by Pat Barr
In all these causes Isabella wore herself out, and yet it was to the ‘corrupt and vicious’ East she turned in search of solace, enthusiasm and delight. She told herself that one of the reasons for her journey was to report on the work of missions in Korea and China; in the preface of her book on Korea she says her journey was ‘part of a plan of study of the leading characteristics of the Mongolian races’. She went, surely, because she was thoroughly weary of clerical drawing-rooms and church congresses, of petty wrangles over women’s rights, of rather dull admiring friends and relatives, of drear rooms filled with mementoes of the beloved dead, of editors, critics and the fulsome compliments of presiding chairmen, of ‘door-bells and please me’ms’, of the tribulations of the Armenians and the insufficiencies of the western islanders. She yearned to straddle a steed and go galloping over some airy plain, she longed for another encounter with the bright eyes of danger and for the stimulation of fresh sights, strange sounds, the jostle of unknown bodies, and the warm, spicy, fetid, perfumed, musty, lush, stewed stinks of the East.
She was sixty-three and physically in poor shape. During her time at home doctors had told her that she was suffering from rheumatic gout, over-exhaustion, an infection of one lung and ‘fatty and calcareous degeneration of the heart’. ‘I have become very elderly – indeed I may say an old woman, and stout!’ she warned one friend who had not seen her for a time. ‘My hair will not turn grey, and thus I am deprived of the softening, and almost renovating influence which silver hair exercises on a plain face. I still wear deep mourning, but not a cap of any kind.’ But, she added, ‘Mentally I think and hope that I am more sympathetic, and that my interests outside of myself are larger and wider, but probably this does not appear, as my manner is quieter than ever. I have written this much to prepare you for a “little soul” in a big body!’ That quietness of mien was perfectly self-assured, and by now it sheathed a well-furnished, keen, disciplined mind, an astonishing capacity for reckless courage and endurance, that same absorbing, unstinting God-given faculty of being interested which never failed.
Early in January 1894 Mrs Bishop boarded the steamer Mongolia bound for Yokohama. The more she travelled the lighter she went, but this time her luggage did include two cameras, for she had recently attended an advanced photography class at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Anna Stoddart saw her off at the docks and says, ‘When bidding me farewell, she seemed to be wrapped up in the sombre expectation of death in the East.’ Mingled perhaps with that gloomy expectation was an equally sombre realisation: that Mrs John Bishop, missionary advocate, authority on Kurds and Persians, celebrated writer, public speaker, helper of the needy, was essentially a lonely, not very happy person. It was Isabella Bird, traveller extraordinary, who had the gift of happiness, and she owed no deep allegiance now to anyone or to any place, so that, if she had died alone, in some far-flung corner of a foreign field, it would have been quite fitting.
II
During the next three years Isabella circulated between Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai as other elderly widows of comfortable means might savour the delights of London, Paris and Carlsbad. She wrote little more about Japan, that had become, as it were, the London, familiar sanctuary of her wanderings. Her interest and enthusiasm centred on Korea and parts of China, and she wrote comprehensive accounts of each in Korea and Her Neighbours and The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. She went first to Korea and spent four months there, during which, she told John Murray, it ‘took less hold of me than any country I ever travelled in. It is monotonous in every way, and the Koreans seem the dregs of a race – indolent, cunning, limp and unmanly.’ But that was a premature judgement, for Korea, like, say, Bolivia or Finland, is an acquired taste on the traveller’s palate, and Isabella was already unconsciously acquiring it.
In 1894 Korea was still known as ‘The Hermit Nation’ that turned an unsociable, unchanging, elderly face to the world. So unsociable was it, the story went, that its coastal areas had been deliberately deforested in order to present the bleakest, most inhospitable and discouraging aspect to the stranger. And the lack of change was such that its King belonged to a dynasty dating from 1392, which managed to survive until 1910. But the Korean image was disintegrating, had begun to do so in 1866 when citizens of several western nations landed ‘to trade, rob, kill or, what was equally obnoxious to the regent and his court, to make treaties,’ says William Griffis, the American historian, who concluded that ‘the fires of civilisation were beginning to smoke out the hermit’. During the next decade or so ‘obnoxious treaties’ which opened some ports to foreign trade were forced upon the Korean authorities, who sent this plaintive note to the leader of one early American expedition: ‘This people and Kingdom have lived in enjoyment of their own civilisation for four thousand years and want no other. We trouble no other nations. Why should they trouble us? Our country is in the furthest east, yours in the furthest west. For what purpose do you come so many thousands of miles across the sea?’
It was an exceedingly good question, but one unlikely to deter either the Americans or the other major powers that soon arrived upon the scene, and forced Korea into the thankless role of ‘buffer’, ‘shuttlecock’, ‘pawn on the international chessboard’, ‘pigskin in the world’s football game’ and other sporting paraphernalia with which historians seek to enliven their pages. Korea, wrote one, was ‘patronised, cajoled, bullied and caressed’ by the powers that were, and by none more so than by the Japanese who, having themselves responded quite differently to the challenge of the West, delighted in the pleasurable exercise of forcing upon someone else a dose of the same medicine they had been given (to use one of those enlivening historian’s metaphors). In 1876 the Japanese made a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Korea and, then proceeded to secure a position of economic and commercial ascendancy in the country that threatened to out-rival the Chinese who, in the past, had maintained undisputed suzerainty over Korean affairs. So Japan and Korea became locked in a bitter and stormy relationship, and Isabella was on hand during the enactment of some of its cruellest, most dramatic collisions.
When she first arrived, in March 1894, Korea was still under its last three months of Chinese suzerainty, but precariously so, its weak government ‘confronted with the ill-suppressed cupidity of Russia, the mysterious latent force of China, the jealous and vainglorious interest of Japan.’ These were the words of George Curzon, who, on his Grand Tour of Asia, had preceded Isabella by a few years. Because, when he chose, he was eminently capable of packing a great deal of succinct, crackle-sharp commentary into the nutshell of a paragraph, let him describe this typical ‘old-style Oriental state’ as he saw it, and it still was in 1894: ‘A royal figurehead enveloped in the mysteries of the palace and the harem, surrounded by concentric rings of eunuchs, ministers of state, officials and retainers and rendered almost intangible by a predominant atmosphere of intrigue; a hierarchy of office-holders and office-seekers, who were leeches in thinnest disguise, a feeble and insignificant army, impecunious exchequer, a debased currency and an impoverished people – they are the invariable symptoms of the fast vanishing regime of the older and unredeemed oriental type. Add to this the first swarm of the flock of foreign practitioners who scent the enfeebled constitution from afar and from the four winds of heaven come pressing the pharmacopoeia of loans, concessions, banks, mints, factories and all the recognised machinery for filling western purses at the expenses of eastern pockets …’ and that was Korea, an ailing land, stumbling defenceless into the late nineteenth century, like a reluctant, grubby, rather dull-witted Rip Van Winkle.
And it had this air of shabby melancholy at first sight, as Isabella thought when she landed at the port of Chemulpo. The roadstead was a slimy mud-flat where turtles, crabs and octopuses wriggled and crept, a drizzly rain fell on the deliberately denuded hills. Chemulpo – the name meant ‘various-articles-river-bank’ – contained a few European merchant houses, an imposing Japanese consulate, tea-garden, Shinto shrine, a foreign club wi
th a billiard-room, a noisy Chinese settlement and a ‘comfortless and unworthy building’ where dwelt the British Vice-Consul, who was later to cause Isabella considerable inconvenience. She stayed just long enough to observe the tight grip of Japan on the place – a Japanese bank and postal service, an influx of cotton-bearing steamers from Nagasaki and of Japanese agents buying up all the rice they could find to stockpile for the coming war, which, at that time, only they knew was imminent – and then she was carried the twenty-six miles to Seoul in a chair with six bearers.
The entrances to walled Seoul had resounding names: the Gates of Elevated Humanity, High Ceremony and Bright Amiability, but the city inside them had little of the pomp of a capital. Viewed from a hill-top, in fact, Isabella thought it looked like ‘an expanse of over-ripe mushrooms’. Yet the old place had a weird appeal that grew upon her. ‘I knew Seoul by day and night, its palaces and its slums, its unspeakable meanness and faded splendours, its purposeless crowds, its medieval processions, which for barbaric splendour cannot be matched on earth, the filth of its crowded alleys, and its pitiful attempt to retain its manners, customs and identity as the capital of an ancient monarchy in face of the host of disintegrating influences which are at work, but it is not at first that one “takes it in”. I had known it for a year before I appreciated it, or fully realised that it is entitled to be regarded as one of the great capitals of the world.’
The magic of the city, to judge from several visitors, including Isabella, lay in its national peculiarities of sound, sight, smell, apparel, custom and a general air of rigid conservatism which Isabella terms ‘grooviness’. In no other capital did the chair-coolies sing so hauntingly, or the great bronze bells (hung in 1498) boom so thrillingly, or the magpies chatter so brashly – beloved birds these, because they ganged up to kill house-snakes. Certainly in no other capital was the clatter of laundry-sticks the one and only sound to be heard after nightfall. The women wielded these sticks over their menfolk’s clothes which were always white and had to be washed every day and beaten, instead of ironed, to a dull satin polish every night. White was the traditional mourning colour and the custom of always wearing it was said to date from a time when three Korean kings (each deserving of a three-year national mourning) died in one disastrous decade. After that the men decided it was easier to keep in mourning; Curzon, the misogynist, wrote that the men adopted white beaten-smooth robes ‘for the excellent purpose they serve in keeping the women busy’.
Peculiar then to Seoul were the streets, filled almost exclusively with men all wearing those same baggy white robes but topped with different hats. ‘It is only in Korea,’ remarked an American traveller, ‘that one realises the infinite possibilities of the genus hat … hats for fair weather, hats for foul, indoor hats, outdoor hats, everyday hats, court hats, immense hats, almost no hats’, mourners’ hats like colossal soup-plates of plaited straw and hats sprouting wings like ping-pong bats. Occasionally, scuttling among this lordly hatted crowd ‘which swayed and loafed and did nothing in particular’ in Isabella’s view, one would see a working woman in a green coat, clutching a bundle of yesterday’s masculine laundry to be washed in the nearest fetid ditch. The ditches stank in a manner characteristic of an old-style oriental state, but there were other, distinctively Korean odours. The lacquer of the men’s hats smelled sickly in the sun; kimchi, the national vegetable dish, a mixture of cabbage, garlic and turnip, imparted to every house and its inhabitants the smell of aged sauerkraut; towards sunset, piles of brushwood were lit for the cooking of the evening meal and every foul alley was sweetened with a haze of aromatic pine smoke. The brushwood was brought into the capital each day on the backs of bulls, and these too were a singular phenomenon – gentle, ruddy-coloured beasts whose loads filled an entire street-width, led by drivers who wore their particular variety of straw-hat – very broadly-brimmed, in order, said the foreigners, that they could jostle you rudely out of the way while pretending they hadn’t seen you.
There were few ‘sights’ to break the monotonous filth of this depressed, eccentric city where ‘the ordinary sightseer sees his vocation gone’. There were hardly any magnificent temples, because Buddhism, formerly the official religion, had been disestablished for some three hundred years. Ancestral and demon worship had taken its place and the lovely hillsides around the capital were monopolised by the dead, horizontal under grassy mounds, encircled by crescents of pines, stone lanterns statuary, and thus in a state of spacious dignity which they had seldom attained when vertical. Below one of the highest hills sprawled the Mulberry Gardens, surrounding an ancient royal Audience Hall. The Hall was haunted by demon hordes; cries of murdered kings and of those killed violently on the battlefield screeched across its gilded rafters at night; leopards were said to lurk in the stone drains under the mulberry-bushes; the only living voices heard were the dismal ones of two aged guardian eunuchs.
Clean, thrifty, matter-of-fact, separate on another hill, a colony of some five thousand Japanese throve; near them was the Palace of the Chinese Minister Resident, guarded by dragon-gods and ‘a number of big supercilious men dressed in rich brocades and satin’. In enclaves too the westerners resided; most of them, predictably, were American, British or German, consular, missionary or mercantile, and little love was lost between the various factions. Isabella’s main contacts were, as usual, with the diplomats and missionaries. Some of the American missionaries had already spent up to ten years in Korea and, as they had been white pioneers on the Korean scene, their view of the country, like that of the missionaries in the Sandwich Isles, was paternalistic and vaguely proprietorial. The missionaries were encouraged too by the heaven-sent void in Korean spiritual life caused by the absence of an official religion, and they were hastening to fill it with a cornucopia of various Christian endeavours. The Roman Catholics had a cathedral with a small spire, the Methodists a mission school, the Presbyterians a hospital, the Anglicans a mission press and English church of the Advent, the Sisters of St Peter a Community House. Isabella visited some of these as was her wont, and at the Boys’ Boarding School met Mr F. S. Miller who eventually accompanied her on her journey up the north branch of the River Han to the Diamond Mountains.
It was not a particularly congenial arrangement, for Isabella would have preferred to go by herself, but even she couldn’t tackle the Korean interior without an interpreter, and a native one had proved impossible to find. So Mr Miller with his ‘imperfect knowledge’ of the language was pressed into service, Bishop Corfe lent her his Chinese servant Wong, and she hired a twenty-eight-foot long sampan for the journey. Her preparations were thoroughly spartan and business-like by this time: ‘I discarded all superfluities such as flasks, collapsing cups, hand-mirrors, teapots, sandwich tins, lamps and tinned soups, meats, bouillon and fruits’, she explained for the benefit of the less initiated, and she took the barest of kitchen necessities, two changes of clothing, a folding chair, bedding, Korean string shoes and the two cameras. The chief burden was money, for the only acceptable coin outside Seoul was cash, a pitiful mite with a hole in the middle rated at 3,200 to the dollar. Cash was threaded in hundreds on straw strings and it took six men or one pony to carry the equivalent of £10. So the sampan had to be ballasted with cash, and was pretty crammed also with sacks of tea and flour, charcoal for the brazier, Isabella herself, Wong, Mr. Miller and his servant, the owner of the boat, (one indolent, ancient Kim), and his assistant who paddled it.
They started on 14 April, an auspiciously gay day: ‘The environs of Seoul were seen through a mist of green, and plum and peach blossom was in the ascendant, and the heliotrope azalea was just beginning to tint the hillsides and the air was warm and muggy …’ According to the Korean Almanac, a kind of Shepherd’s Calendar issued every two years by the Korean Astronomical Board, it was the period of the fourth moon, when ‘Behold the cry of the water chicken is heard in the land and the earthworm crawls out of his hole. Bitter weeds and barley start and last year’s grass dies. Beetles cra
wl and it is a good time to plant beans.’
For the next five weeks, while the earthworms oozed into the spring sunshine and everyone dutifully planted beans, Isabella and her five male companions floated along the River Han in the sampan. Each dewy morning, lying in her trestle bed under the vessel’s makeshift roof of dried pheasant-grass, she awoke to the sounds of ‘the bellowing of cattle, shouts and laughter of boys and yelping of dogs as bulls young and old were driven to the river banks to be tethered in the flowery grass’. The river itself was ‘cheery with mallard and mandarin duck, geese and common teal’, and in the nearby paddies ‘the imperial crane, the egret and the pink ibis with the deep flush of spring on his plumage’ prodded for food. It was a ‘sportsman’s paradise’ for the few male westerners who passed that way, but no paradise for boatmen. Sometimes the water of the Han dissolved to a pebbly trickle over which even the shallow sampan had to be dragged, sometimes it cascaded down rapids up which everything had to be hauled, and sometimes it flowed nicely wide and green, lapping amicably against the junks carrying salt, tin kettles, dried peppers and Japanese cottons to the interior.
