Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  Thus I trekked on, hour after hour. I passed some signs of recent soldierly occupation—‘Headquarters, I Corps’ read a wooden sign ten yards into the woods, and I could see barbed wire fences and Quonset huts and wooden lean-tos and shadowy figures that moved along distant forest paths. They must have been relics of the spring exercises, for otherwise the woods were quiet, and the rutted roads were empty of the tanks and mobile howitzers that had been there days before. It could have been the woods at Versailles or the Thuringian—or great Gromboolian—plain: it looked not one whit Korean.

  I came across a stretch where men were asphalting the road, and my boots were mired in thick, sweet-smelling blackness that it took a good mile to shake from between the cleats. The road snaked over a hill, and just as I was coming to its summit, two American children came flying on their bicycles from the other side. ‘Hey, Mister—whatcha doing here?’ They were straight from Norman Rockwell via Sears Roebuck, and suddenly the road might have been in Chevy Chase or Bel Air, no longer a Thuringian lane. There was a rational explanation, of course: there was an enormous infantry base here, one of the few where families are welcome from stateside, and the children were venturing briefly beyond the cyclone fence to see something of the country where they lived.

  They may well have found it a likable place. The man I encountered no more than an hour later most certainly did not. He was American too, and he was driving a juggernaut of an old Chevrolet into the outskirts of Pyongtaek when he spotted me. He stopped to offer me a lift and then unlocked a sluice gate from somewhere in his brain and unleashed a waterfall of vitriol. ‘Goddam place, this Ko-rea,’ he began. (He was a construction foreman from Kentucky.) ‘I jes’ hate it. Goddam dirt everywhere. Goddam people eating their goddam garlic and kimchi stuff all the time. I see’d people pissing in the streets. I see’d all kindsa stuff here you wouldn’t credit. Man, I hate the place.’ I told him I had seen some remarkable things and met some extraordinary men and women in the past weeks. ‘Oh sure, the people is okay. You gotta admire them, I admit that. No, it’s not the Korean people I can’t stomach, it’s their goddam country. The people, they work real hard, they get on and do things. Why, some of my workers are better than the guys back home.

  ‘But no sir, I ain’t gonna be taking no good memories of this place back to Tampa. Wife and kids gone down there. Got me a real nice condo, and I’m fixing to go into the aircon business in Florida. Make some real money, not like the shit contracts you get from the air force. My wife? Oh, sure, she’s been back there for ’bout a year now. Some of the gals here are pretty nice, so I haven’t been too lonesome.’ He chuckled evilly. ‘No, like I say, it’s not the people I can’t stand, it’s the goddam dirty country they live in. People’s fine, real fine folks. Won’t miss ’em, though. Not back in old Tampa.’

  I spent the night in a hotel he suggested in Songtan. I should have known better. It was a grimy establishment a few hundred yards from the main gate of the Osan Air Base, which is in itself the main gate for GIs coming into Korea, and the plasterboard between the rooms creaked in disharmonious rhythms to the sound of commercial exertions. My room showed the spoils of its previous occupant, a pilot (said the room boy) who had checked in at three and checked out at six.

  His flight plan was crumpled up in the wastepaper basket. It showed that he had flown his C141-B in from Hickam Air Base in Hawaii, and that before that he had been at Travis Air Base in California. He had carried forty thousand pounds of crew and cargo. He had flown across the Pacific through a dozen or so of those oddly named airway marker-points, Bebop and Bandy and Bambo and Gritl and the rest of them, before making Koko Head and Barbers Point and the top of his long gentle slide down to base. And he had presumably taxied his giant plane into the holding area, had ‘locked and sealed the aircraft and left the key, combination and seal number with the Airlift Co-ordination Center’, as required by Osan’s laws, and then headed straight for this grim warehouse and 180 minutes of dubious and not inexpensive pleasure.

  He had also been given a handout that suggested itself to be of the utmost importance. Officers of the United States Customs, it said, were presently giving their almost undivided attention to the importation from Korea of bogus versions of Cabbage Patch Dolls, Members Only T-shirts, Lacoste socks, Vuitton suitcases, Gucci shoes, and jackets by Polo. Cabbage Patch Dolls in particular would be regarded by the ever-vigilant officers with the greatest degree of suspicion, lest they be Korean-made counterfeits. Therefore be ye warned, pilots of America, that only one such beast would be permitted home per flier, and none could be sent stateside by post. This document had bitten the dust as well as the flight plan.

  I spent an unmemorable night in Songtan and woke to a furious and ice-cold rainstorm. The whole day was a struggle: the wind blasted in from the east, the rain lashed down on me, and I was drenched and shivering and in some danger of developing a classic case of exposure, which would have made a dreary end to the venture. The road widened into another emergency airstrip, and the gale whistled mercilessly across it. It was like being at sea somewhere in a cold high latitude—doubling the Horn in August, maybe, or the Bering Strait in March. The towns that came and went were deserted, the wreckage of trees and collapsed fences blocking some smaller streets: the gale was almost typhoon strength, the last efforts of the Chinese winter hurling themselves against the hills of Korea.

  At the top of one hill stood a monument and a café at its base, and—as much in search of a scalding cup of coffee as in seeing any history—I crossed the road and climbed its rain-slick steps. It turned out to be the site of the first major battle of the civil war—the site, fifty-odd miles south of the 38th Parallel, that in 1950 formed the boundary between the two Koreas, where the southern forces turned and started to fight back. The monument said little, but what it said minced no words:

  ‘As the vicious troops of the North Korean Army crossed the 38th Parallel, U.S. troops were ready to fight to preserve freedom, determined to punish the aggressors.

  ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Smith’s Special Task Force stood on Jukmi Pass supported by 17 Regiment, Republic of Korea Army—the first of the United Nations—Korean Joint Operations commenced.

  ‘Blood formed a stream after over six hours of fierce struggle—firing line stretched as far as the Makdong River.

  ‘While forlorn souls sleep on this hill, how can we forget our friendship with Allied nations created in blood?’

  A police patrolman who had stopped by for a break bought me a cup of coffee. ‘Walking?’ he said. ‘You mad.’ I felt it but, not wanting to abandon the adventure, launched myself back into the stinging rain and marched on. The Dutchmen had been on horses, and they had journeyed during June; in probable consequence of this relative luxury they recorded no complaints about their journey. I cursed them silently.

  Three hours later and I was sheltering miserably under an overpass near the proud city of Suwon: the name, which means ‘water field’, seemed singularly appropriate as the rain hurled itself down, and the bat-blind cars, their lights flickering through the thick grey mist of the downpour, ground slowly and painfully along the road. Suwon’s city walls rose before me—massive structures that had been built by King Chongjo at the end of the eighteenth century. The king had built the walls and a magnificent fortress—lately reconstructed, and just visible through the rain—in memory of his father, Crown Prince Changhon. The prince had been the cause of a curious court battle between two Yi Dynasty court factions known as the Party of Expediency (Sipa) and the Party of Principle (Pyokpa). Their battle had developed in the mid-1770s over whether or not each approved of the prematurely senile buffoon who was then Korea’s king, Yongjo, and the extraordinary manner in which he treated his son, the crown prince.

  Basically the king accused Changhon of some trifling misdemeanour and had him locked up inside a rice box until he died—in the same year as the American War of Independence, with which not quite all the world was then obsessed. The Party of Exped
iency thought the young man had been given a raw deal; the Party of Principle applauded the kingly act; the two sides fought bitterly. When the king himself died, and his grandson Chongjo assumed the Yis’ mantle royal, the prince was given a posthumous retrial and found innocent.

  Chongjo then decided to build the Suwon fortress in his father’s honour, and further to consummate the fondness of his memory by moving the Korean capital down from Seoul, thirty miles away. And so up went the walls and the parapets, the embrasures and the cannon platforms and the command bunkers, and a meditative moonwatching pavilion known as the Panghwasuryu-jong, within which the Confucian elders could ruminate on the wisdom of their scholar king. But the capital never was moved south, and when Chongjo died in 1800 his dream city, Korea’s Taj Mahal, was only half finished. It took another reign to complete, and it cannot have been very well built, for after two centuries of ice and rain and summer heat and the depredations of the Civil War, it was reduced to a crumbling shell. The government rebuilt it in 1975, spending more than three billion won and four years on doing so. And now it stands, foursquare and quite magnificent, and it loomed grandly through the storm, a memorial to an ill-judged prince, a dour and fateful place, and like so much of Korea enwreathed in sadness and tragedy.

  I took a car—the weather was simply too terrible to consider pressing on by foot—into the centre of the next town, a dormitory suburb called Anyang. This was clearly home to some of Seoul’s more chic set, since there was a Cartier shop and another selling genuine Gucci shoes. The small hotel the driver found, however, was a reasonably low establishment with mean, old-fashioned rooms and explosive-sounding plumbing. I was too cold to care, and I lay in a blood-heat bath for an hour, feeling very sorry for myself. I then slept until dark and awoke to find that all my joints had seized—or rusted—and the simple act of getting off the bed had become an agony. Life’s return was painfully gradual.

  Dinner was no great success either. I will take some time to forget the error I made in choosing to sit at a table beside the restaurant’s fish tank, unaware that this night had been chosen for the tank’s spring cleaning. I was halfway through a bowl of turgid and half-cold soup made from what tasted like rat when I glanced to my left, expecting to see some exotically coloured guppies and gudgeons and saw instead two large and very horrid-looking human feet. I dropped my spoon with a resounding clang and nearly spat the soup right across the room, at an elderly gent who seemed to be the only other client in the room.

  The feet walked across the tank’s sea bottom, the guppies fleeing in open-mouthed terror. Then the pedal progress stopped, and an enormous net broke the silver undersurface of the water and groped down for the guppies, who panicked and fled behind the yellowish leg-pillars. But they were ruthlessly rounded up, and the legs, which turned out to belong to one of the hotel waiters who had been lifted into the tank to give it a scrubdown, vanished and reappeared on the carpet. I slept fitfully that night, and dreamed.

  But the next morning was fresh and bright. The storm had passed out into the Sea of Japan (or the East Sea, as the Japan-loathing Koreans know it), and such blossom as had been spared by the gales was trembling against a background of a pale, newwashed blue sky. The boundary lions—or more properly the haetae, which are mythical, lionlike guardian beasts that eat fire—of the City of Seoul appeared on Route I after I had been walking for no more than half an hour: the journey—or at least, that part of it which coincided with the expedition of the Dutchmen—was almost at an end.

  Seoul! One of the world’s biggest cities, and yet one of the world’s least known. A city invariably mispronounced (it is homophonic with what it doubles as—the soul of Korea) and a place that is not amenable, unlike all other Korean cities, to having its name (which means capital) written in Chinese characters. A city that has been marched through and devastated by no fewer than four invading armies in this century alone. A city whose population had grown by 80 per cent in the last ten years—fewer than half a million struggled in the wreckage that remained after the Civil War, and today 10 million people jostle and scurry and beaver away in the fantastic jungle that has created itself—in an immense, uncontrolled, unlovely, unforgettable mitosis—in the past dozen years.

  It appears to have been set down in the middle of a range of mountains, and it is a city of great visual drama. Immense peaks of granite and schist—some rounded, some razor sharp, all scarred with pale streaks where vegetation has been unable to gain a foothold—soar from amidst the concrete. The peaks look vast, but they are in fact just hills—the tallest, at 2,627 feet, is no taller than Helvellyn—and they are no longer as wild as once, when leopards and tigers wandered down from them and ate people who were taking their ease on the city streets.

  Isabella Bird thought the city looked magnificent:

  Arid and forbidding those mountains look at times, their ridges broken up into black crags and pinnacles, off times arising from among distorted pines, but there are evenings of purple glory when every forbidding peak gleams like an amethyst with a pink translucency, and the shadows are cobalt and the sky is green and gold. Fair are the surroundings too in early spring, when a delicate green mist veils the hills, and their sides are flushed with the heliotrope azalea, and flame of plum, and blush of cherry, and tremulousness of peach blossom appear in unexpected quarters.

  But that was from afar. She had a rather different opinion once she had entered the city walls:

  I shrink from describing intramural Seoul. I thought it the foulest city on earth until I saw Peking, and its smells the most odious, until I encountered those of Shao-shing. For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable. Etiquette forbids the erection of two-storied houses, consequently an estimated quarter of a million people are living on ‘the ground’, chiefly in labyrinthine alleys, many of them not wide enough for two loaded bulls to pass, indeed barely wide enough for one man to pass a loaded bull, and further narrowed by a series of vile holes or green, slimy ditches which receive the solid and liquid refuse of the house, their foul and fetid margins being the favorite resort of half-naked children, begrimed with dirt, and big, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, which wallow in the slime or blink in the sun….

  A hundred years on, the stamp of invasion and the crump of artillery shells, the fires and the floods and the grand ambition of the new Koreans have utterly altered the city of Seoul. It is a city that is old, not ancient: it was founded in 1392, and before that Kaesong was the capital—and yet hides its antiquity behind high walls or so perfectly preserves and displays it that you feel it must be ersatz or plucked from a museum. The old is there, all right, but not as in Oxford, or Florence, or Istanbul. There are no ancient walls or leafy lanes of tottering houses, no tiny temples dating from Koguryo times or from the days of Unified Shilla, which nestle among the newer blocks of flats or beside the railway station. No, all Seoul looks fairly modern, like Tokyo now, or like Shanghai in another ten years’ time, or like Tulsa—the oldest buildings are the strongest creations of a century ago, and the truly ancient ones are hidden away, unused, on display for payment in folding money.

  Walking the road from Anyang northward, once I had slipped between the haetaes’ suspicious glowering, was rather like being in a film running in reverse—a film on the Rapid Development of a Modern City, with the newer shops and houses as the introduction, the less and less modern, the more and more faded structures making up the body of the story. The road into the city was lined with hundreds upon hundreds of shops, selling all the paraphernalia of an advanced society. In a flash the simple country life had gone, and in its place was not merely congestion and pollution and rush but comfort and luxury and all the familiar icons of mercantilism and materialism. Cameras, stereo sets, silk dresses, fast food, antiques, ornate embellishments for the car, lamps, wristwatches, climbing gear, porcelain, books. Once in a while there would be the kind of shop that had evidently been around for ages—a grocery or a man who sold calligraphy brushes and tojang, the name seals
, with their pots of sticky red ink, or the snake dealer or the deer-horn seller or the ginseng shop.

  It was all a pleasant bustle—not overnoisy (for Koreans, at least when sober, speak quietly), not overcrowded (not in the way Hong Kong’s Wanchai always is and the smaller streets of the Ginza can well be), not tempered with a bullying or a threatening feeling, for the Buddhist and Confucian spirit tends to preserve a degree—diminishing, my friends all say—of gentility and courtesy. I had been to Seoul many times, but this particular foray, through a southern suburb that looked as anonymous as any suburb anywhere in the world, was comfortable in its civilized ordinariness—old ladies out shopping for cabbage, chige-men carrying heavy deliveries on their backs, schoolboys hurrying back from lunch, young blades eyeing the young girls, salesmen in blue suits on their rounds of the shops, workmen digging holes in the road, inspectors checking on the times of the arriving buses, mothers with children tightly strapped to their backs, and every few moments a young woman in her bright chima chogori or an old man in a tall black horsehair hat and a grey suit, neatly pressed. John Betjeman, I thought, would have liked this road—Shihungdae-ro, it was called—and so would Auden. Here was the mysterious Orient benignly prosaic, getting on with its life without any fuss.

  Then a siren began to blow, and everything started to move very fast. Cars screeched to a halt, their drivers slewing in to the side of the road. Passersby dashed into the nearest available doorway. People snoozing on the street benches woke up and dashed inside, looking sleepily ill-tempered. I was hustled into a shop that made and sold tennis shoes, and a dozen other men and women came in with me. I stood around, wrinkling my nose in the glue-sodden air, wishing I could venture out into the comparatively fresh outside again. But there were policemen by the door, and a cruiser was rumbling slowly down the road, observers inside it peering at the empty streets.