Next in authority to the king are the three chong or high ministers. The chief of these (Chen-kun) is the greatest dignitary in the kingdom, and in time of the minority, inability, or imbecility of the king, wields royal authority in fact if not in name. Another term applied to him when the king is unable to govern, is “Foundation-stone Minister,” upon whom the king leans and the state rests as a house upon its foundation-stone. The title of Tai-wen-kun, which suggests that of the “Tycoon” of Japan, seems to have been a special one intended for the emergency. It was given to the Regent who is the father of the present King, and who ruled with nearly absolute power from 1863 to 1874, when the king reached his majority. In the troubles in Seoul in July, 1882, his title, written in Japanese as Tai-in kun, became familiar to western newspapers.

After the king, and the three prime ministers, come the six ministries or boards of government, the heads of which rank next to the three chong or ministers forming the Supreme Council. In the six departments, the heads are called pan-cho, and these are assisted by two other associates, the cham-pan, or substitutes, and the cham-é, or counsellor. These four grades and twenty-one dignitaries constitute the royal council of dai-jin (great ministers), though the actual authority is in the supreme council of the three chong. The six boards, or departments of the government, are: 1, Office and Public Employ; 2, Finance; 3, Ceremonies; 4, War; 5, Justice; 6, Public Works. The heads of these tribunals make a daily report of all affairs within their province, but refer all matters of importance to the Supreme Council. There are also three chamberlains, each having his assistants, who record every day the acts and words of the king. A daily government gazette, called the Chō-po, is issued for information on official matters. The general cast and method of procedure in the court and government is copied after the great model in Peking. [231]

Each of the eight provinces is under the direction of a kam-sa, or governor. The cities are divided into six classes (yin, mu, fu, ki, ling, and hilu), and are governed by officers of corresponding rank. The towns are given in charge of the petty magistrates, there being twelve ranks or dignities in the official class. In theory any male Corean able to pass the government examinations is eligible to office, but the greater number of the best positions are secured by nobles and their friends.

From the sovereign to the beggar, the gate, both figuratively and actually, is very prominent in the public economy and in family relationships. A great deal of etiquette is visible in the gates. At the entrance to the royal palace are, or were formerly, two huge effigies, in wood, of horses, painted red. Only high officials can pass these mute guardians. All persons riding past the palace must dismount and walk. To the houses of men of rank there are usually two, sometimes three, gates. The magistrate himself enters by the largest, his parents and nearer friends by the eastern, and servants by the west or smallest. When a visitor of equal grade calls upon an officer or noble, the host must come all the way to the great or outer gate to receive him, and do likewise on dismissing him. If he be of one degree lower rank, the host comes only to the outside of the middle gate. If of third or fourth rank, the caller is accompanied only to the space inside the middle gate. The man of fifth and sixth rank finds that etiquette has so tapered off that the lord of the mansion walks only to the piazza. In front of a magistrate’s office, at the gateway, are ranged the symbols of authority, such as spears and tridents. The gates are daily opened amid the loud cries of the underlings, and their opening and closing with a vocal or instrumental blast is a national custom, illustrated as well at the city as at the office. The porters who close them at sunset and open them at dawn execute a salvo on their trumpets, often lasting a quarter of an hour. This acoustic devastation, so distressing to foreign ears, is considered good music to the native tympanum.

In sitting, the same iron tongue upon the buckle of custom holds each man to his right hole in the social strap. People of equal rank sit so that the guest faces to the east and the host to the west. In ordinary easy style, the visitor’s nose is to the south, as he sits eastward of his host. A commoner faces north. In social entertainments, after the yup, or bows with the head and hands bent together, have been made, wine is sipped or [232]drunk three or five times, and then follows what the Coreans call music.

The sumptuary laws of the kingdom are peculiar, at many points amusing to occidentals. To commit pem-ram is to violate these curious regulations. What may be worn, or sat upon, is solemnly dictated by law. Nobles sit on the kan-kio, or better kind of chairs. Below the third rank, officers rest upon a bench made of ropes. Chairs, however, are not common articles of use, nor intended to be such. At entertainments for the aged, in time of rich harvests, local feasts, archery tournaments, and on public occasions, these luxuries are oftener used. In short, the chair seems to be an article of ceremony, rather than a constant means of use or comfort.

Only men above the third rank are allowed to put on silk. Petty officials must wear cotton. Merchants and farmers may not imitate official robes, but don tighter or more economical coats and trowsers. A common term for officials is “blue clouds,” in reference to their blue-tinted garments. To their assistants, the people apply the nickname, not sarcastic, but honorable, of “crooked backs,” because they always bend low in talking to their employers.

The magistrates lay great stress on the trifles of etiquette, and keep up an immense amount of fuss and pomp to sustain their dignity, in order to awe the common folks. Whenever they move abroad, their servants cry out “chii-wa,” “chii-wa,” “get down off your horse,” “get down off your horse,” to riders in sight. The Il-san, or large banner or standard in the form of an umbrella, is borne at the head of the line. To attempt to cross one of their processions is to be seized and punished, and anyone refusing to dismount, or who is slow about slipping off his horse, is at once arrested, to be beaten or mulcted. When permission is given to kill an ox, the head, hide, and feet usually become the perquisites of the magistrate or his minions. The exuberant vocabulary in Corean, for the various taxes, fines, mulcts, and squeezes of the understrappers of the magistrate, in gross and in detail, chief and supplementary, testify to the rigors and expenses of being governed in Chō-sen.

Overreaching magistrates, through whose injustice the people are goaded into rebellion, are sometimes punished. It seems that one of the penalties in ancient times was that the culpable official should be boiled in oil. Now, however, the condemned man is exiled, and only rarely put to death, while a commutation of justice[233]—equivalent to being burned in effigy—is made by a pretended boiling in oil. Good and upright magistrates are often remembered by mok-pi, or inscribed columns of wood, erected on the public road by the grateful people. In many instances, this testimonial takes the form of sculptured stone. A number of the public highways are thus adorned. These, with the tol-pi, or monumental bourne, which marks distances or points out the paths to places of resort, are interesting features of travel in the peninsula, and more pleasant to the horseman than the posts near temples and offices on which one may read “Dismount.” At the funeral of great dignitaries of the realm, a life-sized figure of a horse, made of bamboo, dragged before the coffin, is burned along with the clothes of the deceased, and the ashes laid beside his remains.

As the magistrates are literary men, their official residences often receive poetic or suggestive names, which, in most cases, reflect the natural scenery surrounding them. “Little Flowery House,” “Rising Cloud,” “Sun-greeting,” “Sheet of Resplendent Water,” “Water-that-slides-as-straight-as-a-sword Dwelling,” “Gate of Lapis-lazuli,” “Mansion near the Whirlpool,” are some of these names, while, into the composition of others, the Morning-star, the Heaven-touching, the Cave-spirit, and the Changing-cloud Mountain, or the Falling-snow Cataract may enter. Passionately fond of nature, the Corean gentleman will erect a tablet in praise of the scenery that charms his eye. One such reads, “The beauty of its rivers, and of its mountains, make this district the first in the country.”

If, as the French say, “Paris is France,” then Seoul is Corea. An apparently disproportionate interest centres in the capital, if one may judge from the vast and varied vocabulary relating to Seoul, its people and things, which differentiate all else outside its wall. Three thousand official dignitaries are said to reside in the capital, and only eight hundred in all the other cities and provinces. Seoul is “the city,” and all the rest of the peninsula is “the country.” A provincial having cultivated manners is called “a man of the capital.” “Capital and province” means the realm.

The rule of the local authorities is very minute in all its ramifications. The system of making every five houses a social unit is universal. When a crime is committed, it is easy to locate the group in which the offender dwells, and responsibility is fixed at once. Every subject of the sovereign except nobles of rank, must possess a passport or ticket testifying to his personality, and all [234]must “show their tickets” on demand. For the people, this certificate of identity is a piece of branded or inscribed wood, for the soldiers of horn, for the literary class and government officials of bone. Often, the tablet is in halves, the individual having one-half, and the government keeping its tally. The people who cannot read or write have their labels carefully tied to their clothing. When called upon to sign important documents, or bear witness on trial, they make a blood-signature, by rudely tracing the signs set before them in their own blood. The name, residence of the holder, and the number of the group of houses in which he lives, are branded or inscribed on the ho-pai, or passport.

The actual workings of Corean justice will be better understood when treating of Christianity—an element of social life which gave the pagan tribunals plenty of work. Civil matters are decided by the ordinary civil magistrate, who is judge and jury at once; criminal cases are tried by the military commandant. Very important cases are referred to the governor of the province. The highest court of appeal is in the capital. Cases of treason and rebellion, and charges against high dignitaries, are tried in the capital before a special tribunal instituted by the king.

The two classes of assistants to the magistrate, who are called respectively hai-seik and a-chen, act as constables or sheriffs, police messengers, and jailers. French writers term them “pretorians” and “satellites.” These men have practically the administration of justice, and the details and spirit of local authority are in their power. The hai-seik, or constables, form a distinct class in the community, rarely intermarrying with the people, and handing down their offices, implements, and arts from father to son. The a-chen, who are the inferior police, jailers, and torturers, are from the very lowest classes, and usually of brutal life and temper.

The vocabulary of torture is sufficiently copious to stamp Chō-sen as still a semi-civilized nation. The inventory of the court and prison comprises iron chains, bamboos for beating the back, a paddle-shaped implement for inflicting blows upon the buttocks, switches for whipping the calves till the flesh is ravelled, ropes for sawing the flesh and bodily organs, manacles, stocks, and boards to strike against the knees and shin-bones. Other punishments are suspension by the arms, tying the hands in front of the knees, between which and the elbows is inserted a stick, while the human ball is rolled about. An ancient but now obsolete mode [235]of torture was to tie the four limbs of a man to the horns of as many oxen, and then to madden the beasts by fire, so that they tore the victim to fragments. The punishment of beating with paddles often leaves scars for life, and causes ulcers not easily healed. One hundred strokes cause death in most cases, and many die under forty or fifty blows. For some crimes the knees and shin-bones are battered. A woman is allowed to have on one garment, which is wetted to make it cling to the skin and increase the pain. The chief of the lictors, or public spanker, is called siu-kiō. With the long, flexible handle swung over his head, he plies the resounding blows, planting them on the bare skin just above the knee-joint, the victim being held down by four gaolers. The method of correction is quite characteristic of paternal government, and is often inflicted upon the people openly and in public, at the whim of the magistrate. The bastinado was formerly, like hundreds of other customs common to both countries, in vogue in Japan. As in many other instances, this has survived in the less civilized nation.

When an offender in the military or literary class is sentenced to death, decapitation is the rather honorable method employed. The executioner uses either a sort of native iron hatchet-sword or cleaver, or one of the imported Japanese steel-edged blades, which have an excellent reputation in the peninsula.

Undoubtedly the severity of the Corean code has been mitigated since Hamel’s time. According to his observations, husbands usually killed their wives who had committed adultery. A wife murdering her husband was buried to the shoulders in the earth at the road side, and all might strike or mutilate her with axe or sword. A serf who murdered his master was tortured, and a thief might be trampled to death. The acme of cruelty was produced, as in old Japan, by pouring vinegar down the criminal’s throat, and then beating him till he burst. The criminal code now in force is, in the main, that revised and published by the king in 1785, which greatly mitigated the one formerly used. One disgraceful, but not very severe, mode of correction is to tie a drum to the back of the offender and publicly proclaim his transgression, while the drum is beaten as he walks through the streets. Amid many improvements on the old barbarous system of aggravating the misery of the condemned, there still survives a disgraceful form of capital punishment, in which the cruelty takes on the air of savage refinement. The cho-reni-to-ta appears only in [236]extreme cases. The criminal’s face is smeared with chalk, his hands are tied behind him, a gong is tied on his back, and an arrow is thrust through either ear. The executioner makes the victim march round before the spectators, while he strikes the gong, crying out, “This fellow has committed [adultery, murder, treason, etc.]. Avoid his crime.” The French missionaries executed near Seoul were all put to death in this barbarous manner.

Officials often receive furloughs to return home and visit their parents, for filial piety is the supreme virtue in Chinese Asia. The richest rewards on earth and brightest heaven hereafter await the filial child. Curses and disgrace in this life and the hottest hell in the world hereafter are the penalties of the disobedient or neglectful child. The man who strikes his father is beheaded. The parricide is burned to death. Not to mourn long and faithfully, by retiring from office for months, is an incredible iniquity.

Coreans, like Japanese, argue that, if the law punishes crime, it ought also to reward virtue. Hence the system which prevails in the mikado’s empire and in Chō-sen of publicly awarding prizes to signal exemplars of filial piety. These in Japan may be in the form of money, silver cups, rolls of silk, or gewgaws. In Corea, they are shown in monumental columns, or dedicatory temples, or by public honors and promotion to office. Less often are the rewarded instances of devotion to the mother than to the father.

Official life has its sunshine and shadows in this land as elsewhere, but perhaps one of the hardest tasks before the Corean ruling classes of this and the next generation is the duty of diligently eating their words. Accustomed for centuries to decry and belittle the foreigner from Christendom, they must now, as the people discern the superiority of westerners, “rise to explain” in a manner highly embarrassing. In intellect, government, science, social customs, manual skill, refinement, and possession of the arts and comforts of life, the foreigner will soon be discovered to be superior. At the same time the intelligent native will behold with how little wisdom, and how much needless cruelty, Chō-sen is governed. The Japanese official world has passed through such an experience. If we may argue from a common ancestry and hereditary race traits, we may forecast the probability that to Corea, as to Japan, may come the same marvellous revolution in ideas and customs. [237]