liver. It will cleanse your hangover. It will make you live much longer. Gentlemen, drink!’