Written on 2019-05-21.
This article, based on Korea and Her Neighbours by the British woman traveller Isabella Bird, describes how Seoul in the final years of the Yi dynasty was extremely unsanitary, lacking in cultural attractions, and devoid of the features befitting a city.
While bringing into sharp relief the contrast with Japan’s urban culture during the same period, it vividly conveys the reality of the final years of the Korean dynasty.
2019-05-21
Seoul has no works of art whatsoever, no parks, no attractions worth seeing, and no theatres.
Seoul lacks every one of the attractions found in other cities.
Although it is an ancient capital, it has no historic sites, libraries, or literature.
A chapter entitled “Korea in the Final Years of the Yi Dynasty,” which I published on 2012-08-22, had entered the real-time Top 10.
From http://banmakoto.air-nifty.com/blues/2011/01/post-40bd.html.
The following describes Korea in the final years of the Yi dynasty as depicted in Korea and Her Neighbours by the British woman traveller Isabella Bird.
For a city and a capital, its wretchedness is truly indescribable.
For reasons of etiquette, two-storey houses cannot be built, and the estimated 250,000 inhabitants therefore live mainly at “ground level” along a maze of streets.
Many of the alleys are not wide enough for two laden oxen to pass each other and are barely wide enough for a laden ox and a person to pass.
Moreover, their width is reduced by holes or ditches that receive the excrement and urine discharged from the houses.
Gathering willingly beside those horribly foul-smelling holes and ditches are half-naked children covered in dust and large, scabby, bleary-eyed dogs, which roll about in the filth or blink in the sunlight.
One of the sights of Seoul is a waterway that might be called a stream, a sewer, or a canal.
Black, stagnant water slowly flows through a broad, uncovered waterway, giving off a foul odour as it passes among the excrement and refuse accumulated on a riverbed that was once gravel.
Women can be seen scooping into hand buckets a mixture that can hardly be called water, or washing clothes in pools that can hardly be called a stream.
Although pine trees are scattered across the surrounding mountains, they are largely devoid of greenery and rise in undulating expanses of black, barren land.
Seoul has no works of art whatsoever, no parks, no attractions worth seeing, and no theatres.
*Viewers who watched last Saturday’s episode of Buratamori, entitled “Why Minami Became a City of Comedy,” will know that, in complete contrast to this Seoul, Japan during the same period built playhouses and sideshow booths to attract people to the vacant land that had been created in Sennichimae.
Moreover, they arranged for visitors to be brought in by boat from the Dotonbori River.*
Seoul lacks every one of the attractions found in other cities.
Although it is an ancient capital, it has no historic sites, libraries, or literature, and because its people were almost entirely indifferent to religion, it has no temples; consequently, it lacks the imposing presence created by the stately religious buildings found in even the most wretched towns in Qing China or Japan.