Korea (35 page)

The thirty-five Dutch sailors had little enough to say about the Royal Palace; they were embarrassed, it seems, by the attention they were receiving from a citizenry who fully believed them to look like exotic sea monsters, kraken, or blond-haired serpents. Hendrick Hamel noted that the local people thought that when these strangers drank, they had to tuck their noses behind their ears, and such huge crowds gathered outside their house that the militia had to issue a regulation that forbade such gatherings.

The king before whom they were paraded was Hyojong, a man who knew well what imprisonment was all about since he had spent eight years while crown prince as a hostage in the hands of the Ch’ing Manchus in China. The meeting almost certainly took place in the throne room of the Changdok Palace—the Palace of Illustrious Virtue. It is an impressively lovely building, still in excellent condition today and, indeed, housing the remaining members of Korea’s royal family. Hyojong was the seventeenth king of the Yi Dynasty: there were to be only nine monarchs more before that unforgettably wretched day in August 1910 when the twenty-seventh king, Sunjong, issued a proclamation yielding up his throne and his country to the Japanese. They had annexed his country; it fell upon his shoulders to bring to an end a dynasty that had ruled Korea, for good or ill, since 1392.

Sunjong died on 10 June 1926 in the Changdok Palace (there were angry demonstrations at his funeral: ‘Long live Korean independence! Twenty million countrymen—drive out the enemy! The price of liberty is blood! Long live Korean independence!’). His relations and descendants and ancient court retainers live on, and in some style, in a palace annexe called Naksonjae, the Mansion of Joy and Goodness. Once in a while the man who would now be Korea’s twenty-ninth king—Yi Ku, now known as Mr Kyu Lee, a nephew of the deposed Sunjong—returns from the United States to take part in the annual May rituals honouring the royal dead. He wears the extraordinarily elaborate robes of Confucian majesty, including a hat that looks like an Australian mortarboard, with coloured beads hanging in long rows where
the corks would otherwise be. Mr Lee is an architect; he lives in California and married a girl called Julia Mullock. He was not in the country when I called at Changdok, and deep expressions of regret were uttered by elderly chamberlains. He prefers the West Coast climate, it is said, to the rigours of the Korean winter. He looked a pleasant sort of king, a bespectacled man with a benign expression, and the pictures of his performances at the Confucian ritual show him looking, understandably, more than a little wistful at how matters had turned out—the Japanese who had forced his uncle out had been replaced, all right, but the country had been split asunder, and now malign dictatorships ruled on both sides of an artificial divide. The dynasty of which he is still the notional head had taken the ancient Korean name Choson—the name given by the son of the she-bear, Tangun. Choson, as the advertisers tell us, quite ludicrously, means ‘morning freshness and calm’—the idea that the country Mr Lee might head is still the Land of Morning Calm being absurd in the extreme and one that he would doubtless find deeply ironic and sad. The Land of the Rising Sun had helped put an end to the idea that the Land of the Morning Calm could ever be calm again.

I had wanted to see the modern equivalent of the palace, the so-called Blue House where the president lives and has his offices. But you are not allowed within a mile of the place, and once when I was walking with a friend on a hill north of the city, soldiers stopped us and made us look another way, for fear we might see the house in the distance and take a picture of it. I once went with a photographer to the roof of the Seoul Hilton to have pictures taken of the city skyline: the guide instructed us strictly not to point the lenses to the northwest, where the presidency was hidden. So we turned the other way and found that the far corner of the roof housed an anti-aircraft gun, covered in camouflage netting, ready and waiting for an attack from the Communists—surely the only Hilton, we thought, that had an ack-ack gun above the restaurant. (It turned out that it was in fact a model, made of wood and manned by a dummy.)

Yet in a way the new kings of Korea are not the generals who run the place—and they may not be running things for much longer, given the apparently reforming zeal of President Chun’s nominated successor, Roh Tae Woo. The real kings, though their palaces are much smaller than before, are the men who run the great
chaebols
, the huge industrial empires that so exemplify the miracle state of the new Korea. I had called on one of the greatest of these men the last time I had passed through Seoul; he was called Kim Woo Choong, and he ran the Daewoo Corporation from an office next door to the Hilton Hotel.

He owned the Hilton, actually. And he had recently bought, ‘to dress up the lobby a little’, a Henry Moore reclining figure, in bronze. It had cost him the best part of a million dollars. He had hired an American public relations company, Hill and Knowlton, to dress up his company’s public image. He had hired a former official of Mr Reagan’s White House to try to lower his firm’s tax liability in the United States. He was worth tens of millions of dollars, and controlled an empire that made cars and refrigerators and shirts and microprocessors, steel bars and container ships and bridges—an empire whose companies laid pipelines and built new towns, baked bread and sweets, ran supermarkets, and ran the best hotel in Seoul and the best French restaurant to boot.

Kim is a small, modest, punctilious man, with glasses and grey hair, and rather more of a sense of fun than is customary among Oriental businessmen. One afternoon I watched someone take his photograph in the hotel lobby—he is very famous within Korea, an almost deified figure—and he offered to sit on the plinth beside his Henry Moore because he thought it might make a more memorable image. But he was far too short and had to jump up backwards, failing several times before he finally triumphed and sat grinning with his arm through the figure’s central void, waiting for his fan to take the picture. He had not, it seemed, lost too much of the common touch.

Daewoo—the name means ‘Great Universe’—was no more than a small engineering company twenty years ago. Kim Woo
Choong had seven employees back in 1968, and a total capital of £7,000. Now he employs more than a hundred thousand men and women, and his empire is worth billions. Brilliant organization, Confucian dedication, an innate sense of duty, carefully applied company paternalism, and an unforgiving regime of discipline—all this, coupled with low wages and precious little interference from union organizations—all helped to bring Kim and his colleagues at Hyundai and Gold Star and Samsung and the other
chaebols
, who started, as he had, from nothing in those ruined days following the war, the immense power and industrial might they enjoy today.

The Japanese industrial giants are often much older and more venerable institutions or were founded by men with great fortunes or by the members of ancient aristocracies—Sony, for instance, was created by a man whose family firm had made a fortune out of
sake
more than a century ago. But the Korean firms, like Daewoo, are generally the creations of self-made men, of poor men, of farmers and engineers and soldiers who saw an opportunity in the wake of war, seized it, held on to it, and triumphed with hard work against what must have seemed like impossible odds. Korean miracle-making is invariably the product of the very same virtues that have made the survival of Korea something of a miracle. The fact that
hangul
remains intact, that a very real Korean identity still exists, that nearly all traces of all those defeats and those subjugations have all been shrugged off once again—once it is possible to accept that Koreans are capable of such miracles as these, then it is possible to accept the industrial miracles that have happened in Korea since the end of their war.

Of course, one can reasonably say there is a distaff side of the Korean character—a side that brings cruelty and ruthlessness and moodiness and melancholia and uncontrollable outbursts of temper—but that same character also brings the better traits of stoicism, grim determination, the ability to weather almost anything, to meet almost any challenge, and to come back for more—and the ability to make the impossible possible, time and
time again. Kim Woo Choong, tireless and single minded, seems a personification of the Korean character, an exemplar of the success, personal and national, that has radiated from the little country in the last thirty years.

‘Education is the key,’ he had said to me over a cup of ginseng tea in the foyer of his hotel. ‘The people in this country take an enormous pride in seeing that their children are educated well. A worker at one of our factories will do almost anything—he’ll endure anything, work as hard as he can—just to ensure that his children get the best possible schooling.

‘Look at the villages all over Korea, and see which is the biggest and most imposing building in every one. It’ll nearly always be the school building. We worship teachers here; we worship schools. We pay our teachers well. They are respected figures in our community. Are they still in the West? I have heard not, not as much as before. Look at the universities in Seoul—there are dozens of them. People crawl over each other to get to attend classes. They really
want
to learn. They want to be trained. There is this intense desire to better themselves, and to do it with their brains if they can. If anything can be specifically thought of as responsible for our country’s success then it’s that—the intense desire to learn, to become properly educated at the best schools that can be afforded. No matter what the cost, no matter the hardship, that’s the prime duty of a parent, to get his children educated. That’s the key.’

Kim is not a flamboyant figure, though he does dress well and maintains a renowned art gallery in a suburb of the capital. He is seen to mix with friends who play golf at the Han Yang Country Club north of Seoul, where a year’s membership can cost 35 million
won—
£32,000. And this was apparently enough—this illustration of what was said to be the growing gap between the wealth of employers and that of employees in Korea—for Daewoo to be plagued by serious strikes during the summer of 1987 and for riots to break out (during which one demonstrator at the Koje Island shipyard was killed, hit by shrapnel from a police tear-gas grenade). Kim stood up to the strikers for a week, then
gave in gracefully, offering more money, compensation for the dead man’s family, and better conditions. As a consequence of a wave of strikes organized at the same time as the one against Daewoo, the unions have considerably more power and influence in the Korea of the late 1980s than they did at the beginning of the decade. Whether this means that the astonishing rate of economic success can be maintained remains to be seen.

I managed to get myself hopelessly lost on the way back from the palace—Seoul has the appearance of modernity but in fact is divided into a mass of tiny villages that, like palaces themselves (or Moorish bazaars), huddle behind the walls of their own outer houses and inside are like vast mazes. Old women staggering about with
kimchi
dishes, the
yontan
man delivering the coal, the milkman delivering, the children playing
paduk
—the Korean version of the ancient Japanese game
go
—on tiny boards; all seemed wrapped up in a rabbit warren of streets and staircases that ended in blind alleys miles from where I had wanted to go. A child finally led me out into the street again, and I found the entrance to the subway and took a train out to Kupabal Station on the far northwestern side of the city.

Route I was here again—the road to Panmunjom that had once been the road to Peking. Indeed, old maps show the road—now jammed with buses and high-speed cars and underlain by subway trains—to have passed through a defile called Pekin Pass. Henry Savage Landor liked the drama of the place. It is, he wrote:

…the road by which the envoys of the Chinese Emperor, following an ancient custom, travel overland with a view to claiming the tribute payable by the King of Corea. As a matter of fact, this custom of paying tribute had almost fallen into disuse and China had not, I believe, enforced her right of suzerainty over the Corean peninsula until 1890, when the envoys of the Celestial Emperor once again proceeded on their wearisome and long journey from Pekin to the capital of Chosen. It was here at Pekin Pass, then, that according to custom, they were received with great honour by the Coreans, and led into Seoul.

My subway train had undershot the pass by about a hundred feet, and I left the city without ceremony, passing between the northern
haetaes
with no more than a glance. The blossom trees were full and huge, the day was clear and bright, and the road ahead—which in theory passed to China, to Mongolia, to Manchuria—was arrow straight. But there was no chance that I could use it to pass to China or even very much further into Korea. I would manage, in fact, to walk precisely thirty-five miles more along it until I passed the barbed wire and the electric fences, and between the artillery pieces and the tank compounds, and until I reached a row of markers and a battered bridge that took the enfeebled extension of this roadway across a muddy little stream. The bridge, I had been told, was called the Bridge of No Return, and if I made the calamitous error of walking across it, I would be lost for evermore. So, they said, thirty-five miles more, and not a single pace beyond.

From a distance it looked like an enormous bridge—an unappealing structure of grey concrete blocks that stood astride Route I, with a sentry box beside it. From within the box came the glint of a steel helmet and the barrel of an automatic rifle. Even from afar, though, the structure looked rather odd—it seemed somehow out of place, a bit suspect, even phoney.

For a start it clearly was not a particularly useful sort of bridge, since it didn’t appear to be carrying anything across the road. There was no railway line leading up to it; there was no track to allow cattle or people to pass above the endless roaring torrent of traffic; the bridge appeared to support no lesser highway, no water pipeline, no trunk cable for the national grid. Of course, it might once have supported a right-of-way that had fallen into disuse, but it didn’t look a very old bridge, and besides, Korea isn’t a country where things fall into disuse. If the people stop
using something, they tend to tear it down and build something else in its place. There are virtually no ruins in Korea—no modern ones, anyway. So whatever this mysterious object was, it performed a function of some sort.

I walked closer. To the left and right of the structure, reaching away to the distant horizons, were long lines of immense concrete cubes. They were like building bricks that had been set down across the landscape by some giant child on a day when he was bored. The bricks—which must have been eight feet tall and have weighed fifty tons apiece—were arranged in three staggered rows, such that those in the middle line covered the gaps between the bricks in the two others. On the outer, northern (and thus North Korea-facing) side of the line there was a deep ditch with precipitous sides—rather like the Vallum, the defensive moat built by the Romans on the Pictish side of Hadrian’s Wall. The parallel was inviting and, as it happened, appropriate.

It would be quite impossible for any vehicle yet designed by man to pass across this formidable line of defence—for this, indeed, was precisely what it was. In much the same way as the old Seoul city walls had been designed to keep the Mongols at bay—though the walls proved a costly failure—so this new, and not very much more technologically advanced, city wall had been designed to keep the Communists at bay. American intelligence reports have it that there are 3,500 tanks north of the Demilitarized Zone—‘most of them indigenously produced copies of the relatively modern Soviet T-62, supplemented by numerous M-1973 Armored Personnel Carriers mounting the 73 mm smooth bore gun’. The ditch and the concrete blocks, it is fondly hoped, will halt them all in their tracks.

And the ‘bridge’, too, is all part of the same defence mechanism. As I walked beneath it—the sentry saluted me smartly, though only after he had eyed me with the most intense curiosity, for I was the only walker on the road—I could see exactly what it was. Just beneath the huge mass of cement and iron that was poised over the road were a number of long tubes drilled into the structure’s vertical supports. A cable emerged from the end
of each tube, and the cables—twenty or so of them—were gathered together and passed into a duct that took them below ground. There was no doubt as to their purpose: they would, on command from some central bunker, transmit the signal that would detonate high-explosive charges lodged inside each of the tubes—tubes placed in such a way that their detonation would shatter the bridge supports and bring the whole mass of ferrocement and iron crashing down onto Route I. The explosions would totally block the road and would with luck prevent the southward passage of all those T-62 tank squadrons and the M-1973 Armoured Personnel Carriers that were waiting, even now, for a chance to swoop down on Seoul.

I passed through four more such bridges during the next hours. A couple of them had special hinged steel doors that could slam shut at a moment’s notice, also blocking the road but allowing it to be reopened quickly should the Northerners turn tail after a firefight. And there was a bridge over a river, too, that was similarly equipped for self-destruction. Stout ropes were looped through holes in the roadway and, if I craned over the railing sufficiently far, I could see that suspended from them like hams in a delicatessen were high-explosive charges—mines that would blow the bridge to smithereens and deny the Northern tanks another opportunity of clanking southward.

Everything en route—every bluff, every defile, every bridge, every crossing—is designed with the defence of Seoul in mind. This is because current thinking about Northern strategy has it that the Communist forces—should they ever decide to invade, as they did in 1950—would mount a sudden and massive blitzkrieg, storming over the DMZ when least expected and when the Southern guard is down—Christmas Day, perhaps—and try to capture the capital, or at least the capital’s supply lines. The advance, which might take a week, would then halt, and the Communists would negotiate a political settlement based on the now vastly changed military situation.

Since 1973 the most effective counter to this particular threat has been to place American forces, in very considerable numbers,
in the area through which the North Koreans would have to advance—the area through which I was now walking. This would have a dual effect: first, it would bring the North Koreans into direct conflict with what the Pentagon regards as some of the best-trained and best-equipped fighting men it is possible to find—and the Communists might then lose the battle; and second, it would pit the North Koreans against the unique political disadvantage of doing battle with Washington. It is one thing, the argument goes, for the North Koreans to fight their Southern brothers, even if the Southern brothers are linked by treaty with a United States that is more than willing to help defend them; it is quite another for North Korea to take on the United States from the very start. Pyongyang, it is thought, would not wish to take the risk of a direct conflict with the United States—hence the decision to place American troops well forward, almost as pickets, tempting the Northerners into striking a blow, is also a carefully constructed way of warning them not to play with the kind of fire that battle with Washington would inevitably bring down on them. (It is said that the latest battle plan, should the presence of the American troops fail to deter a North Korean attack, requires the Southern forces to mount a major counterattack, crossing the DMZ and pouring deep into the North Korean heartland. Since a huge proportion of the Southern troops are well to the north of Seoul, the presence of dynamited bridges and collapsed river crossings would not present too much of a problem in logistics, since the barriers would all be well behind them.)

The countryside around me had all the delicacy of an old watercolour—the blue sky lapped vaguely against the blue hills, a distant tracery of lime green poplars framed a rice paddy that glinted softly in the evening sun, the tractors purred distantly, there was a sweetish smell of woodsmoke in the air. But the place-names, the signboards, the half-hidden camps—all of these had the feel of war about them, a reminiscence of misery and glory and brief episodes of heroism. The sinuous strip of asphalt ahead of me was after all a classic Korean invasion route, a road
that had been tramped or rumbled or fought along by Chinese and Mongols, and by the First and Second Corps of the North Korean Army just three decades before. Over the low ranges to my right—where road signs pointed to quiet market towns that had been terrible battlefields not so long ago—there were, I knew, two more valleys, near parallel, that made up the notorious Uijongbu Corridor, along which hundreds of tanks and infantrymen had swept on that bleakly wet summer Sunday in 1950 when, as one author put it, ‘the South Korean soldiers mistook the rumble of enemy artillery for the sound of thunder’.

So all the names round here—Munsan, Komchon, Tongduchon, Pyokche—are to many Koreans (and to not a few Americans) redolent of gunsmoke and defeat, then victory and defeat again, and final stalemate. (Uijongbu means ‘the City of Ever Righteousness’, which some may find ironic.) ‘Down these roads came the North Korean 3rd and 4th Divisions,’ wrote Robert Leckie—one of the Civil War’s most recent historians—in
The Korean War
. ‘The 4th was on the west road [close to where I was now stepping out], the 3rd was on the east, and both were behind the bulk of the tanks of the 105th Armored Brigade. There was no stopping these armored columns, for there was nothing with which to stop them. The American 37 mm antitank guns were hardly better than pistols against the T-34s….’

Today the preparations for war are more impressive, and they look more impressive too. No one, this time, is going to be caught napping. Up on the hills, above the canopies of the pine woods, radar dishes that point ever northward rock and turn rhythmically. Convoys of American Army trucks grumble along the road. Korean foot soldiers, their rifles tipped with bayonets, clamber over stiles on their way to patrol the fields. And every few miles there is a camp—usually American, with a prosaic name like Camp Smith or Camp Edwards—behind barbed wire entanglements and lines of arc lights. The sentry posts, the Quonset huts, the pay offices, the water towers, and all the other paraphernalia of a foreign base are familiar enough; they look less threatening, being merely the conventional aspect of the new
American colonialism, if you like, that you see in Turkey or the Philippines or in East Anglia. But then, at the far end of each camp, is the vehicle park—and that invariably looks very threatening indeed. Up here, so very close to the Zone, the parks are jammed solid with camouflage-painted, net-shrouded battle tanks and howitzers and armoured personnel carriers, jeeps, scout vehicles, machine gun platforms, field ambulances, ammunition trucks, mine scourers, bridge layers, mobile mortars—a concentration of battlefield equipment for a great field army, ready and waiting in its lair to fan out and deal death to the enemy or, in the case of the ambulances, to deal with the death and the dying of its own.

I seemed always to feel a tingle and a chill of apprehension creeping along my spine as I walked past these camps; and the camp fences were very long, and so my walks under the great grooved barrels of the howitzers and the siege cannons took time—too much time for comfort. I think I felt much as I remember feeling when I saw my first IRA man holding his smoking rifle in a Belfast slum street years ago. To read about such people, or even to see them on film, manages to be not at all chilling. Print or celluloid, however graphic, can be a neutralizing medium. But to see a gun in the hands of an angry man—or to see, as on this day, hundreds of mighty weapons in the hands of ever-watchful and ever-fearful guards—that was a frightening thing. I was glad each time to walk away free of the wire fences, to get away from the malevolent presence of the guns, and back to the colour-washed quietude of the Korean pastoral.

I made the dirty little village of Kumchon by twilight and found a
yogwan
where a matronly concierge gave me a room with a Western-style bed. She had hung up a poster of a naked girl, who peered coquettishly down at me, and the matron stood in the doorway pointing at the girl and then at me, and looked enquiringly. I muttered something about having a bath and began to ease off my socks, and she retired to her room muttering, and I could hear her switch on the television. I sat in the little bath—Korean baths, when you find such things, are engineered for tiny
people who sit bolt upright, and they are not kind to those of us longer creatures who like to languish in the foam—and I felt a little depressed: there were only twenty miles to go now, and I was coming to the end of a journey that I wished could go on forever. Why couldn’t I carry on across the borderline? Why could I not, as I had originally wanted, walk to Pyongyang, or indeed right up to the banks of the Yalu River? Wretched politicians! I cursed, and lathered myself furiously.

But an hour later, cleansed and refreshed and my feet powdered and dried, and wearing the last fresh shirt I could find in the bottom of my bag, the gloom had lifted. I called a friend in Seoul, a pretty interpreter called Choon-sil whom I had tried to find while I had been walking through the city, but without any luck. This time she answered the phone and seemed instantly excited. ‘I have been so very sad,’ she said, without further explanation. And now I am a little drunken. But you not mind? I come to see you? In Kumchon—that’s only half an hour in the taxi.’ I was pleased, of course, though a mite offended by the casual way she had reminded me that a distance I had taken a day to walk took less than thirty minutes in a cab. But, then, all Korea would only take eight hours by car: I could be back in Mokpo by dawn, if I started now.

Choon-sil was very ‘drunken’, as she would say, when she arrived. She had come home from work at six and had started on the beer—four cans, and another in the taxi on the way. She insisted on taking me to a café she knew well from her student days, and she swayed slightly as she walked.

We sat in the candlelit gloom of this cavelike bar late into the night. The tables were worn sections of an old oak, the rings picked out by a decade of student ballpoints. The chairs were deal, the floor was warm stone. Each table seemed to be enveloped by low, rough walls, and all manner of intimacies were encouraged in the fuggy cosiness of the place. We ordered
pindae-ttuk
, a big, steaming-hot bean-flour pancake, and endless bottles of beer. Rosa—her parents, devout Christians, had suggested the name to her when she was fifteen—was indeed very sad. She suffered
the classic dilemma of so many intelligent Korean women—for intelligent she very much was, with a mind like a razor, a splendid facility for language, a wide assortment of clever, and foreign, friends. She was thirty-two, her teenage prettiness perhaps fading a little. Her parents had wanted her married, and she had duly gone to the matchmakers and seen what was on offer. But she had always made it clear that she would never warm to the idea of performing the kind of uxorial duties expected by a Korean husband. So she had turned all suitors down and opted for an independent life, teaching English, interpreting, doing research work for foreign visitors. She was much loved and admired, but she knew, as the years slid by, that she had a diminishing chance of marrying or bearing a child.