MORE ABOUT COREA.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXXII, Issue 10482, 20 October 1894, Page 2

MORE ABOUT COREA.

(St James’s .Budget.) Thera are two great palaces in Seoul, the Old Palace and the Now Palace. The New Palace is four hundred years old and more. The Old Palace is as old as Seoul. Seoul is over five hundred years old. The King of Corea lives in the New Palace. His Majesty deserted the Old Palace —or, to be more exact, upon his accession to the throne declined to adopt it as his residence—because it was full of, to him, painful family reminiscences. The New Palace is, in reality, a collection of palaces. Like Seoul, its grounds are surrounded by an elaborate wall. Those grounds cover over a hundred acres, every yard of which ia beautiful. They are carefully laid out, but not with foolish elaboration. Nature is accented in those palace grounds, but never interfered with. Wherever an exceptionally pretty bit of view is to be seen, theta is a quaint Coreaa summer-house; and as the pretty bits tread upon each other heels, the grounds are rather thick with odd summer-houses and still odder pavilions. The Coreans arc intensely fond of Nature, but they are not fond of exorcise. They like to sit, even when they look upon the trees, the flowers, the hills, the sky, the lotus-ponds that they so love. Therefore the grounds of a king's home would be most incomplete were not rest and shelter available at every few yards. One summer-house is a favourite haunt of the present King. On a drowsy summer afternoon his Majesty sits there for hours, sipping tea and watching the, changeless loveliness of the view. The Coreans drink tea almost as perpetually as the Siamese do, and, like the Siamese, they are greatly addicted to drinking it out of doors. To one versed in Corean architecture, the little buildings in the palace grounds are unmistakably the maisonettes of a King, because their columns are round and their rafters are square. Only a King may nee the round column or the square rafter. Only a King may paint his house. Only a King may wear a coat of brilliant red. Of all men, only the King may look upon the faces of the Queen’s hundreds of attendant ladies. On occasions of ceremony, when the King is present, only he may face the south ; and if a horseman would pass by the gate of a King’s house, why, then that horseman must dismount and. slowly lead hia steed until he and it pe well beyond the palace portals. The New Palace, the homo of Corsa'a King, ia a place of considerable luxury, of great beauty, and of vast comfort.

Corean ladies are not aeon in public or by the public; foreigners never see them. The very few women who go freely upon the Corean highways are disfigured by poverty, aged by hard work. A Coreau woman who is Been upon the streets is either very poor or very bad form. Singing girls—or, as the Coreana call them, geisha —are conspicuous at almost every Corean ■ festivity. They sing,, they dance, they talk gently, they smile, they serve the viands and the wines to their employer and his guests; in brief, they do everything and anything to compensate the Corean . gentlemen for the enforced absence of the Corean ladies. Women seem to be an indispensable element of society after ali. Social enjoyment without them is more or less a failure; at least, in any prolonged form. And in those countries where wives and mothers must veil their faces, a class has sprung into existence, a class whose exact social position is almost if not quite outside the pale of European comprehension. The geisha of Corea, like the Yoshiwara women of Japan, are sweetly pretty, soft voiced, and charmingly mannered; and, like their sisters of Japan, they seem almost happy and quite dignified. Perhaps, indeed, they feel that they fulfil a national want—perform a national duty.