The Marmot’s Hole

Those with an interest in the history of early modern Korea and the history of Korea-U.S. relations may wish to drop by the Somerset Palace tonight at 7:30—Prof. Samuel Hawley will be talking on the travels and tribulations of George C. Foulk, the second U.S. minister to Korea.  The lecture promises to be fascinating:

In May 1884 U.S. Navy ensign George Foulk arrived in Korea with the returning first Korean mission to the West. As naval attaché to the legation in Seoul, he traveled throughout the kingdom and became fluent in Korean and one of the most knowledgeable Westerners on the country. When the first U.S. minister to Korea, Lucius Foote, resigned and left Seoul in January 1885, Foulk was thus the obvious choice to replace him. For the next two years the young officer, working alone on an ensign’s salary of $1,200, exhausted himself representing America in a country it did not want to be, while at the same time helping Korea modernize and maintain its independence amid the imperial rivalries of China, Japan, and the West. In the end he was recalled by Washington to smooth relations with the Chinese. Humiliated, angry, and disillusioned, Foulk resigned from the navy, forsook the U.S, and lived out his few remaining years in self-imposed exile in Japan.

This lecture is based on two largely overlooked sources that the speaker is preparing for publication: Foulk’s private letters to his family in New York, and his diary of a 1,400-kilometer sedan chair trip through southern Korea. In both, Foulk writes of events big and small with delightful energy and candor: of “the contemptible old drunkard” William Parker and “the Chinese hoodlum” Yuan Shih-kai; of Lucius Foote, “the boss coward of the age”; of Mrs. Foote exposed in petticoats; of “perfectly helpless” missionaries and a U.S. government “almost criminally negligent of its duties”; of attending dinner parties with a concealed revolver; of the indignity of using a toilet as scores of locals look on. Writing with a novelist’s eye for details, colors, smells and sounds, Foulk has left us one of the most vivid accounts of Chosŏn-dynasty Korea at the time of its opening to the outside world.

Samuel Hawley is a professor of practical English at Yonsei University in Seoul and the author of The Imjin War (2005), an account of Japan’s sixteenth-century invasion of Korea. His latest books, America’s Man in Korea: The Private Letters of George C. Foulk, 1884-1887, and Inside the Hermit Kingdom: The 1884 Korea Travel Diary of George C. Foulk, will be published by Lexington Books in mid 2007.

Be there or be square.

UPDATE: Fascinating writeup on George Foulk at, of all places, the CIA homepage.