CHAPTER V

THE CAPITAL AND COURT OF KOREA

Beautiful for situation is Mount Zion. On the side of the north is the city of the Great King. Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generations following. Psalm xlviii. 2, 12, 13.

Name of the capital.

AMONG the unexpected features of Korea is the possession of a capital that, as regards size and population, may fairly be counted one of the great cities of the East. I have spelled the name Söul;1 but I should say in advance that I have never met two persons, even scholars, who pronounced the name in exactly the same way. Seoul, Syool, Sawull, Sowul, are among the more popular phonetic transliterations. That the word is a dissyllable seems to be certain; but not even on the lips of Koreans does the precise equivalent to the vowel-sounds employed make itself apparent. Perhaps to an English ear the true pronunciation is best conveyed by saying that the way in which an Irishman pronounces the immortal part of him fairly represents the sound.

To those who bear in mind the Chinese connection of Korea, upon which I shall so frequently have to insist, it will be no surprise to learn that Söul is in most exterior respects a Chinese city. Indeed, it was first made the

1 The name signifies 'capital city.' Compare the Chinese Pe-king and Nan-king, i.c. northern and southern capitals, and the Japanese Tokio and Saikio (Kioto), i.c. eastern and western capitals. Soul is the Sior of Hendrik Hamel.

Walls and

capital of the Korean kingdom exactly five centuries ago by Ni Taijo, the founder of the reigning house,1 a monarch who in everything aped the Chinese model, at that time, and, we may also say now, the sole stan- gates of dard of majesty or fashion to the petty surrounding States. He built the stone wall, over twenty feet high, with battlements and loopholes for archers, by which the city is

Soul.

surrounded; and he made the eight great gates, consisting of a tunnelled passage in the wall, surmounted by a single or a double-storeyed projecting tiled pavilion, by which access is still gained to the interior.

Like the gates of

1 The regalia and robes of state of Ni Taijo are still preserved in the metropolitan monastery of Sak Wang Sa, which he founded in memory of his 'call' to rule from this spot. The monastery is superbly situated in a romantic wooden gorge, about twenty miles from Gensan.

2 They are situated two on the north, one on the north-east, one on the east, one on the south-east, two on the south-west, and one on the west. The main gates are the east and west.

Peking, these have names of swelling import-the Gate of Elevated Humanity, the Gate of High Ceremony, and the Gate of Bright Amiability. As at Peking, also, the heavy wooden doors, sheathed and clamped with iron, are shut soon after sunset, the keys being taken to the King's Palace, and deposited with His Majesty, or, when the Chinese Commissioners are in Söul, with the latter. No bribe can then open them, and the only method of ingress is by climbing, with the aid of a friendly hand with a rope, a dilapidated portion of the wall. Just before my visit a British admiral, being a few minutes too late, had been compelled to enter in this not unnautical fashion; whereat the Korean dignitaries could not make up their minds whether to be more shocked or amused.

Its situation.

The entire space circumscribed by the wall is not built over, for the latter climbs with antelope-like facility the scarp of the various rocky hills and mountains by which the city proper is surrounded, and includes much ground which could by no possibility admit of human dwelling. In fact, the wall may be said merely to embrace a defensible area, in the midst and lowlying portions of which has been placed a great human hive. The situation of the city, thus nestling in a trough between high hills, is therefore picturesque in the extreme, and would appear to have been specially designed for the purpose, were it not that the confined atmosphere in summer operating upon a densely-crowded mass of dwellings where the most. contemptuous disregard of sanitary law prevails, renders it at that time a nursery of pestilence and sickness. Unlike the scenery which I have described in the last chapter as prevailing in the more northerly and eastern parts of Korea, the hills surrounding Söul are bare, arid, and uninviting. 1 An interesting collateral admission of Chinese suzerainty.

The disintegrated granite of which they are composed does not admit of much vegetation, while such verdure as once adorned their slopes has in large measure been swept away. A scanty growth of timber clothes the north hill, called Pouk San, which, very much like Lycabettus at Athens, rises to a sharp elevation behind the Royal Palace. But the other

hills are almost treeless, with the exception of Nam San, which is splendidly timbered up to its summit, 800 feet above the city on the south. Further away on the northern side the nearer elevations are dominated by the imposing mass of the Mountain of Pouk Han, whose gleaming grey pinnacles protrude themselves from sterile lower slopes.

It is worth while to climb Nam San; for from there is a wild and gloomy outlook over mountains rolling like grey billows on every side; while along the widening valley

Beaconfires.

between them the river Han pushes its broad and shining Icoils to the sea. On the top of Nam San, too, are four beacon-towers-circular structures built of big stones, in whose interior tall piles of leaves and brushwood are nightly set ablaze, to signal to the capital the message of peace and security or the reverse, which, like the bale-fires of Troy, is supposed to have been passed

from peak to peak from the southern confines of the kingdom. On the north-west side another tall and threepointed hill-known as Sam Kok San, or Three-peaked Hill, which the French in their expedition of 1866 called the Cock's Comb, because of the fiery red which it blushed at the early dawn-flashes an answering gleam from the opposite quarter; nor has this primitive form of telegraphy been nominally abandoned (though it is believed to have fallen into practical disuse), except on the lines where it has been replaced by the electric wire. A special code of signals