Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  And I did so promise, and he wrote his name and address, in English, in my Alwych book: ‘Haedarng, Monk—Chonnam, Darmyarng Kun, Soobuk Myun, Oh Jung Ri.’ He added his telephone number and the name of his monastery—Kumtasa. I said I would do my best to get there, in about two weeks’ time. He blessed me profusely and went on down the mountain bowing and pressing his hands together in gestures of farewell.

  It took a while to translate his address into something approximating the words I found on my map (although there were few enough romanized words on the chart—most words were in Chinese characters, a few were in hangul, which all made map reading even more difficult than usual). ‘Chonnam’, I realized after staring at it for a good ten minutes, was a compression of the word ‘Chollanam-do’, or South Cholla Province. It was then clear he had written his address backwards, as many old-fashioned Koreans still do. The next word, ‘Darmyarng-kun’, stumped me, until someone suggested that the monk, like many older Koreans, was employing a system of romanization called the Ministry of Education System, which was now hopelessly out of date. It had been replaced, since 1983, by the internationally accepted McCune-Reischauer System, and if I wanted to decode Haedarng’s language I had to substitute Ts for Ds, Ks for Gs, kick out all the superfluous Rs, stir the whole thing around a bit and, with luck, a real, recognizable word might emerge.

  I did this, and, hey presto! for ‘Darmyarng-kun’ I read ‘Tamyang-gun’, and promptly found it on the map and in the gazetteer—a small country town twenty miles north of Kwangju, the bamboo-growing capital of Korea. I never did find Soobukmyun, and I thought I might well miss his ri, his village of Ojung. But I now knew roughly where it was, and so, once I got near Tamyang town I planned to ask directions. This was not as easy as I thought: when I approached farmers and rice planters and schoolchildren with the enquiry: ‘Ojung-ri odi isumnikka?’ they may have wanted to help but clearly had never heard of the place and ended up making me more confused than ever. I quickly realized that salvation would come only if I was brave enough to try to read the hangul on the road signs. If I continued to shy away from any words that were written in King Sejong’s modish linguistic invention, I would never reach Ojung-ri, and a cold and uncomfortable night would be in store for me. So, with the sense of desperation I remembered as a schoolboy when told to stand up in class and translate a paragraph of Civil War, Book Three that I had omitted to read in homework the night before—with desperation much akin to that, knowing the consequences of failure, I set about trying to read every little granite road sign and marker I could find.

  The Koreans are quite possibly the only people in the world who have a national holiday to celebrate the invention of their system of writing. (There is, so far as I am aware, no Cyrillic Day, no Devanagri Week, nor anything to celebrate Arabic, or Roman, or Katakana, or Chinese.) Shortly after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, a decree providing for such a day was handed down from Seoul. In essence, the declaration read as follows: Since during the entire time of the Japanese occupation, the use of hangul has been banned, and since with the defeat of the Japanese it will be possible for hangul to be used once again, then the date of 9 October, the anniversary of the first promulgation of our national writing system in 1446, shall henceforward be called Hangul Day, and shall be a national holiday for all the people of our country.

  It is a system well deserving of a day of celebration. Its invention has helped foster Korea’s remarkable sense of national unity, and it has helped make sure that nearly all of the Korean population, for the last two centuries at least, has been able to read. The astonishing advances in Korea’s economic standing in recent years are, of course, principally the result of hard work, determination, and shrewdness. But the fact of near 100 per cent literacy, and the fact of an almost wholly unified sense of national purpose (pace, of course, the young radicals’ loathing for the policies of the last government) must have contributed; King Sejong is well worthy of the reverence accorded to him and to his invention.

  He began work on a replacement writing system in 1420. His reasoning was simple. Korean didn’t exist in written form at all; there was a very rich language being spoken out there, but no one could read or write in it because there was nothing to read or write it in. Those few people who could write had opted, some centuries before, to use Chinese characters—characters that, as a writing system for the Korean language, were entirely unsuitable.

  The two tongues are wholly unrelated: Korean is a Ural-Altaic language, linguistically connected (though only rather vaguely) to Turkish, Mongolian, Finnish and Magyar. Chinese, on the other hand, is a Sino-Tibetan tongue, with ties to Burmese and Thai and Tibetan. Using Chinese characters to express Korean sounds would be like using Chinese characters to express English—it is technically possible, but is also clumsy, useless and philosophically out of whack. Chinese characters couldn’t begin to express the sounds and subtleties of Korean, and besides, whether they could or not, the Korean people just couldn’t begin to understand Chinese script.

  It just didn’t make sense to them; the thought of using up to thirty-two brushstrokes to form a single character, and having to learn as many as fifty thousand characters that had appeared to have precious little logic behind their construction was anathema to most ordinary Koreans. The yangban and the scholar classes made an effort to learn classical Chinese script in order to communicate with each other, and, indeed, all literature and official prose was written using it. But the ordinary people had nothing. A simplified version of Chinese was introduced in the seventh century—it was called Idu, or ‘clerk writing’—but it was still regarded as far too complicated, an unnecessary pile of artistic baggage with which to express the meaning of a beautifully simple language. So King Sejong, who was the fourth king of the Yi Dynasty (the dynasty that reigned until the Japanese extinguished it in 1910), decided that a new system was needed. He devoted all his efforts, and those of a scholarly body known as the College of Assembled Worthies, to the invention of one.

  On Christmas Day 1443—though of course no Christmas was celebrated in Korea, since no Christian missionaries had yet reached Korea—the new script was unveiled. It was to be known, the great Sejong had decided, as Hun min chong um—‘The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People’. (An odd title for a supposedly simple script: he changed it three years later to hangul, which means ‘the Korean Writing’.)

  ‘Being distinct from Chinese,’ Sejong wrote, in the introduction to his proclamation (which was written in Chinese), ‘the Korean language is not confluent with Chinese characters. Hence, those having something to put into words are unable to express their feelings. To overcome such distressing circumstances I have designed twenty-eight letters that everyone may learn with ease and use with convenience for his daily life. Talented persons will learn hangul in a single morning, and even foolish persons will understand it in ten days.’

  The king, who was forty-seven years old when his alphabet was completed, devised a system with seventeen consonants and eleven vowels. It was elegant, it encompassed all the sounds uttered by the Korean tongue, and it had its roots—like no other system known—in human physiology. Thus the consonant letters were designed actually to look approximately like the organs of speech. The letter , for example, which represents the sounds of our letter k, was meant to show the shape of the back of the tongue blocking the throat while the k sound was being made. The shape of the tongue reaching up and touching the inner ridge of the gums , is the hangul symbol for our sound n, which is made in precisely that way. The simple squared-off circle, , the script for our letter m, is said to represent the shape of the lips as the m is being uttered. And while I, as one of Sejong’s ‘foolish persons’, cannot boast of having learned it in a morning, I can say, in common with almost all others who stay in Korea longer than a week, that hangul is a delightfully easy script to learn. It may not be possible to understand what you have read, but to read and to come out with an utterance Koreans will recognize, is ea
sily possible after only a couple of days’ practice.

  There was some resistance to the introduction of what the Confucian elders called ‘the Vulgar script’. To create a new script ‘is to discard China and identify ourselves with the barbarians. This is what is called “throwing away the fragrance of storax and choosing the bullet of the praying mantis”.’ Sejong was unmoved by so withering an onslaught; both he and his son Sejo were determined to broadcast the good word, in concert with the Buddhism that the pair so ardently followed. There were setbacks, both for hangul and for the Buddhists, but within a century the script had taken a firm hold, and it was not until the Japanese tried to suppress it that its purpose briefly faltered.

  It was simplified in 1933, when one of the vowels and three of the consonants were officially dropped. Essentially, though, the system that survives today has remained untouched, and enormously popular, for more than five centuries. Its popularity stems only partly from its simple elegance; more than anything, it represents to the Korean something that is his very own, an illustration of his cultural and linguistic uniqueness, a device that sets him apart from the Chinese, the Mongols and the Japanese who, for reasons good or ill, so often have occupied their peninsula and attempted to subdue, suppress and subjugate these more independent of Asian people. Hangul is a real and living symbol of the cussedness of the Koreans, of their unquenchable spirit, of their unwillingness to be subsumed by their mightier neighbour-nations.

  (One problem unforeseen by King Sejong was the difficulty of writing hangul on a typewriter. The various syllables of Korean words—the first consonant, say, then the vowel, and then the third consonant—are grouped together in a specifically stylized manner. The first part of the word kamsa hamnida—‘thank you’—is broken up into the syllables kam and sa; the syllable kam is made up of the first consonant, k, , which is written on the left; the vowel, a, , which is put to the immediate right of the ; and the final consonant, m, , which is put below the first two: . Sa is similarly done, and easily, thus . The other syllables are constructed likewise, but with one very confusing difference, in that ham is actually written hap, , but the p is pronounced like an m. Ni and da are less complicated because of their being made up of only two letters. The final version of the word is thus . As you can see, to type the syllable kam, , involves both lowering the font and backspacing; in the one word this operation has to be performed twice. In some words—such as the word ‘telescope’, man won gyon, or —every syllable is constructed with three letters, with the last and sometimes the intermediate ones positioned in a way that is highly inconvenient for the typist. There is no suggestion it is more complicated than Chinese; but when compared with Devanagri, or Urdu (despite its being written from right to left), with the knitting-like Burmese or the spaghetti-like Tamil, Korean is very trying. The benevolent king, whose statue sits in benign invigilation over the Toksu Palace in Seoul, on a hangul-covered plinth, could not have been expected to know the trouble he would cause for the Remingtons and Olivettis of this world.)

  And thus armed with my smattering of hangul I scanned the road signs. I was dreadfully slow at first, but was nonetheless determined to keep walking while I tried to read. In the early afternoon the frustrations were enormous: by the time I had managed to twist my eyes and brain around the complexities of a Sokwang-ju or a Ssangtae-ri, the junctions by which I might have reached these villages were long past. But slowly I managed some degree of fluency. And as the sun began to slope down towards the hills—a welcome relief, for it had been a very hot day, and sweat was running from beneath my hat and down my neck—I saw the name I wanted. I recognized the as o; I just managed to get the as jung; and I had by now become accustomed to , or ri. Ojung-ri, carved on a granite post, and a number 5. Five kilometres, I guessed, up this stony path that led through the paddies and the groves of young bamboo, and into the mountains proper.

  The path entered a small copse of pine trees where the sunlight was split into thin shafts of dusty air. It became much cooler. The air was fresh with the clean, crisp smell of resin. A tiny stream burbled somewhere in the deeper gloom. The birdsong, bright and cheerful out in the warmer air, was muffled. I walked steadily for ten minutes, always slightly uphill, until I came to a small clearing, strewn with old pine needles. A small obelisk, inscribed with Chinese characters, stood on a mound; it was probably a gravestone or a village guardian designed by the local shaman to keep away unfriendly spirits. I stood still for a while, lingering over this tranquil spot. And then I became aware of someone else also standing in the shadows. It was a man dressed in a neat blue suit and well-shined brown shoes. He hadn’t seen me and was just standing stock still, gazing up towards the patches of blue sky. I watched him for a few minutes and then coughed to let him know I was there. He turned round, and his face broke into a broad smile.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and in impeccable English added, ‘What is your name?’

  I told him and said how sorry I was for spoiling his reverie. ‘Oh no!’ he replied. ‘It is so nice to have company. I was just looking for somewhere for my parents to live. They will be retiring soon; she is seventy, you know, a wonderful woman, and she and my father have always said they would like to retire to a peaceful place in the hills. I told them I would look out for somewhere. It is Saturday, I had time off, so here I am. What about you; why are you here?’

  I told him of my walk, and he chuckled approvingly. It was so unusual, he said, to see people in Korea doing things alone. The Confucian spirit, he said, laid great emphasis on the group, on togetherness. ‘Solitude is not a Korean pleasure,’ he said. ‘You and me, we like it. We shall be friends, I think.’

  We walked slowly together across the mossy floor of the woods, while he told me a little of his life. He worked as a manager of a tyre factory in Kwangju. He had been a teacher until three years before, but he had left his job. There had been some trouble. In fact he would tell me about it. It was a strange little story. I might find it amusing.

  ‘You will know we have a president in power who is not very well liked down in these parts. Well, even if we like him or not, it is part of our way of life that we give him great respect. Not everyone does—the students up in Seoul do not, for instance—but most of the older people, like myself, we do. And of course the young children are in awe of him and his position.

  ‘Well, some years ago we were told that he was coming down to our town and that he would visit a local school. There was great excitement. The security people wouldn’t say exactly when he was coming, but they told the school to go ahead and make all the preparations to greet him properly. So they did just that: they arranged a big ceremony, and as one of the ways of welcoming him, they made a huge portrait of him, broken up into hundreds of pieces on the back of coloured cards. When the children held the cards up one way, they made a pretty pattern. When they turned the cards over, there was the president’s face.

  ‘The day arrived, and we were told when he would be arriving. The children were ready, everyone very nervous. Then one of the children asked permission to go to the bathroom. His teacher said that would be fine, but hurry. Well, you can guess what happened; while the boy was in the bathroom the president arrived, and the security people wouldn’t let the boy back onto the field. So the celebration went on, the children did their dances with the cards and turned this way and that, and then, all together, turned them over.

  ‘The president’s face was there all right—except that it was missing a left eyebrow. The official people went crazy! The president himself didn’t say anything, of course, but after the party had gone the education department had the master in and fired him on the spot. The headmaster was in trouble. I even heard they visited the parents of the child and warned them of the consequences. And then an instruction went out. If ever there was a demonstration of loyalty like that held again, the children had to be told if they wanted to pee, they peed where they stood. Understand?

  ‘I got to hear that there was anoth
er demonstration some weeks later, and the president was late, and the children were waiting several hours. And they did as they were told. And when it was all over the children, particularly the girls, went back to their mothers, terribly upset by it all. It had been a bad experience for them all. So it was then that I decided to leave. I just didn’t seem to be in the right job. Tyres are not much fun, but out in the commercial world I’m not so much a part of the machine. I feel better now, although I miss the children. I miss teaching.’

  I have no way of knowing whether his story was true or not. It is about a microcosmically unimportant event, but one that nonetheless somehow illustrates the way that authority occasionally works in today’s Korea. There is no way of finding out if what my tyre maker alleged had indeed happened or whether it was the fanciful invention of a man who loathed the regime. I did, though, mention it to a doctor in Kwangju and to another in Seoul, and both said they had heard the tale and believed it to be true. So my initial nervousness about including the tale evaporated: even if it is not literally accurate, and even if my guide had a somewhat selective memory, it represents the kind of assumptions that are made these days about the behaviour of governments, and as such it has a purpose. The beginning of the tale was amusing enough, anyway, and Mr Shin—as he later introduced himself—was an excellent storyteller.

  But he had no idea where Kumtasa might be, and when we reached the next hamlet we asked, and no one knew. Then I remembered that most Buddhist monks were called Sunim—whether that was a title or not I wasn’t really sure—and so I tossed that word around a little, and sure enough a small boy, bright-eyed and smiling, said yes, he knew where a sunim lived, and pointed up through a grove of bamboo higher still up the mountainside. ‘Haedarng,’ I heard him say, and suddenly there was a murmur of agreement, and everyone started nodding and grinning and pointing up into the hills. My friend was no stranger, thank heavens.