2025-11-05 - The Land of the Morning Calm by Percival Lowell ============================================================ Korean Flag by Shivero FX In the past i have watched a lot of Korean historical drama. So i am more familiar with Korea than the average US citizen in the 1800's would have been. When i downloaded this book, i didn't have high expectations because of how long ago it was published. The author's humor and wit came as a pleasant surprise. His descriptions of the tail end of the Joseon era align very closely to what i have seen in historical dramas. One major discrepancy is that women have a much more prominent place in the dramas than they do in the society described in this book. Here's another review of this book by Colin Marshall. The Adventures of Percival Lowell What follows are interesting excerpts from the book. * * * It is because the far East holds up the mirror to our own civilization,--because by her very oddities, as they strike us at first, we learn truly to criticize, examine, and realize our own way of doing things, that she is so very interesting. It is in this that her great attraction lies. It is for this that [people] have gone to Japan intending to stay weeks, and have tarried years. Habit blunts the perceptions. But let us change our attitude toward the subject in question; let us see it from a sightly different point of view, and we begin to be aware of what it really is in a way we were never conscious of before. Conceive, then, a language devoid of gender, number, and person,--one that takes into account neither sex nor plural nor individual. Here is a speech that at the outset utterly disregards what seems to be the fundamental principles in our own process of thought. It denies, by ignoring it, that question which has not only perplexed metaphysicians for centuries, but which is tacitly assumed as innately proven and acted upon by the world at large,--the conscious yet controverted distinction between [one's] mind and the universe beside. What is mind? What is matter? [These] are problems which the far-Oriental solves by regarding [oneself] and others in the light in which [one] would regard a house,--namely, simply as a material fact. * * * To one reflecting on the utter contrast between the feelings that enwrap us with the gloom of night and those we inherit with the birth of the new day, it would almost occur to doubt a continuous personal identity. In the gloaming our sensitive side, our feelings, our passions, seem to awake to a strength, an acuteness, that had lain dormant during the light. For joy or sorrow, the heart measures then all things by itself. But with the morning awakes the thrill of being. We feel the throb of life within us that answers to the pulse of life without. Action in thought has paled before the thought of action, and we forget our world of fancy in our fancy for the world. * * * The Chinese, among their other self-given appellatives, have always been prone to call themselves after their ruling dynasty. Most naturally, therefore, other nations on making their acquaintance learned to call them by the name they gave themselves; and then, getting accustomed to it, continued its use long after the Chinese had given it up,--a curious instance, indeed, of being more conservative than the most conservative people in the world. * * * The Sa Kwan--such was his title--was the most celebrated folk-lorist. He was admirably adapted to his temporary office, for he was a born entertainer. The stories he could tell and the legends he knew would fill a volume by themselves. He was a consummate Korean mythologist... * * * Here, then, subjectivity vanishes. The whole cosmos--[humanity itself] included--is reduced to its objective existence. It is the boldest expression of materialism the world has ever seen. It does more than posit a theory on the subject; it assumes such a theory to be a fact. Each [person] has not yet fully realized the division of the world into self and not-self. [One] recognizes intuitively an equal right, or something approaching it, in [one's] fellows to what [one] possesses [oneself], so that the drawing of lots to settle matters strikes [one] not only as having the keeping of the peace to recommend it, but as being peculiarly the rational thing to do. * * * The worship of ancestors, so called, follows then directly from the patriarchal system; and its observances are logically in keeping with the idea. To call it worship, however, is misleading. It is simply a form of showing respect. The worship of ancestors is, properly speaking, only a communion with the dead. It is in no sense a religion, nor part of one. * * * ... in Korea woman practically does not exist. Materially, physically, she is a fact; but mentally, morally, socially, she is a cipher. * * * A long while ago--the Korean guess of three thousand years will do as well as another date--a certain spirit called Tan Kun, or "The Lord of the Oak Tree," descended from Tè Kun, and made himself ruler of the country. He called it Chosön, or "The Land of the Morning Calm." If the spirit spoke Korean, he named it Achim Koun. All we know is that when, later, Chinese came to be the language of literature, the name was Sinicized into Chosön. * * * My unexpected appearance made them all [the students] pause; but, the momentary excitement over, they returned with renewed assiduity to their books and began again their humming, like a swarm of bees once more on the wing. It is allowable to read aloud; or rather any other method is unheard of. Each student hums to himself, his voice, now rising, now falling, in two different tones, so as to impart a sort of chanting character to the occupation. ... what they begin at school, they practise through life. This hum may be said to pervade the far-East. It is one of the distinctive sounds of any Japanese inn. * * * ... the streets of [Tokyo] or Canton in the early evening are, in their way, as brilliant as those of Paris or London become nine hours later. But with Söul it is different. While [Tokyo] is spangled with lights and lanterns, Söul lies dark and silent as a tomb. It is not that her people have failed to discover, but they are not permitted to enjoy. The official oligarchy wills it so. That the Koreans do not borrow of the night as other nations have learned to do... is due to a law as singular in its existence as it is striking in its effects. [Oh dear, healthy sleeping habits and no light pollution, how uncivilized!] * * * The damsels were Korean singing girls. Now, the singing-girl is an institution in the far-East. The word but faintly expresses the person. In Japan, where the class attains its greatest luxuriance, they are called "geisha,"--a name which means "accomplished person," and much more nearly does them justice; for to sing is but a small part of their duty. Their business is to sing, play, talk, flirt, and generally to make themselves as agreeable as possible; for they constitute all the female society there is. ... She is a professional entertainer, who, after a thorough course of preparatory study, devotes her life to enlivening banquets, which are always, except for her presence, exclusively stag parties. [So a singing-girl or a Geisha is basically a female minstrel who specializes in entertaining men.] Only the officials can often afford themselves the luxury. * * * A dinner in Korea is a day, not a night, affair; and artificial light is rather a twilight of the day that is passed than the harbinger of a new one just begun. * * * It has often been said that Poetry and Mathematics are own sisters. They differ in feature, but not in blood; and their common mother is Imagination. For art is to the senses what science is to thought, and both have their birth in the realms of fancy. Of all the arts, perhaps the one most closely allied to mathematics is music. To bind them by law who are already espoused in heart, is one of the prettiest conceits by the far-East. ... with it the key-note of all science is actually a note,--a note of music; for the standard of all measures is based upon the size of a certain flute, whose self-determined criterion of accuracy in the sound it is capable of giving forth. The opening page of far-Eastern treatises of mathematics begins as follows: > The measures of length, of volume, and of weight, all are derived > from the length of a certain kind of flute. This flute is of > bamboo and its long-shortness such as to produce a particular > [specified] note. > > A certain number of grains of millet of average size make a > length equal to that of the flute. This grain of millet forms the > unit of length. > > The flute will hold twelve hundred grains of millet. This is the > unit of volume. > > The weight of twelve hundred grains gives the unit of weight. So runs, in substance, the ancient Chinese definition now some [millennia] old. Let us listen to what is entitled "The Song for finding the First Figure in the Cube Root of a Give Number." I give it literally, without trying to keep the poetic form. I doubt whether I shall be able to convey the real beauty of the idea. The conception is to our thought so novel that the line between the beautiful and the ludicrous is a very difficult path to travel. Of a thousand the cube root is ten; this is clear When the number given is thirty thousand, the root is only thirty and a little more. The first figure in the root of nine hundred an ninety thousand even is some tens; And the root is but one hundred when the number has reached a million. Here then the /motif/ of the poem is the changelessness of the cube root amid the ever changing transitory number. Numbers succeed each other, like flowers that last but for a day; but the root, deeper down, lives on perennial. These poems are very old; they run back into long-past centuries of Chinese civilization. Nor is their association with mathematics an isolated phenomenon. The whole official oligarchy is based on proficiency in verse. But they have here an aspect which is even more interesting than mere age. They point again to that shadowy influence from the homes of Aryan thought. Books of Indian geometry and algebra show the same desire to interweave philosophy and song. But without, at present, crossing to the old Altaic table-land, this book of the Korean mathematician bears internal evidence of some value. It contains unmistakable signs of a mathematical knowledge prior to any contact with modern European thought. There is from Confucius, from "The Book of Rites",--an odd place to find such a thing,--the following quotation: > A right-angled ruler can be formed by making the base altitude, and > hypotenuse in the proportion of 3, 4, and 5; "Such a ruler," adds the Japanese translator... "as is used by Japanese carpenters." Both the ratio, then, and the device were known in China at least twenty-four centuries ago. A fact like this seems to bring the intellectual kinship of the world startlingly before one. [The author also quotes ancient Chinese writing about pi.] The symbols for numbers in Korea, as in Japan, are Chinese. But the Chinese symbols are not themselves native. In their turn, they were borrowed from India. Though we should never recognize any connection to-day, they are, in fact, transformations of the symbols [of Indian origin]. A study of the older Indian forms makes this almost indisputable. The most ancient bear a striking resemblance to the Chinese... Meanwhile the Indian symbols went on changing, until at the time the Arabs in their turn came and borrowed, the symbols had nearly reached the form with which we are familiar. * * * The monastery was Buddhist. The Shinto faith, or what corresponds to it in Korea, has no monasteries,--only temples properly so-called, and shrines; and the sect of Buddhism to which it belonged, was what we may compare among Christian sects, to the Roman Catholic. For Buddhism can boast as many sects and hair splitting refinements of belief as Christianity. The Korean churches are mostly those which have clung to the old ways. The outward expressions of these sects are as various at the corresponding ones in Europe, and the expressions themselves bear a very striking resemblance to their counterparts at home. A European ignorant of the existence of Buddhism, standing in the Flower-Stream Temple, would have believed [themself] to be in a Roman Catholic Monastery. This is what actually happened to the Catholic missionaries when they first came to China. They stood aghast at what they saw. For there they were face to face, in a strange land, with what they had firmly supposed to be their own property. They were at loss what to say till, their subtlety coming to their rescue, they hit upon an explanation. Without hesitation they pronounced it the personal work of the devil. "You have indeed got," they said to the people, "the outward forms of true faith; and the only difference between you and us is that your god is our devil." So encouraging and flattering a way to put it to those whom they hoped to convert! * * * Time is a purely Western necessity. The very impersonality and consequent individuality of the far-Oriental renders [them] superior to it. [One] has no engagements to meet, and therefore [one] needs no punctuality to meet them. ... In Korea... simply because all day is given up to the feast, and there is no such thing as being too early. author: Lowell, Percival, 1855-1916 detail: source: tags: ebook,travel title: Chosön, The Land of the Morning Calm, A Sketch of Korea Tags ==== ebook travel