First Impressions

IN 1908 I did one of the wisest things I have ever done. I married Kathleen, second daughter of Mr Hall, my helpmate, companion and counsellor for nearly thirty years. At the same time I was transferred to Seoul, the capital of Corea.

We landed in Corea towards the end of February 1908. It was like coming into a different world. Viewed from a train, the countryside in Japan is charming, beautiful at times, dull at others, but nearly always pleasing to the eye. The hillsides are clothed in trees, the towns and villages look neat and everything that denotes man's handiwork reveals a people that is orderly and tidy. First impressions of Corea in 1908 were exactly the reverse, the white costumes worn by the poorer classes showed up their grubbiness, the villages looked miserably poor and unkempt, the hills were bare of trees and scored with ravines, heaped up with rocks and boulders. The main impression of our first journey from Fusan to Seoul was of a poverty-stricken country.

First appearances are often deceptive. Nor is the winter the best time to judge a country in northern latitudes. For that matter, many of the villages in Japan that look so neat and tidy from a distance are less pleasing at close quarters. In later years, when I came to travel all over Corea, I found it to be a beautiful country and in the intervening twenty years, the Japanese had made valiant efforts to plant the bare hills with trees. But much of my first impression was correct. Years of corrupt and inefficient government had impoverished the country.

The capital, Seoul, told the same story. Its setting is picturesque in the extreme. It is almost completely encircled by hills, round which runs a wall, complete in 1908 but since taken down at vital points in order to allow traffic to pass. Considerable areas were, and are, taken up by what were popularly known as the North and East Palaces. The former had been abandoned since the murder of the Queen in 1895. The latter was still the residence of the Corean King. Looked at from a height, Seoul made a striking picture.