Once in a dog’s age even now a country youth turns up at a government or a mission school wearing the braid that not long ago was universal among unmarried males, or, since early marriages are still in vogue, with a topknot; but it is seldom that the end of the first week does not find his fashion changed. Pseudo-pathetic stories still come in from the outlying districts of mothers who wept their eyes red at the cutting of a son’s braid, or of conservative old fathers wrathfully driving from home youths who have sacrificed the topknot that stands for manhood. But the shearing goes steadily on, and thus is passing one of Korea’s most conspicuous idiosyncrasies. The bachelor braid down the back yielded swiftly to foreign influence; a generation hence the topknot, perhaps even the stovepipe screen that surmounts it, may be as unknown in the peninsula as the pre-Meiji male head-dress is now in Japan.
If one takes heed not to carry the likeness too far, the Korean might be described as a cross between the Japanese and the Chinese. Some of his traits and customs resemble those of one or the other of his immediate neighbors, but a still greater number seem to be peculiar to himself alone. He builds his house, for example, somewhat like those of Japan; he heats it somewhat after the fashion in China, yet in neither case is the similarity more than approximate. Certainly he is content with as few comforts as any race, with the possible exception of the Chinese, that ever reached the degree of civilization to which he once attained. This, of course, is partly due to the centuries of atrocious misrule under which he lived, when it was unsafe for even the wealthiest of men to attract the ravenous tax-gatherers, turned loose upon the kingdom in rival bands by both king and court, by living in anything more than a thatched mud hovel.
Thus it is that even the larger Korean cities are little more than numerous clusters of such hovels, huddled together along haphazard alleyways of dust or mud, except where the hand of the new rulers of the peninsula, or of those Westerners who have been striving for more than three decades to Christianize it, show themselves. The typical Korean house, whether of country or town, is made of adobe bricks or odds and ends of stone completely plastered over, inside and out, with mud. Thus the walls remain, until they crumble or wash away, for neither paint nor whitewash is used to disguise their milk-and-coffee tint. Except in rare cases, or a few special localities, a rice-straw roof covers them, a roof so smooth and almost glossy, so low and nearly flat, that a village suggests a cluster of dead mushrooms. The accepted shape of the dwelling is that of the half of a square, though in its poorer form it may be merely a hut somewhat longer than it is wide, and in the more pretentious cases it sometimes completes the whole square. Whether it does or not, it must be wholly shut off from the outside world, usually by a wall or screen of woven straw as high as the eaves and enclosing a wholly untended dust-bin of a yard between the two ells. The well built and spick and span servants’ houses erected by a missionary community near Seoul were unpopular with the domestics because they looked off across a pretty valley to the mountains, instead of being shut in by the customary mat-fence.