# 2025-11-05 - The Land of the Morning Calm by Percival Lowell
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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.
HTML 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
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Percival_Lowell
HTML source: https://archive.org/details/chosnlandmornin00unkngoog
tags: ebook,travel
title: Chosön, The Land of the Morning Calm, A Sketch of Korea
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DIR ebook
DIR travel