Here are some great photographs from Fifteen Years Among the Top Knots, written by Lillias H. Underwood in 1904.
Of course, why just look at a few photos when you can read the whole damn book for free (and in several different formats) at Archive.org.
(HT to Korean Economic Reader)
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I haven’t checked out any of the photos, but the text is realy interesting. I love old writers:
“I landed in Korea at the port of Chemulpo on a cloudy, windy march day in 1888. My eyes fell on a rocky shore, back of which the bare sharp outline of low hills, whitened with patches of snow, was relieved by no trees to break the monotony of the scene. Dreary mud-flats, instead of a sandy beach, lay reeking and slimy along the water’s edge. As our boat neared the shore, for there was an is no pier, and ships even at high tide canot approach very near, wild and strange-looking men, uttering wild and strange sounding speech, came hurrying down the hill to inspect us.”
The last sentence reminds me of getting off the plane at Gwangju airport last year.
Thank you very much for all the links, Robert. Now, y’all are going to think I’m a fussbudget—especially with the kind of language that gets thrown around on this blog—but please don’t use the “d” word to describe the works of a Presbyterian missionary! (Books by Methodists are debatable.)
Unless you’re a Catholic and you used the word deliberately….
“Now, y’all are going to think I’m a fussbudget”
No, I think you’re a precious religious nut. How about you leave those sort of decisions to the owner of the (non-religious) blog?
If I was a “religious nut,” I’d be trolling half the comment threads for all their sexual innuendo and the like. The word just caught me off guard in the context, and my joke about Methodists and Catholics (which, ironically, the Western Confucian may be the only one to get) was an attempt to make light of my own reaction.
Great photos! I flipped through this book at Yonsei University Library awhile ago, so it’s nice to have a chance to read it now.
The frontspiece (the first full photo) on this page - http://blog.daum.net/hsjs7/6364692 - looks rather familiar. You can even see the bridge over the stream that Samcheongdong-gil now covers.
The Dongsipjagak (mentioned by Bulgasari) and the pavilion 1 km south at the intersection of Jongno & Sejongno are weird…like island relics from another age, cut off from all context. At least with the city gates—also orphaned from their surroundings—you can visualize the walls and see what their function was.
Sewing - “orphaned from their surroundings” - Nicely put. You could probably also include the bell tower at Jonggak station.
By the way, if you do a search for “Korea” at the site where you can download the book, you can find about a dozen books from that time period.
I’ve been scrolling through Lilian Underwood’s book, and there are a lot of fascinating stories there, about things like stone fights, trying to convert the queen, how they got the land for the foreigners cemetery, etc.
That website is really an incredible find. I followed bulgasari’s advice, and found an interesting book “Corea, Chosen, land of the Morning Calm” 1898, a type of travel guide written by a British guy. There’s a bizarre story in there (pg 9-15) about a band of foreigners who tried to steal the body of Daiwongun, along with buried treasure, and got caught. Other stories about leapards, Korean customs, etc. Quite interesting
dokdo, One of the members of the graverobbing team, Ernst Oppert, went on to write his own book about Chosun. I think it was Englished as “Corea: A Forbidden Land.” We longnoses have a long history of “adventurism” here.
Bulgasari, thank you very much for the tip, and for Robert’s mention of the Internet Archive in the first place. I had know idea they’d be a repository for books—what a marvelous resource—and these are full photographic reproductions of the texts, not just text or PDF files! Wow! What a find!
That’s just under “Korea—American Libraries.” There’s more stuff under “Korea—Canadian Libraries,” and probably more yet under the other text subheadings, but it’s kind of slow right now, so that’s as far as I got. This is the most awesome Internet resource that I had never heard of. It beats the pants off Project Gutenburg (whose texts also seem to be included) and Google Books.
Does anyone know - are the books on this site all 100 years old because the copyright has expired? Or because they just started scanning old books first?
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[...] Sidenote: Those interested in photography of old Japan might be interested in London-based photo-historian Terry Bennett’s new book, Photography In Japan, which was reviewed by the Japan Times today. If you’re interested in Korea too, the Marmot’s Hole has posted some fascinating links to a collection of photos taken in 1905. [...]