The Marmot’s Hole

The Marmot has graciously allowed me to post a long article about crime in the streets of Seoul during the 1890s. It is part of a project I am doing that, unfortunately, will only be published in Korean so I thought this would be a good place to make it available to those expats who have an interest in old Choson:

In the mid 1890s, crime in Seoul was rampant - the newspapers, magazines and legation correspondences were peppered with accounts of armed robbery and murder. So severe was the problem that The Korean Repository was compelled to publish a long article describing the lawlessness of the country:

“From every direction reports exist of highwaymen and robbers. These pests exists in especially large numbers about the capital, infesting the roads along which the commerce to and from the provinces passes and preying upon it constantly.” According to the article, the gangs consisted of 30 to 90 men who preyed upon the young and old men and women who had the misfortune of falling into their grasps. These brazen bands of armed men raided small villages stealing clothing, furniture, money, and even the doors of buildings. Their banditry made many of the roads around Seoul impassable after nightfall. Even lone policemen were not safe from their depredations.

The Independent reported in July 1897: “A highwayman knocked down Police Sergeant Kang Chongwo on Broad Street last Tuesday night and took away his clothes, a watch, and a pocket book. The thieves are getting bold now a days.”

Some of the crimes were even bizarre. In December 1896, a lone Korean policeman managed to apprehend a gang of grave robbers near the West Gate and Pekin Pass where they had been preying upon the graves – digging them up and removing valuables. Sometimes, however, the bodies themselves were stolen and held as ransom.

“A band of robbers entered the ancestral grave of Pak Ki Yang, a former Governor of Chung-Chong, and dug up Pak’s father’s body and cut away the head of the corpse. They left a letter on the grave saying that if Pak wants to recover his father’s head he must send $2,000 in silver or paper money to them at a certain point in the grave yard within three days. This was not done, hence the head is still in the hands of the robbers.”

But according to a contemporary Western expert on Korean affairs, this was nothing unusual, and, in fact, was the norm. He wrote:

“No country is more famous for its skilled grave thieves and expert desecrators of tombs than is Korea, for no custom is more common, than that of seeking revenge on the living by molesting the resting places of the dead.”

Most of the crimes were committed by Koreans who preyed upon Chinese, Japanese, or their fellow Koreans. Westerners were, for the most part, unmolested by the Korean highwaymen and bandits, and Seoul was considered a relatively safe city. Even during the unrest of the Baby Riots of 1888 when some Koreans believed that foreigners were abducting and killing Korean children for medicine and food, Horace Allen dismissed the newspapers accounts of the “outrages” and claimed: “Foreigners are safer in Seoul than in New York.” Despite Allen’s early optimism, crimes occasionally did occur in which the victim was a foreigner.

CRIMES OF OPPORTUNITY
Many of the crimes committed against Westerners were crimes of opportunity. Coolies and laborers hired to transport goods from Seoul to Chemulpo, occasionally ran off with the goods. Often the pilfered item was something small that would not be readily noticed until it was too late, but occasionally an entire load of goods simply did not arrive. No one was exempt from being a victim of this pilfering. Several naval officers and even the American Minister to Korea suffered at their hands.

As bicycles became more popular as a means of transportation and relaxation, they also became popular targets. The local English language newspaper, The Independent, was peppered with accounts of parts stolen from bicycles and then resold in the market – often to other foreigners.

But not all the victims of bicycles thefts were foreigners:

“A Korean merchant in Chemulpo brought sometime ago a bicycle from Shanghai for Gen. An Kyensu. Before its delivery however the machine was stolen by somebody. It is suspected that the wheel was brought up to Seoul but as its make is unknown Gen. An is unable to identify it, even if he were to see it. He will be grateful for any information given in regard to the missing wheel.”

As Seoul’s population of foreigners increased, there were a number of snatch crimes – especially against women.

“A foreign lady went to the grounds of the Mulberry Palace a few days ago for a walk. She was accosted by a Korean boy who asked the time of day. She took out her gold watch and showed the dials to the boy. He snatched the watch from her hand and made his escape through the openings of the Palace wall.” Two weeks later the woman offered a return of 30 dollars for the return of her watch, but it does not appear that she ever recovered her goods.

After another woman nearly had her purse snatched on the street by a young Korean male, a foreigner noted that this type of robbery was uncommon in Korea and he speculated that it had been learned from the Westerners – particularly the sailors.

BREAKING AND ENTERING
In January 1897, an American named Crumne (possibly Krumm) who lived in a second story apartment in one of the new brick buildings built by the Seoul Improvement Company on Legation Street was robbed of three suits of clothes and two Japanese outfits. A couple of months later, Reverend F. S. Miller, who resided in Hankang, had ten dollars worth of clothing stolen from his house. Mr. Wakefield of the Korean Customs Department lost two silver candlestick holders and a silver cigarette box with Russian lettering on the front to a bold thief who entered his residence.

One of the most serious of these break-ins in terms of money was the loss of nearly 400 dollars pilfered from the home of Hutchinson, a teacher at the Royal English School, in the summer of 1897. The money was contributions made by the British residents of Seoul for a dinner party to be held in honor of the Queen’s Jubilee.

But homes were not the only buildings pilfered. “The English Mission Hospital in Nak Dong was entered by robbers who carried away several surgical instruments and other articles of value.”

One extremely brazen thief, Pak Chun-son, walked into the German consulate and tried to steal a pistol he found in one of the empty rooms. He was apprehended by an alert Korean employee and was promptly turned over to the Korean police where he not only admitted that he had tried to steal the pistol but also confessed to several other crimes including the theft of the barometer from the French Cathedral and the clock from Chong-dong school. The items were eventually recovered.

Evidently, the cathedral was a popular target. One Saturday night in September 1896, a Yi Bong-kuk entered the cathedral and stole several valuable unnamed items. The police quickly apprehended him the following day in Chong-no where he was attempting to sell the items. The goods were recovered and returned.

Bong-kuk was taken to the city prison where they discovered that he had just left the prison a couple weeks earlier after serving four months imprisonment for attempting to rob the home of Taiwon’kun.

PUNISHMENT
Thieves and highwaymen were, unless one had high connections or was rich, severely punished by the Korean authorities. If they were lucky [a matter of opinion], they were beaten and imprisoned for several months. One writer described the life of a prisoner in the City Prison:

“Occasionally one sees a man with body bloated as with dropsy and rotting as with gangrene, carried though the streets of Seoul on a jiki. He is being carried from one of the city or national jails to be thrown, perhaps, at the gate of a foreign hospital to be fed and treated by a foreigner at foreign expense, till he recovers or until king death releases him from pain.”

“For theft, perhaps he has been imprisoned with many others in a dark, dirty hole, unheated even in the coldest weather, to be starved or underfed until insensibility brings relief by rendering further torture impossible.”

The writer noted that the prisons in Seoul were better than those in the countryside where “sometimes the poor wretches grow so desperate that they gnaw any thing – the straw on the floor, their clothes, and even the skin and bones of their own arms – to satisfy their awful hunger.”

While many thieves were imprisoned, others were simply executed – sometimes immediately - after their trial as an example to the rest. In the late 1890s the preferred methods of execution were hanging and strangulation.

William Franklin Sands, an American advisor to the Korean court, described the strangulation process: “A light cord loop was passed around the neck, and a stout stick passed through it, and given to some able-bodied person to twist until no longer necessary.”

Often several prisoners were executed at once in the City’s prison courtyard by stringing them up by their neck on a long horizontal pole so that their toes were mere inches off the ground. One such execution took place on May 15, 1896 when “the Seoul court passed the death sentence on five robbers and they were hanged the same day.”

Sometimes the victims refused to wait for the guilty to be punished. In September 1896, a mob pushed its way into the Court and dragged Kim Keun-suk, a robber, into the street where they lynched him.