by Pat Barr
After this tragedy, the King, utterly distraught, was imprisoned in his Palace. He feared greatly for his own life, and would eat only eggs boiled in their shells or food sent in locked boxes from the various legations, and begged the foreign missionaries to keep guard outside his chambers, for they were the only people he could trust. The missionaries were generally held in high esteem in the country, and Isabella formed a high opinion of their work in the fields of education and social reform. Yet, though one of her ostensible purposes was to report on their work, she only devotes to them about fifteen of some five hundred pages on Korea, and it is plain that her chief interest was in social and political change, the effects of the Japanese take-over on the country and the ordinary everyday life of its peasantry.
In pursuit of these concerns she again went exploring, this time up the north-west coast along the old main road to China. Travelling conditions were much as before: the roads as foul, the ponies as cantankerous, the inns as loathsome, and readers are still not spared ‘an ounce of dust nor a single predatory insect’. It was a grand little trip nevertheless, Isabella thought, and some of her descriptions are novel and breezy. She visited the royal city of Song-do, famous for wooden shoes, pounded capsicums, coarse pottery, oiled paper and above all for the cultivation of that mysterious panacea, ginseng. Panax ginseng, to give it its botanical name, was a root plant considered tonic, febrifuge, stomachic, the very elixir of life by the Chinese and was therefore a major export of the Koreans, who scoured their mountains for the specially-precious wild variety as if searching for gold in the Klondike’.
The season was at its height in Song-do when Isabella was there and the people, seemingly untouched by the momentous upheavals going on in their capital, ‘talked, thought and dreamed ginseng’. Its roots were planted and transplanted under reed roofs inside fenced areas which, at certain crucial times, had to be guarded by watchmen who howled and beat drums throughout the night in order to ward off thieves and evil spirits (surely one of the world’s most extraordinary jobs – that of ginseng guard!) After seven long years of unstinting care the ginseng was dug up – a pallid tuber with ‘beards and tails’ that bore ‘a grotesque resemblance to a headless man’. It is possible, Isabella adds, ‘that the likeness is the source of some of the almost miraculous virtues which are attributed to it,’ meaning, presumably, its reputation as a potent aphrodisiac. The root was then boiled and dried, its ‘beards’ and ‘tail’ cut off for humble home consumption, and its trunk, looking then ‘like a piece of clouded amber’, was packed ‘waterproofed and matted and stamped and sealed by the Agricultural Department as ready for export’. One basket fetched up to 14,000 dollars, Isabella says, and one root of the extra-efficacious wild variety up to £40 – so no wonder there was so much fuss about it.
From Song-do, she continued north to Phyong-yang, which, the previous year, had been the site of one of the decisive battles of the Sino-Japanese war. For the Chinese the engagement had ended in massacre or ignominious flight, and desolate evidence of the conflict still littered the area. Houses were in ruins, shell-fragments were embedded in the gilt temple carvings, the pines were notched with bullets, human bones glared from amid the rows of cotton and beans, and in the ditches lay pathetic scraps of paper fans, umbrellas, silk banners like those Isabella had seen among the Chinese who had gone shuffling through Mukden the year before.
The further north she went the poorer the land became. At Tok-chon, the most distant town she reached, only officials could afford to eat rice; peasants scratched meagre crops of potatoes and millet from stony soil, ate also scraps of stiff ancient fish and seaweed, made nothing but skimpy gauze for cheap black hats. Pedlars, who staggered up from the south bearing silk girdle cords, Japanese lucifers, indigo dyes, sticks of candy stuffed with sesame seeds, green-glaze pickle jars and amber buttons, had to carry nearly everything away unsold, for money there was as scarce as ‘frogs’ teeth, crabs’ tails or eunuchs’ whiskers’, to use a picturesque native phrase. Tok-chon was truly the end of the road: ‘the ruin and decay of official buildings and the filth and squalor of the private dwellings could go no further’, she concluded, adding, ‘As I sat amidst the dirt, squalor, rubbish and odds-and-endism of the inn yard before starting [on her return journey] surrounded by an apathetic, dirty, vacant-looking open-mouthed crowd steeped in poverty, I felt Korea to be hopeless, helpless, pitiable, piteous, a mere shuttlecock of certain great powers, and that there is no hope for her population of twelve to fourteen millions, unless it is taken in hand by Russia, under whose rule … I had seen Koreans transformed into energetic, thriving peasant farmers in Eastern Siberia.’
But no country, just then, seemed to take Korea in hand. The Japanese were proving incompetent at it, the newly-defeated Chinese were incapable of it, the Russians, on whom Isabella pinned rather excessive hopes, were biding their time. When Isabella got back to Seoul some weeks later, the King was still a prisoner, the government was still in chaos, the Japanese, though increasingly discredited and detested since the murder of the Queen, were still issuing their decrees for reformation. Then, at the very end of that disastrous year, the conquerors compounded their errors by the promulgation of a really terrible edict that plunged the nation into new depths of farcical-tragical confusion: the Royal Proclamation recommending the cutting off of the Korean top-knot. ‘This set the country aflame,’ Isabella wrote. ‘The Koreans who had borne on the whole quietly the ascendancy of a hated power, the murder of their Queen and the practical imprisonment of their King, found the attack on their hair more than they could stand.’
As she went on to explain, the top-knot of the Korean was no inconsequential tuft but a symbol of manhood bestowed upon the male in a solemn investiture. At this ceremony, a boy’s hair was scraped up into a bundle on the crown of the scalp and arranged with strings into a firm twist ‘which stands up from the head slightly forward like a horn’. Over this a crownless skull-cap of horsehair gauze was bound so tightly across the brow that it gave its wearer a headache for a week and, in the opinion of one irreverent foreigner, ‘acted as a successful barrier to the ingress of any new ideas for the rest of the man’s life’. Over this cap a tall black gauze hat was fastened through which the top-knot could be clearly seen like a cocky little bird in a cage. This hat too, Isabella explained, ‘is a source of ceaseless anxiety to the Korean. If it gets wet it is ruined, so that he seldom ventures to stir abroad without a waterproof cover for it in his capacious sleeve, and it is so easily broken and crushed, that when not in use it must be kept or carried in a wooden box, usually much decorated, as obnoxious in transit as a lady’s band-box…. The Top-Knot is often decorated also, with a bead of jade, amber or turquoise, and some of the young swells wear expensive tortoiseshell combs as its ornaments. There is no other single article of male equipment that I am aware of which plays so important a part or is regarded with such reverence or is clung to so tenaciously, as the Korean Top-Knot.’
For the Japanese therefore to demand the severance of this venerated institution in the name of western-style progress was almost tantamount, in Korean eyes, to the urging of mass castration upon the nation’s manhood – and they reacted accordingly. The King and the Crown Prince were the first victims of the dreaded Japanese shears and most of the Cabinet were similarly denuded. ‘But the rural districts were convulsed. Officials even of the highest rank found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. If they cut their hair, they were driven from their lucrative posts by an infuriated populace, and in several instances lost their lives, while if they retained the Top-Knot they were dismissed by the Cabinet…. All through the land there were Top-Knot complexities…. Countrymen, merchants, Christian catechists, and others who had come to Seoul on business and had been shorn, dared not risk their lives by returning to their homes. Wood and country produce did not come in, and the price of necessaries of life rose seriously. Many men who prized the honour of entering the Palace gates at the New Year feigned illness, but were sent for
and denuded of their hair. The click of the shears was heard at every gate in Seoul, at the Palace and at the official residences; even servants were not exempted, and some of the Foreign Representatives were unable to present themselves at the Palace on New Year’s Day because their chairman were unwilling to meet the shears!’
The shorn King, tool of the Japanese, issued a soothing proclamation to the effect that ‘The Top-Knot and hair band were regarded as novelties when first introduced and became fashionable only because people liked them. But that they stand in the way of activity and health goes without saying. Nor is it right in these days of communication by ships and vehicles that we should stick to the old customs of the exclusive past.’ Perhaps not, but the people wanted none of this tousle-headed Japanese-western hybrid of modernity and nor, secretly, did the King. On 11 February 1896 Seoul was again convulsed with the news that His Highness had escaped from the Palace and sought asylum in the Russian Legation.
It was a momentous and terrible day in Korean history. Following the royal flight, the Prime Minister and other members of the Cabinet were beheaded by furious mobs, prisons were opened and their inmates released, innocent Japanese were lynched. Within a few hours of his escape, the King issued a quaintly woeful statement, which Isabella quotes. It began, ‘Alas! Alas! on account of Our unworthiness and maladministration the wicked advanced and the wise retired. Of the last ten years, none has passed without trouble…. Our dynasty of five centuries has thereby often been endangered and millions of Our subjects have thereby been gradually impoverished. These facts make Us blush and sweat for shame.’ After more in this breast-beating vein, the King continues: ‘As to the cutting of the Top-Knots – what can We say? Is it such an urgent matter? The traitors by using force and coercion brought about the affair. That this measure was taken against Our will is, no doubt, well known by all. Nor is it Our wish that the conservative subjects throughout the country, moved to righteous indignation, should rise up, as they have, circulating false rumours, causing death and injury to one another…. As to the cutting of the Top-Knots,I say, no one shall be forced as to dress and hats. Do as you please …’
At this dispensation, the people breathed a sigh of relief and returned to their normally passive and disengaged state. From the security of the Russian Legation the King ruled or rather misruled the nation for a year, spurning the endeavours of the Japanese and almost ignored by the Chinese, while the Russians, in the view of many historians, were deliberately giving Korea enough rope to hang herself. The impetus towards reform faltered and fell away, in spite of a nascent progressive movement among a few Koreans in the capital. Some of the Japanese forces were withdrawn; Viscount Miura, though harshly censured in a Japanese court for his complicity in the Queen’s murder, was acquitted on technical grounds; the bones of the Queen’s little finger, all that was left of her, were immured in a colossal catafalque in the grounds of the New Palace. The King reverted with cheerful incapacity to his groovy well-tried ways and one Lady Om, an Imperial Concubine of the First Class, gradually attained a position of ascendancy in the dead Queen’s stead.
In the winter of 1896 Isabella returned briefly for the last time to the eccentric, secluded, dun-coloured Korean capital. A few changes had taken place, she noted: main streets had been widened and some slums cleansed; dirty, sturdy little boys were actually selling newspapers along these wider streets, and groups of Korean policemen, ‘with shocks of hair behind their ears and swords in nickel-plated scabbards by their sides’, slouched about them, their numbers and superfluous equipment suggestive of ‘useless and extravagant expenditure’. But much of the irredeemable Orient remained unscathed: bulls loaded with brushwood plodded by, coolies still sang and the tattoo of the women’s laundry-sticks still echoed in the twilight. ‘Incipient Top-Knots were everywhere,’ Isabella reported, and, on being granted an audience with the unrepentant King, she saw that the royal appendage also ‘seemed to have resumed its former proportions’. The regeneration of Korea, such as it was, still lay in the future, and Isabella was to have no first-hand experience of it.
CHAPTER X
China
WHEN Isabella looked lovingly and knowledgeably, as she often did, at the map of the Far East, she saw a vast gap in her experience of it. Her first approach had been from the Pacific when she had explored its exotic Japanese fringe and had then touched upon its mainland at Hong Kong. Ducking out from behind the deck-house on a storm-ridden day in December 1878, she had seen ‘the coast of Asia, the mysterious continent which has been my dream from childhood – bare, lofty, rocky, basaltic; islands of naked rock separated by narrow channels, majestic perpendicular cliffs, a desolate uninhabited region lashed by a heavy sea, with visions of swirling mists, shrieking sea-birds and Chinese high-sterned fishing-boats with treble-reefed, three-cornered brown sails appearing on the tops of the surges, at once to vanish’.
And on shore the cities of Hong Kong and Canton had been equally intoxicating, her first draught of ‘true Orientalism’. And she, drinking everything in, wished every day ‘that the sun would stand still in the cloudless sky, and let me dream of gorgeous sunlight, light without heat, of narrow lanes rich in colour, of the glints of sunlight on embroideries and cloth of gold, resplendent even in the darkness, of hurrying and coloured crowds in the shadow, with the blue sky in narrow strips high above, of gorgeous marriage processions and the “voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride”, of glittering trains of mandarins, of funeral processions, with the wail of the hired mourners clad in sackcloth and ashes, of the Tartar city with its pagodas, of the hills of graves, great cities of the dead outside the walls, fiery-red under the tropic blue … of the wonderful river life and all the busy, crowded, costumed hurry of the streets …’
The oriental magic of that journey had culminated in the Golden Chersonese; next, she had aspired to the Tibetan passes of the Himalayas and then turned back. Circling again, she had, in the mid-1890s, visited Eastern Siberia, revisited Japan, explored the Chinese coastal plains as far south as Swatow, been three times to Korea. And there, between her eastern and western approaches, between the ranges that dominated the familiar valleys of the River Shyok and the Yellow Sea which lapped the familiar shores of Chemulpo, was the gap. It was a very wide gap, but it was more or less bridged by the River Yangtze which flowed from the Tibetan highlands to China’s east coast. And so, early in January 1896, when she was sixty-four years old, Isabella went purposefully to Shanghai, where the River Yangtze joined the sea.
Shanghai was by then one of the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated of all the treaty ports in the East, and for that very reason held no charms for Isabella. But for many of more extrovert and conventional temperament, Shanghai was a jolly place, a ‘model settlement’ with an elected Municipal Council to keep everything spick and span. Water-carts laid the dust, scavenger carts allayed the smells, a spruce force of Chinese, Sikh and European policemen waylaid undesirables, and, in short, all the strange magnificent squalor of China was kept at a safe and hygienic distance. In its place, Isabella saw, stretched ‘ranges of great godowns, wharves, building yards, graving docks, “works” of all descriptions, filatures, cotton mills and all the symptoms, in smoky chimneys and a ceaseless clang, of the presence of capital and energy’.
Away from the commercial hubbub, macadamised roads were lined with ‘private houses of the most approved and massive Anglo-Oriental architecture’ and the wide, tree-lined Bund was dignified with the Grand Hotels of France, Britain, Germany. Newspapers and periodicals from every ‘civilised’ western nation lay on the green-baize tables in their public rooms; in their dining-rooms and verandahs guests sipped vermouth, ate chicken patties and caviare, talked about last night’s performance of the visiting Italian operetta group. From the hotels’ windows the scene was a lively one: ‘Single and two-horse carriages and buggies, open and closed, with coachmen and grooms in gay and often fantastic cotton liveries, dash along the drive. Hackney victorias abound, and t
here are jinrikishas … in hundreds, with Chinese runners.’
Most of this traffic was made up of foreigners dashing madly from one entertainment to another, for, as Isabella says, ‘The tremendous energy with which Shanghai amuses itself during seven months of the year is something phenomenal. It is a fatigue even to contemplate it.’ There were clubs for drag-hounds and dramatics, bowling, lawn-tennis (Chinese lads in cotton uniforms made nippy little ball-boys) and cricket (the ‘Feebles v. Duffers’ match was an event of the season); there were societies for fireflies, astronomy, philharmonics, and looming largest of all was that for ‘the racing fraternity’. ‘The morning gallops extract people from their beds at unwonted hours, and in spring and autumn the prospects of the stables make great inroads on conversation’, Mrs Bishop noted tartly. But it depended, of course, on how you looked at it. Oliver Ready, for example, author of Life and Sport in China, long-term Shanghai resident, thought that Race Days were the greatest fun: ‘Everyone knows everyone else, the names of ponies entered have been household words for weeks [as Isabella said] while their supposed merits are open secrets. The jockeys are personal friends, the weather is bright and warm, the ladies wear their smartest dresses, the course is kept and order maintained with the aid of blue-jackets from the gunboat in port, while her drum and fife band or nigger troupe render selections of varied merits.’ And then there was the delectable champagne lunch on the grandstand to look forward to, and even if your particular favourite hadn’t been first past the post, all the exercise and excitement helped to ‘shake up the old liver’. For that, as Ready explained, was the cure for all Shanghai ills, and the ardent pursuit of many ‘manly sports’ kept the livers of the young men so well shaken, that they were invariably fitter than either the ladies or the Chinese.
