Gosu Cave and Thereabouts

About a month ago when the weather was still relatively warm, RAS offered a tour to Gosu Cave along with a scenic boat tour on the Chungju River with the changing colors of fall around; we even stopped in at a cultural village-park. A comment on the latter: back in our home country, the culture-park would be a "tourist" attraction for foreigners (our van load and a couple were the only foreigners there) but the culture-park swarmed with Koreans, which demonstrates a world of difference in marketing and expectations about what is to be visited and by whom [somebody really should pursue research on this topic!]

Gosu Cave

Gosu Cave is listed as Natural Monument #256. According to Spleological Society of Korean in October 1973, the lime formation in the cave is about 400-500 million years old and the cave itself is estimated to be about 150,000 million years old. The cave has value as a research site for its terrain, cave coral, aragonite,and other mineral, plants and animals. Around 1700 meters long, stalactites and stalagmites abound in color, length, and development. They twist, twirl, cascade, and otherwise descend or ascend from eroded shelves into giant crevasses of inky blackness and high humidity - the temperature inside wavered around 16.4 Celcius and had a whopping 96.3% humidity.

Upon entering the cave, a fellow anthropologist saw the teepee of sticks and twigs with a light burning inside and just said, "tacky" and then added that the beauty of a cave or many cultural assets have been weirdly represented; a culture site shouldn't have baubles or gimmicks that detract from the setting rather than make it more attractive, but then what is attractive to one culture is not necessarily attractive to another, as proven here. On a more realistic note, the dampness of the cave, even near that front area, did seem too a very unlikely place to erect a home.

Further in the cave were beautiful soaring stalactites and stalagmites, some of which were named, like St. Mary's Image, which did in fact look like a woman shrouded in naturally emitting mist. The Love Rock was another named and very unique structure of a incredibly tall stalactite and a likewise tall stalagmite that were almost touching and reminded me of God and Adam stretching outwards to touch fingers but not being fully extended and therefore not quite touching. Paradise Wall, the multiple cascades of stalactites and which was featured on the entry ticket, was very photogenic although I felt there was a much more beautiful and certainly more powerful cascade on a vastly grander scale but it just wasn't capturable on film.


Of course sporadically the long queque of people spidering up and down the metal ladders that twisted in, around, between and among the formations would be halted due to those "candid" moments at scenic shots. A couple ladies in our vanload and who had been in Korea for only a few short months were eager takers on the shots, which would be sent back home as memories of Korea. It was actually fun to travel with people who had just arrived in Korea and who could open my eyes anew to things I no longer considered out of the ordinary.

As we departed the cave, a sign was posted in three languages (Korean, English and Chinese): "For a moment look back, and then goodbye". The two ladies got a big kick out of the odd wording ... and so we all took picts to remember our cave farewell.

Post-cave Tourism

On exiting the cave and down the hill to the restaurants, the ribbed cemented walkway was lined with little kiosks of sellers marketing traditional teas, herbal tonics, toys, gimmicks, what-nots and of course the inevitable rock shops found in mountain touristic places.



I haven't seen too many bonsai (Japanese term but the Korean term is unknown) sellers and she had a wide selection of choices, of course all based on the same theme and with the same flora.


Then, and most importantly, were the food sellers. People need to eat and with the approach of lunch time, the food sellers were starting to attract quite a lot of business.


Chungju Boat Ride

Boat traffic on the river was thriving that Sunday. All boats were filled to capacity from the single deckers to the huge triple-decker psuedo-Mark-Twain-reminiscent ferry boats. Parking lots were packed, the ferry lines were long, and people were in jolly spirits as they pushed their way onto their assigned boats. We pushed with them and rushed to get good window seats ... and then realized that the cabin deck was empty. People had flocked to the roof so up some of us went to see the sights. Rocks shaped like turtles were pointed out; a rock that was likened to friend chicken got the most amusement from the announcer and passengers as the rock and the fried chicken was some kind of word play. There was a crane rock, an elephant rock and others positioned high on the cliffs overlooking the serpentinous river. The scenery was phenomenal and occasionally when the lighting was right, the undulating hills that are frequently pictured in art appeared.

To some of our amusement, while the majority of people were tightly packed on the roof of the boat, on the back deck a cloth had been spread and some older people were delighting in the boat cruise by none other than...drinking. It really is no joke to say that Korean's ubiquitous pasttime is drinking, and that whenever they have free moments in time to enjoy themselves, it is done by...drinking. They did occasionally glance out the back of the boat when the announcer had some particularly intersting comments, but most of the comments concerned the upcoming features in the terrain, so our dear fellow passengers could just continue...drinking without being particularly bothered.

In the surrounding areas, tourism is being further developed. Advertised in the area are the Soseonam Auto-camping site (a recent innovation to accommodate the growing number of cars in Korea along with the growing demand for tourism), Soseonam Natural Forest (gradually being decimated with the development of tourism - maybe soon people will wonder why it's called a forest), and Seonan Valley also called 삼성구곡 or "Three Deities and Nine Curves" by the poet Yi Hwang because deities were said to cavort in the twisting river bends. The first of the two pictures shown here is from the boat while the second is from an overlook further up the river.

Glenn Sundeen's Photo Exhibition

A colleague Glenn Sundeen put together a very impressive collection of photography at the Guillaume Boulangerie in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul from October 22 to November 19. Originally from Canada, his past eight years in Seoul, Korea, and with wealth of travel experiences between, his eyes and his lens have focused on and captured arresting scenes, tranquil moments and an artist's palette of people. He is a self-proclaimed traveller, historian, educator and photographer (in that order) and bringing all these experiences together he has created his project based on his transmigration from rural Canada to urban Asia, Life and Land. His collection is filled with images that "bring to mind one of the great unifying traits of our plant, the attachment to the land we live on, be it temperate or tropical, rural or urban, rich or poor." On closing night (which I unfortunately had to leave before his arrival) he gave final thoughts on his experiences and unique anecdotes behind some of his choice pictures, embuing the pictures with the rich history behind the moment of life forever trapped in still form. Pictured above is one of his Canadian shots, the isolated homestead now forever remembered in a field of golden flowers and canopied by the wide Canadian sky. More of his pictures are viewable at www.flickr.com/photos/tigerpalace.

Guillaume Boulangerie was a well-chosen (although little bit tough to find) coffee shop with an art gallery for young and upcoming artists or artists not wishing to hire expensive galleries in famous buildings. The double-function coffee-shop slash art gallery is a win-win situation for the artist and the shop itself for it is affordable for the artist to get exposure or publicly present on the theme that impassions him or her in a place that is tasteful and elegant. For the coffee shop the gallery brings in people wishing to view the gallery and who inevitably linger to enjoy the rich wooden decor, choice coffees, eye-popping desserts and the display shelves of coffees and gifts lighted in the evening most romantically by tea lights.

Suneong - College Entrance Test Day

Suneong is the traditional testing day for would-be university freshmen. Across the nation, wanna-be university freshmen flock to the university they would like to enter and take a rigorous examination of several hours. To show just how important education is and how focused the nation is on accommodating the huge number of testees on this day, the government requires companies start work an hour or two later to expedite the in-coming "freshmen" to the big universities around Seoul. Then in the universities themselves where the students are flocking, classes are cancelled in several of the buildings to allow setup of desks, cleaning of desks and removal of all papers and pencil marks from the desks, and then classrooms are locked and no students, professors, or anyone is allowed to enter. This entry restriction extends for three days: the day of setup, test day itself, and for some reason the following day as well.

Passing the test is all-important, or at least that is the attitude manifested by the vast majority. Unfortunately but thankfully not as frequently as previously, even suicides take place if students "fail" to gain admittance in the university they want. To augment their years of university preparation ... and indeed, all lessons in high school particularly, middle-school and even elementary school to some degree seem to be aimed at taking and acing the entrance exam ... and once that is accomplished, the university freshman year can be spent in having fun, drinking, making friends, and is seen as a bit of a joke. The freshmen year is often a "let your hair down" year and is a year of celebration because in Korea, once a student enters the more prestigious universities, basically he or she is assured success in life. Anyway, to augment their years of preparation, students' parents rush to get symbols and prayers for furthering their childrens' success. And this is one of the times of year when Buddhist temples, particularly around Chogyesa, flourish in the business of charms, talismans, well wishes ...

A younger brother of one of my university students oddly asked if he could leave class early in order to give his brother the Buddhist symbol for good luck that his Catholic mother had gotten for her younger son. My student was almost desperate because he had forgotten it in his dorm room and it had to be given to his brother BEFORE the exam so that his brother could gain blessings and luck during the exam by tucking it into his pocket. He absolutely had to fulfill his great responsibility as an older brother! My student is atheist (as tends to be the younger generations), his mother is Catholic and the symbol is Buddhist. When I asked about the irony of a Catholic purchasing Buddhist artifacts, he shrugged and basically said his mother, like many mothers, will do anything to have their sons succeed at the entrance exam.


After the exam, the Buddhist braided luck symbol (colors have symbolism but no one could tell me what they symbolize) was given to me. And supposedly, even though another person had used the "luck" chain (as I call it for want of a better term), I could still use it for an exam like my doctoral degree defense since each owner can use it once. Auspicious symbols are not limited by any means to "luck" chains but could be a picture of a Buddha or an auspicious word carved on a rock, the list is rather endless.

Ghosts, Spirits, Dieties and the Haunting of Seoul

Robert Neff, a long time resident of Korea and who researches and writes about the late Joseon period (1880-1910), gave a presentation through the Royal Asiatic Society last week on ghosts and the haunting of Seoul, from which these notes were taken. Not only does he present on themes related to Korean history but he also has articles appearing in a number of local and international newspapers as well as having a regular column in Jeju Weekly. His recent publication is a book entitled Korea through Western Eyes.

Korea's history has been long and turbulent and thus filled with han, the untranslatable emotionally evocative word perhaps meaning 'unexpressable sorrow locked within' or perhaps 'the ache of loss and longing'. Han is culturally unique to Korea and has been a part of Korean history for ages, well, that is until the late 1980s. The current university students born in the 1990s have little conception of what han really means as they grew up in a more expressive and certainly more opulent and non-suppressive society. Be that as it may, it seems that han and the intense belief in ghosts and spirits are interrelated on some levels - at least that is my opinion. Ghost, spirits and the like are unhappy and their deaths and/or demeaning burials were the result of great sorrow, which they as yet cannot express.

Ubiquitous Ghosts, Spirits, Dieties

Many kinds of ghosts, spirits and dieties exist in Korea - the 장승 or totem dieties seen along roadsides to ward off evil or at times famine or drought; small pox demons that came to capture children and take them away; spirits of the housebeam, roof, kitchen and other areas of the house, and many more like bathroom spirits. Surprisingly, the bathroom spirit is still believed in, or at least that belief has become part of a superstitious ritual much like the Western superstitious ritual of "knock on wood". Long ago there were many fears about the outhouse and many deaths due to children falling into the hole and suffocating in the crap. Spirits were believed to lurk in the out-lying building and so Koreans always cleared their throats before entering because they didn't want to surprise the spirit, especially when the spirit (always a long, wild-haired female) had become bored and was counting her hairs while waiting for something to do. Whether people carry this belief or not, the clearing of the throat is still done when people enter bath-houses.

Ghost babies or spirit babies - especially after the Korean War in the 1950s and 1960s unmarried women and divorced women did NOT have sexual relations but when they DID become pregnant, they said it was due to being attacked by spirits and that's how they got pregnant ... so their children were called "spirit babies". For those wanting to double-check the truth of this esoteric group of babies, there were occasional accounts mentioned of the spirit babies in the newspapers.

Places of Haunting around Seoul

Mulberry Palace was one of the most famous haunted buildings and resulted in wasteful abandonment, or so this viewpoint existed from Westerners. By the time Westerners were arriving in Korea the palace had fallen into major disrepair and was slowly being dismantled. It was reported to be so haunted that Queen Min, on a visit there, couldn't sleep because she kept hearing the moaning, "Why was I killed? Why was I killed?" Spirits that had not had honorable burials due to decapitations, mass burial or no burial at all are believed to be restless spirits, and therefore unreliable. Queen Min never again attempted to sleep in, or maybe even visit, the Mulberry Palace.

In the mid-1880s when Mullendorf and the American legation arrived, they required places to live, and the only nice homes for the American dignitaries were the haunted homes of people who had been killed in the recent 1882 riots. Mullendorf and the legation were very happy with their elegant homes, but the king feared they would be angry when and if they found out about the inferior homes that they had been allowed to live in once they heard of the death of the former owners. Mullendorf and the legation did find out but, not having the same beliefs, lived quite happily in the upper-class homes.

Yangwajin Foreigner Cemetary was haunted even before foreigners were allowed to bury their dead in the alloted plot. In the mid to late 1800s this is where the Christian massacre took place, and it has since been a place of great haunting.

Ironically, Queen Min was murdered and her body burned, a very non-Confuscian treatment of the body which must remain whole even after death. She was murdered in Kyungbokkung, the grandest of palaces, and yet surprisingly, no one seems to talk of Kyungbokkung being haunted.

Independence Gate, which was famous for wandering tiger sightings, was also infamous as the place where Korean men who were visiting Seoul were emasculated. That is, their top-knot, which was a symbol of the honor and dignity as a man, was rudely cut off by the Japanese in one of their control policies. When the "emasculated" men returned to the countryside, they told their rural friends that it was the 토계비 or goblins around the Independence Gate that had attacked them and shorn their manhood. Being shorn by a 토계비 was much less demeaning than being shorn by a fellow, but unfeeling, human-being.

Hauntings in the Heart of Seoul

Six (actually more) landmark areas in the downtown Seoul area are believed, by some, to still be haunted. Actually, Robert Neff said that within the past five years or so he has heard very little about ghosts, spirits, demons and hauntings, at least in the urban areas. The supernatural beliefs of the past seem to be finally sealed on the lips of even those who believe as Christianity denies the talking spirit world and knowledge in science has displaced beliefs in the supernatural.

Anyway, those six haunted places are Chong-ro, now a major downtown street, but formerly a place where people were executed by being hacked up or hung. Chonggyecheon, the beautiful riverside touristy park area recently developed, was where people were boiled to death. These two places are haunted by the executed spirits while in Chongro-3-ga, a former and still present red-light district, the place seethes with unhappy spirits of women who died violently. One more haunted place is Sejong-ro, another street and one which intersects Chong-ro; it is supposedly so filled with ghosts that if pictures are taken at night, the picts will be marred by the ghosts. Even in this place, foreigners have reported strange behavior of Koreans at night, that is, Koreans were seen to jump in front of taxis and other on-coming cars, but of course running so fast that they wouldn't be hit. When foreigners reported this strange behavior, others were able to inform them that the Koreans believed in the spirits and that they were being chased so they would run in front of cars, but they would be so fast so that they wouldn't be hit but the spirits behind them would and so would quit chasing them.

The place which seems to be a very propitious ground due to containing a national treasure, a tall pagoda, is the former temple grounds of Pagoda Park located on Chong-ro. The top was and had been missing for whatever reason when the Japanese took Korea over as a colony. According to a legend, if the whole pagoda were completely rebuilt, Korea would fall, so Japan immediately rebuilt the full pagoda ... and of course history does show that Japan ruled Korea as a colony for 35 years. The pagoda had been already or became (the time is unclear) a haunted place, a place where people like opium addicts, jilted lovers and social outcasts would go to commit suicide.

It seems that people in these modern times still do believe in ghosts and spirits of people who died unhappily. The National Assembly building is one such site, as it was built on the ground of what used to be the burial place of palace women. One man (he had to have some clout) complained that whenever he walked near the building on a certain walking path he felt he was being raped. Evidently he was heard and believed because in 2008 a 65-ton stone - actually a phallic symbol - was constructed at the whopping sum of ₩200,000,000 to protect men in that area. In 2009 the very next year, the phallic symbol had been removed due to complaints of vulgarity by locals and other citizens. It was replaced by a tree.

Peppero Day

Pepero Day is a festive day for the youth of Korea. While not a holiday, it is a day when particularly the Korean youth invest their money in a cookie-stick snack for expressing sentiment to each other and even their teachers. The reason for giving the snack is wrapped in the visual significance of four long cookie-sticks to represent 11/11 or November 11, a visual pun easily noticeable from the poster.

The cookie has been around since 1989 but the celebration of Pepero Day didn't begin until 1994, when according to rumor, some middle-school girls in Pusan gave each other some Pepero sticks and wished each other to grow tall and slim like the Pepero. Lotte, the manufacturer of the snack, has greatly encouraged and further marketed the idea of exchanging Pepero sticks on November 11 by making various flavors, gift packages and foot-long, two-foot long and yard-long Pepero sticks for that special person. The variety of flavors (pictured below) is expanding year by year - chocolate, strawberry, and more with some having almond and nutty chunks on the outside and others just dipped in plain chocolate; other Peperos are nude, meaning the chocolate is on the inside of the cookie snack and the 'nude' term is probably a kickback from the concept of 'nude kimbop', the rice stick mini-meal which usually has seaweed laver on the outside but the nude version is inverted with the seaweed on the inside and rice rolled around.

Although in many ways Pepero Day is like Valentine's Day in that the youth actively give and want to receive Pepero sticks, unlike Valentine's Day on Feb 14 (for men to receive chocolate) and White Day on Mar 14 (for women to receive candy) and Black Day on Apr 14 (for people who didn't receive either chocolate or candy and so must express sadness by eating black noodles), there is no negative side for not receiving Pepero. I suppose this factor is that it is still a "young" festive occasion but with the passing of time, it will undoubtedly build in festive character, especially with the hype in marketing for promoting the snack.

Rice Harvesting

Rice has been the staple of Korea for centuries, much as wheat is in the States and millet is of northern Russia. This type of rice is wet-rice planting but the fields are flooded only during the planting season and then of course - whether wanted or not - filled to over-flowing during the rainy season, which was particularly long this year and ruined a large percentage of the cabbage crop (for kimchi); fortunately the rice stalks were not beaten down too badly. Many modern machines are used in harvesting. There are machines which cut the rice and separate it from the stalks (and I believe this particular machine does that). There are machines that rake and turn the rice in the field so that it can dry before other machines come and bale the straw.



Only within the last few short years have the large round baling machines been in Korea. Even the machines for small square bales are fairly recent; my guess is they were started to be introduced in the mid-1990s but not widely used then at all. I'm not certain how the small square bales are stored but the large round ones are wrapped in plastic and left along edges of fields. With livestock being nearly non-existent on farms now, how the rice straw is presently used though is beyond me.


I was happy to get a shot of such this beautifully manicured field while zipping along merrily on a rural bus with dirty windows. The sheaves are systematically laid in the fields awaiting the harvesters to come and stack them and pile them on a cart pulled by a machine that looks like a rotortiller and has been the companion machine for farmers and their work for a few decades. One can be seen in the field.


Here the rotortiller-like machine can be seen to be more of a powerful engine that pulls the cart. Farmers use this to take their produce to market, to get supplies in town and transport them back home, as transport to and from their fields, and even as the family conveyance or taxi to get them around in the general area. I used to see a huge number of people piled into and onto the cart being pulled behind, and the people seemed quite happy with the jolly transportation. Cars and trucks have pretty much replaced these farm machines as town transport but here we can see that the farmers still use them for to and from the field transport. As for the rice in view, typically rice is carefully dried and the best place for doing that is along edges of village streets, on sidewalks and in parking lots. In fact, the whole rural countryside has streets lined with drying rice!

Beauty in Autumnal Fields

A grandfather diligently working in his fields. The rice field in the background has probably been machine-cut but the sheaves have been hand-tied in the traditional manner rather than bundled in square or large round bales. Retirement age in the rural vicinities is often when a person can no longer work as retirement pensions are a relatively new thing - only since the 1990s. A tour guide I met told me about her grandmother's village where the youngest villager is 73-years-old and they are all still working, most planting gardens and caring for orchards for their children and grandchildren to give them well-being, usually organic, country-raised produce.


Fields are neat and orderly, well-planned and well laid out. Of course with the introduction of modern machinery, the edges of fields are now straighter and the soil is tilled deeper and made softer, but these fields have been planted and harvested on for centuries, and the fields are the farmers' pride.


The hanok in the background is for a higher positioned person than others as can be deciphered by the number of buildings enclosed within the walled home. Unfortunately, the hanok in many parts of the country are falling into disrepair - people find them less comfortable or fashionable to live in than the apartment buildings and villas with their more convenient gas-heated ondol-floors and other modern conveniences, not that the hanok can't be carefully remodeled inside as many have. This particular hanok is nicely positioned facing the fortuitous south as well as being at the base of a hill so that the earth's energy can flow into it but not too low so as to be poorly irrigated. Long ago choosing sites for hanok was done scientifically based on the wind, the soil, the terrain around and many other considerations. Too bad such a beautiful home is falling into disrepair.


Korea is considered to be the second most mountainous country in the world with about 75% of the country considered to be mountain-sloped (Nepal is the most mountainous and with decidedly bigger mountains too). Therefore, when seeing large flat areas, it is a bit of a surprise. This picture was taken in the very hilly province of Gyeoungsangnam-do.


Sheaves of rice straw bundled and tied are becoming a rarer and rarer sight. More and more farmers are managing to get the big baling machines into postage-stamp sized rice paddies (only wet during the early planting season and rainy season) to rake and bale the rice straw for convenience winter storage. In the pictures below the sheaves are ready for gathering on a warm Indian summer autumnal day.














The patchwork colors were vibrant and clear but I was unable to capture their beauty. Nor was I able to capture the freshly-cut grass and straw scents that permeated the warming morning air.

Mulling over Green Tea

As opposed to many people's thinking, the centuries-old much stylized tea ceremony of Japan does not get the same ceremonial regard in Korea. The green tea ceremony in Korea was restricted primarily for the ancestors and the king, but the reality of drinking green tea was for the pleasure and luxury of relaxation.

Historical Decline of Korean Green Tea

Historically, green tea was popular in the Koguryeo Dynasty, but because monasteries were destroyed and Buddhist monks were forced to retreat to isolated mountains and forbidden to enter city gates in the Chosun Dynasty, the popular drink of Buddhists was not deemed acceptable by the Confucians; it was symbolic of a religious time period gone awry, and the drinking of tea gradually went out of fashion. Another reason for the decline in tea drinkers was that green tea was only grown in the warmer southern climate of the Korean peninsula, so with the decline of Buddhism and thus the diminishing demand for tea, the drink became only a local drink, but even the locals stopped cultivating and drinking it when in the 18th century a tea taxation was passed - yet another unwanted tax on the peasant class, and so those peasants with tea farms began abandoning them as the tax was more demanding than the demand for tea. By the 19th century, tea was little known to the common people and was basically drunk in the countryside for medicinal reasons because something so "nasty" had to be good for you.

During Japanese occupation, the Japanese imported Japanese tea roots for black tea and initiated new tea farms to imbue the conquering Japanese within colonial Korea aka Chosun. Whether the black tea farms/plantations have been replanted with green tea, I don't know; however, green tea is once again in demand. Korea is planting new green tea plantations and packaging their products for sale within the country. Ironically, the sale of Korean green tea is always in powder form and never in the form of loose tea leaves. Another irony and one which Korea seems to be aiming to correct is that Korea, known as a country that consumes green tea, does not export its product (as yet). If you go to a tea shop in another country and look at the wide variety of teas imported from various corners of the world, Korean green tea is virtually guaranteed to not be in the collection. This might change soon with the growing number of green tea plantations, especially on the more temperate island of Cheju.


Tea Poetry

Tea poetry has a long, long history in China and was borrowed by the Buddhist-dominated Korean society during the Goryeo Dynasty. The founding text for tea literature is "Classic of Tea" by YuLu who wrote in the 8th century in the Chinese Tang Dynasty. In the book he described the intricacies of making tea - the planting and picking of the leaves, the roasting process with the end product in small round briquettes for reconstituting and brewing tea... When tea was introduced into the Korean society, the tea drinking culture was re-transformed from the Chinese mainland into various societies to meet the different classes of people. Tea evolved:

- royal tea
- aristocratic tea
- monk's tea
- ancestral tea (which was very ceremonial as was tea to Buddhas in the temples)

In these modern times, people now substitute wine for tea. (Present-day Buddhists are supposed to be against fermented drink so I wonder if wine or soju really is used in Buddhists ceremonies. Hmm.)

Samples of tea poetry translated into English from a collection entitled "Rhapsody...":

"Bring out a jade bowl and wash it yourself; boil water from a rocky spring, then observe how the pale steam brims at the lip of the bowl like summer clouds issuing from mountain streams and peaks, and white billowing waves form as if dashing down a swollen river in spring."

"Wisdom is to float like an empty boat on water. Benevolence is to admire the trees and fruit of the mountain. When the spirit moves the heart, it enters the Wondrous, even without seeking pleasure, pleasure arises. This is the tea of my heart, it is needless to seek another."

In 1928, transcribed from the Chinese, Cha JinSeon transcribed a beautiful volume concerning the traditional way of Chinese tea.

In 1837 Dong ChaSong wrote a hymn in praise of Korean Tea with the opening lines combining nature and tea and that is the blend. Following are some selections:

The Horrors of Bad Tea - "Below is Chilbum Meditation Hall. Those meditating there often picked tea late, old leaves, and dried them in the sun. Using firewood, they cooked them over a brazier, like boiling vegetable soup. The brew was strong and turbid, reddish in color, the taste extremely bitter and astringent. As Jeong-So said: 'Heaven's good tea is often ruined by vulgar hands'." (DongChaSong stanza 12).

The Wonders of Good Tea - "The sound of bamboo oars and wind in pine trees, solitary and refreshing, penetrates my weary bones, awakens my mind, so clear and cool.
With no other guests but a white cloud and the bright moon, I am raised to a place higher than any immortal." This tongue-in-cheek selection suggests that tea awakens the mind and brings enlightenment, higher than the Buddhist immortal!

Confucians were scholarly and valued the pen and brush. Naming poems and writing in general was given deep thought, and when the scholar Chusa in about the 1820s was sent into exile, he wrote the name-board for a meditation hall in Daeheung Temple that had been built by the Venerable Cho-ui, a monk who taught meditation and the way of tea. The naming basically translates as: "The fire for making tea smells good."


This is just a fragment of the presentation given by Brother Anthony of Taize on "Scholars in Exile or Dead, Monks and Tea: Stories from Old Korea". Brother Anthony has been living in Korea since 1980, and is now emeritus professor of Sogang University and a chair-professor at Dankook University. He has published some 25 volumes of translations of Korean poetry and fiction, and is the author of The Korean Way of Tea as well as his recently published Korean Tea Classics, with translations of writings about tea by Yi Mok and the Venerable Choi-ui.

Aging in the Rural Regions

When traveling in the southern areas of Korea, a more rustic and cheerful ambiance greets my eyes. The big city bustle with the domain of personal autonomy and individuality is left behind. There, business people, busy housewives, career women and the noisy youth surge on sidewalks and race to appointments. In contrast, the streets of towns are filled with the elderly as the vast majority of youth have migrated to Seoul for better educational opportunities (a typical view in Korea is that the big cities, especially Seoul, can actually provide better education than the outlying areas. And then once people are actually in Seoul, they vie to live in the "best" neighborhoods - "best" is defined as having schools with high reputations.) So in the towns and rural precincts the elderly predominate. I love to watch their vigor and bustle in the marketplaces, or, like the pictures below, at the staggered bus stops where they gather after doing their "town shopping" so they can take their goods back to their countryside residences.

After getting off the bus at their village marker - usually a stone with the village name - the women totter home. Don't kid yourself in thinking they are weak for quite the contrary is true. From their years and years of work washing clothes by hand, doing intensive gardening by hand, and other demanding physical labor, their hands are thick with hardened muscle and their grips are like vices! Just a decade or two ago when the Korean society was more of a collective society, huge cookware and giant tea kettles were mainstream items. At many a Korean home during those decades I witnessed the mothers and yes, many of the grandmothers, grabbing the handle of a near-full giant tea kettle with one hand and pour me a glass of hot water without quivering the kettle. My eyes bugged and they bugged even more when I tried to do it and had to steady the kettle with the other hand and a quiver could still be detected. But the aging women do totter. Years of bending over planting and working in the rice fields has made many of their backs malformed, but thankfully the dowager's back is seen less and less often nowadays because intensive rice farming is done by machinery in the present, which is better for the women's health but has the downside of not requiring the man- or woman-power at the home site. And so the youth are free to pursue education for education is the step out of the farmhouse and into "success" in society, or so the viewpoint goes.

Living in a somewhat remote village where aging people dominate is physically taxing. With no young hands to take over the work, the elderly are condemned to forever work. In the traditional days, the elderly were revered and it was the younger people who respected and obeyed the older members of families, villages and society in general. The white hairs were hairs representative of experiences and wisdom. Those days are sadly gone. Before they were expected to "enjoy" their aging years; now they just continue working. The irony here is while sons and daughters are in the cities making money and where grandsons and granddaughters are being educated, the rural home is just a vacation place, a getaway from the big polluted city, a place where the aging folks diligently and painstakingly raise "healthy" uncontaminated food which they give to their children and grandchildren as parting gifts when they return to the big cities.

Here, the little woman on the right has lost her vigor but she still helps as she can. Her task at hand, or rather "at foot", is to turn the rice so that it can dry speedily for putting into winter storage. The woman below is properly covered to block the sun's harmful rays, that is, from making her skin "black", the term for "sun tanned". Black skin was in traditional times the sign of a lower-class worker, a peasant (not pejorative like in western societies as they were free and often were land-owners; they just were not of the scholarly class who could maintain "white" skin). This woman, as do all women when working outside, cover their faces and hands to prevent the "blackening" of their skin. This includes always wearing long-sleeved clothing when going outdoors at any time, even on the hottest days. Actually, if you were to go to the ajumma (married lady) floor in a department store, even in summer the majority of clothing has long sleeves - just a culture reflection on a people-group still tied to a more conservative time period in Korea.

Good Fortune, Welcome

The Five Fortunes or the Five Blessings

Thoughts of good fortune permeate all aspects of Korean society - with symbols and superstitions for exam taking (and passing) to negating jinxes and hexes to food and health to calendrical fortunes. The Korean concepts of seeking good fortune were borrowed from the Chinese in the centuries when China was the "Big Brother" to Korea, the "Little Brother" - a long period of cultural sharing. Many types of fortunes exist, but those fortunes most sought became known as the Five Fortunes or the Five Blessings, and they are: Good Luck, Prosperity, Longevity, Happiness and Wealth. These symbols are subtly evident by symbols in nature or in the more obvious written fortunes hung on bedroom walls and glued to the front door gates of traditional homes.

While walking this past weekend in the downtown area where there remain a small scattering of hanok (traditional tile-roofed, wooden homes with central courtyards) I noticed that on the front door gates of a few of the hanok fortune papers from the lunar New Year, celebrated at the end of January this year, were still glued. The fortune papers were on the doors so that when the doors were opened the good luck would also be swung inside with the visitor or household member as he or she entered into the outer courtyard; from there the fotune would freely flow on toward the house and its multiple compartments. In this particular picture, the left strip of fortune attached to the door is a welcome to fortune; the right strip is for wishing for good fortune as spring comes. Spring, the symbol of renewal and the beginning of a time where food could once again be produced, was much looked forward to. The agricultural society (the society that "we" think of as most traditional to Korea) had many celebrations and expressions for the coming of spring.

This second picture is another beautiful outside door that leads to the household courtyard. Although no paper is on it inviting luck and fortune, the fish hung at the top of the door symbolizes "abundance" which is poured down on the person entering. To get the concept of "abundance", one must have knowledge of the Korean language as this fish and the word for "abundance" share phonological sounds, the linguistic phenomenon known as a "rebus" or in this case can be known as a "visual pun". I have also seen these fish in some of the 식당, tiny mom-and-pop style eateries that are not to be confused with restaurants as Koreans typically think of a restaurant as having some class or some special ambience or food; the menu of a 식당 is limited to Korean food and that seems to be the tell-tale distinction.



In the same vicinity another paper, much larger and more complicated, was taped to a rich brown door (the wood was probably stained as the vast majority of these houses was made with a Korean pine, possibly the Korean red pine, that was grown at a higher altitude and thus grew more slowly and so is more durable as housing material than other trees available). I couldn't get a translation for this scripted fortune but it was likely purchased at a fortune tellers, a shaman's or near a temple. The very large and much celebrated Seon (Zen) temple, the Chogyesa, nearby runs a lucrative market around New Year's providing almanacs for reading fortunes and talisman papers to be hung around the home and elsewhere.

One other symbol, that of the tiger, is frequently placed on front gate doors. The tiger is said to chase away evil spirits - very important in a country fraught with spirits - and so was viewed as a powerful talisman for safety within the home. This year especially, 2010, as year of the very propitious white tiger, would have been a doubly beneficial year for putting the tiger symbol on the front gate doors.

Okcheon Temple, Gyeongsangnam-do

For a more in-depth write-up of what is of interest to see in the elusive Goseong-gun, Gyeongsangnam-do, please read Kim Hyungyoon's article in the Koreana. The following is liberally taken from this informative article.

Okcheonsa Temple on Mount Yeonhwasan in Gaecheon-myeon is a large, old temple which has as many as 12 buildings, including the Daeungjeon (main Buddha hall - pictured above) built in 1745 and the 300-year-old Jabangnu Pavilion. These large buildings are arranged in a manner which makes them resemble a lotus flower when seen from above. Okcheonsa is he home to numerous Buddhist treasures. The merits and values of Buddha are clearly on display in the temple's 120 or so relics, which include the pictured iron drum called imjamyeong banja made by Goryeo artisans in 1252 and used in both shamanic and Buddhist rituals, a large bell very similar to the Emile Bell located in Gyungju, the capitol of the Shilla Dynasty, a bronze incense burner, and the pictured wooden blocks of the Buddhist script Geunganggyeong (Sutra to Teach the Principles of Buddhism).