Written on 2019-05-21.
Based on Korea and Her Neighbours by the British woman traveler Isabella Bird, this passage introduces how unsanitary, culturally barren, and urbanly underdeveloped Seoul was in the final years of the Yi Dynasty.
By highlighting the contrast with Japanese urban culture of the same period, it vividly conveys the reality of late Joseon Korea.

2019-05-21

There were absolutely no works of art in Seoul, no parks, no performances worth seeing, and no theaters.
Seoul lacked every charm that other cities ordinarily possess.
Though it was an old capital, it had no historical remains, no libraries, and no written records.

The Condition of Korea in the Final Years of the Yi Dynasty.
The chapter I posted on 2012-08-22 under that title had entered the real-time top 10.
From http://banmakoto.air-nifty.com/blues/2011/01/post-40bd.html.
The following is the condition of Korea in the final years of the Yi Dynasty as written in Korea and Her Neighbours by the British woman traveler Isabella Bird.

For a city and a capital, its wretchedness is truly beyond description.
As a matter of propriety, two-story houses could not be built, and therefore the estimated 250,000 residents lived chiefly at ground level in maze-like streets.
Many of the alleys were not wide enough for two pack oxen to pass each other, and were only barely wide enough for a pack ox and a human being to squeeze past one another.
Moreover, even that width was narrowed by pits or ditches receiving the filth of feces and urine coming out from the houses.
Gathering beside those horribly foul-smelling pits and ditches were half-naked children covered in dust and large dogs with scabies and dim eyes, the dogs rolling about in the filth or blinking in the sunlight.
One of the sights of Seoul was what might be called a brook, or perhaps a sewer, or a channel.
In a wide uncovered watercourse, black stagnant water slowly flowed with a foul odor among the excrement and dust that had accumulated on what had once been a gravel bed.
There were women drawing up with buckets what was not water but a mixture, and washing clothes in what was not a brook but a puddle.
The surrounding mountains had scattered pine trees, but for the most part they were without greenery, rising instead in black barren undulations.
There were absolutely no works of art in Seoul, no parks, no performances worth seeing, and no theaters.

Viewers who watched Buratamori last Saturday under the title “Why Minami Became a District of Comedy” will have seen that, in complete contrast to such a Seoul, Japan of the same period built theaters and sideshow huts in the open land at Sennichimae in order to gather people there.
And it did so in such a way that visitors would come by boat from the Dotonbori River.

Seoul lacked every charm that other cities ordinarily possess.
Though it was an old capital, it had no historical remains, no libraries, and no written records, and because it was almost indifferent to religion, it had no temples either.
As a result, it lacked the imposing force that grand religious structures give even to the most shabby towns in Qing China or Japan.