Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  After the cleansing I climbed into the massive hot bath—my first encounter with a mogyoktang some months before had taught me the etiquette: I shall not easily forget the withering glares when I jumped straight into the common bath and began lathering myself there—and soaked for a while. Next, the sauna—far, far hotter than anything I had known back home, it seemed heated with volcanic and sulphurous gases, and breathing was almost impossible. I staggered out after two minutes, my lungs cripplingly scalded, and leaped into an ice-cold plunge pool, then back into the hot bath, then under a cold shower, was tempted back into the sauna, and so on for two hours at least, until I was pink and glowing with good health and felt intensely reluctant to leave this womblike home and go back to the hard floor of the yogwan next door.

  In fact, sensible to such needs, the management had provided a halfway house, an airlock in which the customers could slowly prod themselves back towards the real world. There was a long sitting-out room, a withdrawing room furnished with reclining chairs and a television, on which a mildly erotic film was unrolling, and from which pretty girls blindly blew kisses at the rows of sleepy, half-broiled bodies ranged around the room. I ordered a can of a much-advertised restorative drink with the unlikely name of McColl—it was ice-cold, but it tasted of a mixture of corn oil and methylated spirits and smelled of mercaptan, and if it did me any good it had a funny way of showing it, because I was very nearly sick on the spot. But maybe the actual effect was the intended one: I got up and left, collected my clothes and dressed, and then went out for a solitary dinner, curled up on my yo on the ondol floor, and slept like a top until dawn.

  The old ladies woke me with breakfast at seven. I am still not convinced that the best way to start the day is with kimchi and rice. Day lilies, aralia shoots, royal fern bracken, bluebells, wild asters, broad bellflowers, mugworts, and sow thistles—all of which are used in dishes to spice up the average Korean day—I could just about imagine being placed before me at seven, with the morning’s Korea Times and a cup of oksusucha. But when the inn’s Mesdames Park placed their tureen of year-old cabbage and turnip soused in sour vinegar and brine, and with garlic and red chillies stirred in for good measure (which is what kimchi essentially is, though anything, not only cabbage and turnip, can be kimchi’d, in the same way that anything can be curried in Hindustan)—when they placed that sorry-looking mess in front of me that morning, my stomach gave an unpleasant little nudge to the back of my throat, and I suddenly longed for a five-minute egg or a bowl of Weetabix and cold milk. It was the only incident of what I could actually call homesickness, and it vanished in a trice.

  Henry Savage Landor had never cared much for the yogwans of a century ago: ‘The Corean inn—and there are but few even of those—are patronized only by the scum of the worst people of the lowest class, and whenever there is a robbery, a fight or a murder, you can be certain that it has taken place in one of those dens of vice…it is within those walls that sinners of all sorts find refuge, and can keep well out of sight of the searching police.’ My own experiences, here in Sochon, and in every other country inn I have spent nights in, have led me to a quite contrary view. I was quite sorry to leave this place; the old couple turned out, with their cleaning ladies, to wave me off on the next leg, and they solemnly gave me their set of hwatu cards, with which they saw I had been fascinated, as a remembrance.

  Spring was rising fast up the peninsula now, and this morning was hot again, and all the blossoms were out. For some reason my rucksack was a great deal heavier—the Americans had loaded me down with lots of booklets on improbable topics like How to Adopt a Korean Child, and I had picked up the odd sample of rock or piece of interesting wood. Anyway, the going seemed tougher than for a long time, and I had to stop at the tops of most of the hills and catch my breath.

  I called in at one small café where two girls were working preparing lunch. I was the only customer, and I ordered a cup of cold coffee and a plate of biscuits, and the order was taken with what seemed to be sullen bad grace. It turned out to be shyness. Within five minutes the larger of the two girls—she was very comfortably chubby, in fact—was pawing at my arms and then, like her less respectable sister in Naju, suddenly thrust her hand right down the front of my shirt and squealed with misplaced delight. I found this all a great joke and thrust my own hand down her dress, discovering much the same as I had in the Room-Salon, only more. She wasn’t in the least bit offended, and in fact her friend rushed into the back room to get her camera for a picture of the happy scene. Both girls then asked me to stay for lunch (I had to say no, sadly) and then refused to accept a single won for the coffee. They came out into the sunshine and helped me on with my pack, and were waving me goodbye from beside their little café when I was half a mile up the next hill.

  Korean women, I am bound to think, present a most bewildering and complicated mixture of emotions and attitudes. One woman can at the same moment be delightfully shy and yet alarmingly forward, liberated and yet coquettishly deferential, sexually ignorant and yet wantonly promiscuous, aggressive and argumentative and yet strangely sulky and passive. So very different from the Japanese—so friendly, so curious, so studiously attentive. The baser side of me would often think that for stimulation and curiosity value there could probably be no greater woman than the Korean, but life could at the same time perhaps be pretty hellish, I have no doubt.

  Some miles along the road I encountered another woman. This lady, however, was of a great age, and she was waiting for the bus to Puyo. She was a little stooped and a little wizened, and she was standing at a bus shelter with a young man who waved to me as I passed and greeted me in English. The afternoon was very warm and I was glad to stop, and for the next fifteen minutes or so, until the country bus arrived to bear the couple away, I talked to them—or rather the old lady, who had a razor-sharp mind and a puckish sense of humour, talked to me. I had gathered that she had lived in this same village for the last fifty years, and I had asked her whether any battles had been fought here during the Korean War, or, as Koreans call it, the Civil War.

  She stepped back, puffed up her chest and steadied her legs, and started to talk as though she were delivering a seminar by Clausewitz out of John Keegan. Yes, she said, she had seen a considerable amount of action. A battle royal had been fought in this valley and on these surrounding slopes. The Reds, she said, warming to the theme, were gathered on that hill, there, you see it? with their artillery behind those trees, there. They had dug trenches where you see those pigpens, and had set up a battery of mortars over there. Now the United Nations—most of them Americans, though she had heard that some Britishers were with them too—came through here with their tanks one afternoon and set them down behind that bluff to the west…and so the lady went on, delivering (via the good offices of the boy, who acted as translator) a blow-by-blow account of the battle for her village, as though it had taken place just yesterday. In one field, she said, a hundred men had been killed, and she had been shocked to find, when the tide of war moved on, that the grass had been left rust red. She was talking when the bus swept into view, and she was still offering her interpretations of the various stratagems as the boy and the bus driver helped her up the steps, and the bus took her away to the town where she planned to visit her son-in-law and take him some vegetables for his dinner.

  It took me the better part of the day to reach the Puyo bridge and cross the wide, slow-flowing Kum River once again. A mile before the crossing I had been intrigued by the sight of a large and very secure-looking installation set down behind high walls beside the main road. It looked like some kind of military headquarters, or perhaps a secret laboratory or research plant, except that there was a sign outside the main gates and below the guard tower with the word insam in huge letters and the picture of a gnarled root beside it. Could this, I wondered, be what many disciples would regard as Korea’s single most strategic possession—the main factory for the processing and packaging of that most precious Korean product, prim
e quality red ginseng? I resolved to inquire the moment I had found a room and could safely use the old Paekche capital of Puyo as my base.

  There were any number of friendly little inns in the red-light quarter of town—which was easily identified by the scores of signs for barber shops and saunatangs—but the taxi driver who picked me up at the bridge insisted on taking me to what was laughingly called the Puyo Youth Hostel. This gaunt institution had clearly enjoyed a more ambitious history: some Korean investor must have once thought that tourists would flood in to inspect the Paekche relics and had constructed an immense, Soviet-style hotel in which the masses could stay. But few did; such visitors as had made it to Puyo town had based themselves farther north in Kongju or over in Taejon to the east, and the hotel remained empty for most of the year. Then someone had the bright idea of relaunching it as a youth hostel, affiliating it to the international movement, and encouraging parties of youngsters on educational tours to stop by. It was an odd idea—a youth hostel with suites and a ballroom and cavernous restaurants—and it didn’t seem to have worked: I was the only guest and a pretty discontented one at that, since the management forced me to pay top rates, of about thirty pounds a night. I railed inwardly at my folly and at the taxi driver’s insistence, but he clearly thought that such a palace was the only worthy home for a visiting foreigner and would have been ashamed to have offered me anything less.

  Puyo town itself is, like most Korean towns, outwardly not a pretty place; it is just an agglomeration of very forgettable little brick boxes in which commerce of one kind or another is carried on. But beneath the surface it is more charming, to no small extent because of the part it once played in the country’s beguilingly complicated history. Puyo is to Korea as Ayutthaya is to Thailand or Angkor to Cambodia or Kyoto to Japan—an old royal capital, revered for past achievement; it is nowhere near as memorable as Kyoto or Ayutthaya—far from it—but neither is it a town to be ignored.

  Korea has spent the better part of its four thousand years being invaded, crushed, subjugated, colonized, or in other ways trampled on: all its neighbours have made good use of the little peninsula—the Chinese, the Russians, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Japanese have all seized and invaded and wrecked according to their wants and moods. (The cynical though not wholly unreasonable view, on which I shall expand later, is that today’s Americans are following in the same ignoble tradition.) But through this all the Korean people have remained culturally inviolate, and in no small part because of their fierce attachment to their colourful and complicated history.

  It begins, like so many Eastern histories, with a legend—though woe betide you if you publicly declare your scepticism: I have a friend who was thumped on the jaw during a rowdy party in Seoul, for scoffing at the story of Tangun, the man who is supposed to have founded it all. Tangun himself is certainly no less believable a character than Adam or Noah, though the popularly accepted account of his own origins does strain credulity just a little. He is said to have been descended from Hwanung, who governed the universe in 4000 BC Hwanung happened to overhear the prayers of a male tiger and a female bear who wanted to become humans, and decided he would do them the necessary favour: he gave them twenty pieces of garlic and a chunk of wormwood and instructed them to live on this evil diet for a hundred days, without benefit of light. So the pair retired to a cave and glumly chomped away, the tiger giving up after a fortnight. Lady bear stayed on and was duly rewarded by being turned into a female human being. Her first wish being to have issue, she did what was apparently natural in those days and prayed for one beneath a sandalwood tree. A child whom she named Tangun was duly born on 3 October, 2333 BC (the date is still celebrated as National Foundation Day, showing how keen is the attachment to the legend), and promptly ruled Korea for the following 1,211 years.

  More prosaic work by archaeologists and anthropologists suggests that the Korean peoples were in fact descended from Manchurian and Mongolian nomads, tempered by influences from Siberia and even Scandinavia, and that they have been on the peninsula since palaeolithic times. The oldest known true Korean settlement has been dated at 4270 BC; the oldest city proper was at a place called Lolang, close to the site of today’s North Korean capital of Pyongyang, but its nature is indicative of the frustration and tragedy that were to lie ahead, because it wasn’t Korean but Chinese—a commandery of the Han Dynasty that lasted for four hundred years.

  It says much for the early robustness of the Koreans that they eventually forced the Chinese out: all the commanderies were closed in very short order, and only Lolang held out before it, too, was dismissed by the now-settled nomad Koreans. These first settlers came to be called the Koguryo, and by the fifth century they had managed—by virtue of constant warring with the aggressive Chinese—to maintain dominion over a vast tract of territory in the northern half of the peninsula, as far north, in fact, as the Amur River of Siberia and the Laio and the Sungari of China.

  At about the same time two other informal alliances of nomads—also on the run from, and pushed south by, the Chinese—staked claims to land and power in Korea. To the east—farthest from China, and thus less influenced by her and more waywardly independent—were the Shilla people; to the west, ranging across a huge tract of territory running down to the Yellow Sea and stretching from the Han River in the north to the Cheju Strait coast in the south, was the kingdom called Paekche, which had its first capital near Seoul and then retreated to Kongju and finally to the town in which I had found myself, Puyo.

  At its most basic, history’s judgement on these three kingdoms is thus: the kings of Koguryo (who operated from Pyongyang) were warlike; those of Shilla (whose capital was Kyongju in the southeast) were skilful and ambitious (and eventually triumphant in dominating the monarchs of the other two); and the rulers of Paekche were cultured and religious. Paekche, indeed, may have been a military starveling, but her influence far outweighed her standing as a relatively minor Korean power.

  It was Paekche, for instance, which introduced Buddhism to Japan. Paekchean architects built temples and statues in Japan, the great Horyu-ji temple at Nara being one such. (Koreans delight in the knowledge that the word nara means ‘country’ in Korean—proof positive of their early dominion over the Japanese.) Paekchean and Koguryon tutors taught in Japan. Paekchean embroiderers worked in the Japanese court. Koreans, who have suffered much at the hands of the Japanese, are fond of telling themselves of such early triumphs. A new book about which I read while I was walking across the old kingdom went so far as to claim that Paekcheans actually conquered Japan in the fourth century—that the Empress Jingu was a Korean who invaded Japan and not (as other less nationalistic histories have it) a Japanese who invaded Korea. Of such airy debates are theses made, and the chatter in certain kinds of bars enlivened.

  But only the history books make much of such achievement. You don’t come away from Puyo feeling that you were at the epicentre of a glorious movement. You don’t leave as you might leave Durham or Cadiz or Heidelberg, feeling that from here something was spread that changed the face of the world.

  Virtually nothing of the pride today’s Puyo people might deserve to feel is, in fact, even notionally evident there. Quite the opposite. The side of history of Puyo that today’s people cherish is—like the side of history cherished throughout much of Korea—the tragedy rather than the triumph. I have heard it said time and again that Koreans revel in their sadness, wallow in their misfortunes, and make much—too much, critics say—of their having been invaded and subjected so many times. Feeling sorry for oneself seems a peculiarly Korean trait, and the impression I received most powerfully from my stay in Puyo is that on a historical level, at least, a Puyoan wouldn’t be a Puyoan and a Korean wouldn’t be a Korean without being able to feel happily miserable about himself, his heritage, and his history. Tell a Puyoan he’s exported Buddhism to Japan, and he will look blankly at you; tell him that the Shilla kings and the T’ang Chinese conspired together to defeat him, and he’ll pe
rk up, with an almost Pavlovian response to gloom.

  Nowhere is this better reflected than in Puyo’s most memorably dispiriting memorial, a place called the Rock of Falling Flowers. (Another Puyo monument known as the Paekche Pagoda can also compete for the honours: when Puyo was captured by the Chinese in AD 660, the victorious general had a calligrapher carve a brief history of his triumph onto the side of the pagoda. The characters have come to be regarded as forming a classic of elegant Chinese literature, but the Puyo people immediately thought of it as a blot on the corporate escutcheon and, as soon as the Chinese had gone away, promptly buried the entire pagoda. However, an American dug the pagoda up again in 1890, and now it stands in a park in the centre of town, National Treasure Number 9, and a humiliation of which the Puyo people are now—given my theory about revelling and wallowing in misery—truly proud.)

  I went to the Rock of Falling Flowers on a warm late-Sunday afternoon, having spent a tedious hour looking at interminable rows of celadon pots at the Puyo branch of the National Museum, a modern structure of great ugliness built beside my hotel.