Korea (33 page)

Chongjo then decided to build the Suwon fortress in his father’s honour, and further to consummate the fondness of his memory by moving the Korean capital down from Seoul, thirty miles away. And so up went the walls and the parapets, the embrasures and the cannon platforms and the command bunkers, and a meditative moonwatching pavilion known as the
Panghwasuryu-jong
, within which the Confucian elders could ruminate on the wisdom of their scholar king. But the capital never was moved south, and when Chongjo died in 1800 his dream city, Korea’s Taj Mahal, was only half finished. It took another reign to complete, and it cannot have been very well built, for after two centuries of ice and rain and summer heat and the depredations of the Civil War, it was reduced to a crumbling shell. The government rebuilt it in 1975, spending more than three billion
won
and four years on doing so. And now it stands, foursquare and quite magnificent, and it loomed grandly through the storm, a memorial to an ill-judged prince, a dour and fateful place, and like so much of Korea enwreathed in sadness and tragedy.

I took a car—the weather was simply too terrible to consider pressing on by foot—into the centre of the next town, a dormitory suburb called Anyang. This was clearly home to some of Seoul’s more chic set, since there was a Cartier shop and another selling genuine Gucci shoes. The small hotel the driver found, however,
was a reasonably low establishment with mean, old-fashioned rooms and explosive-sounding plumbing. I was too cold to care, and I lay in a blood-heat bath for an hour, feeling very sorry for myself. I then slept until dark and awoke to find that all my joints had seized—or rusted—and the simple act of getting off the bed had become an agony. Life’s return was painfully gradual.

Dinner was no great success either. I will take some time to forget the error I made in choosing to sit at a table beside the restaurant’s fish tank, unaware that this night had been chosen for the tank’s spring cleaning. I was halfway through a bowl of turgid and half-cold soup made from what tasted like rat when I glanced to my left, expecting to see some exotically coloured guppies and gudgeons and saw instead two large and very horrid-looking human feet. I dropped my spoon with a resounding clang and nearly spat the soup right across the room, at an elderly gent who seemed to be the only other client in the room.

The feet walked across the tank’s sea bottom, the guppies fleeing in open-mouthed terror. Then the pedal progress stopped, and an enormous net broke the silver undersurface of the water and groped down for the guppies, who panicked and fled behind the yellowish leg-pillars. But they were ruthlessly rounded up, and the legs, which turned out to belong to one of the hotel waiters who had been lifted into the tank to give it a scrubdown, vanished and reappeared on the carpet. I slept fitfully that night, and dreamed.

But the next morning was fresh and bright. The storm had passed out into the Sea of Japan (or the East Sea, as the Japan-loathing Koreans know it), and such blossom as had been spared by the gales was trembling against a background of a pale, newwashed blue sky. The boundary lions—or more properly the
haetae
, which are mythical, lionlike guardian beasts that eat fire—of the City of Seoul appeared on Route I after I had been walking for no more than half an hour: the journey—or at least, that part of it which coincided with the expedition of the Dutchmen—was almost at an end.

Seoul! One of the world’s biggest cities, and yet one of the
world’s least known. A city invariably mispronounced (it is homophonic with what it doubles as—the soul of Korea) and a place that is not amenable, unlike all other Korean cities, to having its name (which means capital) written in Chinese characters. A city that has been marched through and devastated by no fewer than four invading armies in this century alone. A city whose population had grown by 80 per cent in the last ten years—fewer than half a million struggled in the wreckage that remained after the Civil War, and today 10 million people jostle and scurry and beaver away in the fantastic jungle that has created itself—in an immense, uncontrolled, unlovely, unforgettable mitosis—in the past dozen years.

It appears to have been set down in the middle of a range of mountains, and it is a city of great visual drama. Immense peaks of granite and schist—some rounded, some razor sharp, all scarred with pale streaks where vegetation has been unable to gain a foothold—soar from amidst the concrete. The peaks look vast, but they are in fact just hills—the tallest, at 2,627 feet, is no taller than Helvellyn—and they are no longer as wild as once, when leopards and tigers wandered down from them and ate people who were taking their ease on the city streets.

Isabella Bird thought the city looked magnificent:

Arid and forbidding those mountains look at times, their ridges broken up into black crags and pinnacles, off times arising from among distorted pines, but there are evenings of purple glory when every forbidding peak gleams like an amethyst with a pink translucency, and the shadows are cobalt and the sky is green and gold. Fair are the surroundings too in early spring, when a delicate green mist veils the hills, and their sides are flushed with the heliotrope azalea, and flame of plum, and blush of cherry, and tremulousness of peach blossom appear in unexpected quarters.

But that was from afar. She had a rather different opinion once she had entered the city walls:

I shrink from describing intramural Seoul. I thought it the foulest city on earth until I saw Peking, and its smells the most odious, until I encountered those of Shao-shing. For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable. Etiquette forbids the erection of two-storied houses, consequently an estimated quarter of a million people are living on ‘the ground’, chiefly in labyrinthine alleys, many of them not wide enough for two loaded bulls to pass, indeed barely wide enough for one man to pass a loaded bull, and further narrowed by a series of vile holes or green, slimy ditches which receive the solid and liquid refuse of the house, their foul and fetid margins being the favorite resort of half-naked children, begrimed with dirt, and big, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, which wallow in the slime or blink in the sun….

A hundred years on, the stamp of invasion and the crump of artillery shells, the fires and the floods and the grand ambition of the new Koreans have utterly altered the city of Seoul. It is a city that is old, not ancient: it was founded in 1392, and before that Kaesong was the capital—and yet hides its antiquity behind high walls or so perfectly preserves and displays it that you feel it must be
ersatz
or plucked from a museum. The old is there, all right, but not as in Oxford, or Florence, or Istanbul. There are no ancient walls or leafy lanes of tottering houses, no tiny temples dating from Koguryo times or from the days of Unified Shilla, which nestle among the newer blocks of flats or beside the railway station. No, all Seoul looks fairly modern, like Tokyo now, or like Shanghai in another ten years’ time, or like Tulsa—the oldest buildings are the strongest creations of a century ago, and the truly ancient ones are hidden away, unused, on display for payment in folding money.

Walking the road from Anyang northward, once I had slipped between the
haetaes’
suspicious glowering, was rather like being in a film running in reverse—a film on the Rapid Development of a Modern City, with the newer shops and houses as the introduction, the less and less modern, the more and more faded structures making up the body of the story. The road into the city was lined with hundreds upon hundreds of shops, selling all
the paraphernalia of an advanced society. In a flash the simple country life had gone, and in its place was not merely congestion and pollution and rush but comfort and luxury and all the familiar icons of mercantilism and materialism. Cameras, stereo sets, silk dresses, fast food, antiques, ornate embellishments for the car, lamps, wristwatches, climbing gear, porcelain, books. Once in a while there would be the kind of shop that had evidently been around for ages—a grocery or a man who sold calligraphy brushes and
tojang
, the name seals, with their pots of sticky red ink, or the snake dealer or the deer-horn seller or the ginseng shop.

It was all a pleasant bustle—not overnoisy (for Koreans, at least when sober, speak quietly), not overcrowded (not in the way Hong Kong’s Wanchai always is and the smaller streets of the Ginza can well be), not tempered with a bullying or a threatening feeling, for the Buddhist and Confucian spirit tends to preserve a degree—diminishing, my friends all say—of gentility and courtesy. I had been to Seoul many times, but this particular foray, through a southern suburb that looked as anonymous as any suburb anywhere in the world, was comfortable in its civilized ordinariness—old ladies out shopping for cabbage,
chige
-men carrying heavy deliveries on their backs, schoolboys hurrying back from lunch, young blades eyeing the young girls, salesmen in blue suits on their rounds of the shops, workmen digging holes in the road, inspectors checking on the times of the arriving buses, mothers with children tightly strapped to their backs, and every few moments a young woman in her bright
chima chogori
or an old man in a tall black horsehair hat and a grey suit, neatly pressed. John Betjeman, I thought, would have liked this road—Shihungdae-ro, it was called—and so would Auden. Here was the mysterious Orient benignly prosaic, getting on with its life without any fuss.

Then a siren began to blow, and everything started to move very fast. Cars screeched to a halt, their drivers slewing in to the side of the road. Passersby dashed into the nearest available doorway. People snoozing on the street benches woke up and dashed inside, looking sleepily ill-tempered. I was hustled into a
shop that made and sold tennis shoes, and a dozen other men and women came in with me. I stood around, wrinkling my nose in the glue-sodden air, wishing I could venture out into the comparatively fresh outside again. But there were policemen by the door, and a cruiser was rumbling slowly down the road, observers inside it peering at the empty streets.

I had fifteen minutes to wait. I knew that well. Once a month, shortly after lunch, the Seoul government stages a civil defence drill; the sirens blow, the police fan out, and everyone must take to shelter. The roads must be clear, too—no traffic other than police cars and emergency trucks is allowed to run. Anyone caught driving or walking on the streets is fined stiffly. Korea intends to have as many of its civilians as possible left living should the Communists invade again: too many were killed in June 1950, when the Northerners tried it for the first time. So the Southerners practise ways of improving their fate.

The seconds ticked past interminably. My civilly defended colleagues smiled nervously at me, and a mother looked embarrassed as her child, spotting me, fled behind her skirts. There was a girl wearing a T-shirt bearing one of those meaningless, half-formed sentences that have become almost an art form across in Japan. Hers said: ‘Westwood. We will be just like standing over. 1955.’ She smiled and told me she was a student at Seoul National University.

‘Civil defence is the government’s way of keeping the people nervous,’ she declared, assuming, probably correctly, that she and I were the only English-speakers among the shop’s captive clientele.

‘But what if the North attacks?’ I said. ‘Better to survive, isn’t it?’

‘They won’t attack. They don’t have to. They’re more clever than that. Our only enemies here are the Americans.’

I said I thought she was being a little unfair. Didn’t she remember the sacrifices the Americans had made for Korea during the Civil War? ‘It was a civil war. They should have kept out.’

But the all-clear sirens began to wail just then, and she waved cheerfully and took off for class. The others in the shop had vanished too, leaving me standing among the avalanches of Reeboks and Adidas and Nikes, and the manager was coming to ask if I wanted to buy…

An hour later, after I had passed the undamaged magnificence of the Oriental Brewery Company—brewers of O.B. beer, the better of the two local brands of
maekju
—I was at the river Han. My first sighting of what, for me, was supposedly a landmark of some moment, was of a less than impressive trickle, the southern nullah that separates Yoido Island from the shore. But Yoido itself is an impressive sight, though of a rather bloodless kind, and in no way redolent of Korea: it is all office blocks and government headquarters—IBM on one side of the road, the Korean Broadcasting System on the other—and the eastern tip of the island is dominated by the enormous gold-tinted skyscraper of the Daehan Insurance Company—at the time of writing the tallest office block in Northeast Asia but soon to be outdone by the new Bank of China building in Hong Kong. (And already out-skyscraped by the Raffles Towers in Singapore—some comfort being taken in Korea by the fact that it was built by their very own Ssanyong Construction Company.)

But perhaps Yoido is best known for its mighty plaza, a lone and level plain of hard asphalt and stone a good mile long and half a mile wide—the kind of place that all totalitarian states (and many others besides) seem to have at their disposal for laying on the most impressive demonstrations of national unity and power. This is where Armed Forces Day is celebrated each October; it is where the Pope offered mass and where the Korean masses came out to vent their anger at the shooting down of their airliner over Sakhalin in 1983. Today I was almost alone and felt mightily insignificant as I traced my way along the patterns of white lines that showed where the tank commanders should place their tracks or where the armies of schoolchildren should set their slippered feet and begin their routines of patriotic dance.

At the far end of the plaza was the main stream—the Han
River, mightiest in all Korea, a rival to the Yalu and the Kum and the Imjin. It was an impressive river, a real city river, with tall buildings on each side and a feisty flow against the buttresses far below me. But the impression that the Han might give, of power and strength and great utility, is a false one. Politics have made the Han a sad sort of stream, a river that is pointless at one end and now supposedly very dangerous at the other.