By Robert Neff
During the late Joseon period, Westerners traveling in Korea’s interior were faced with many hardships including obtaining passports, porters, food and of course, housing. There were no hotels and the traveler was often faced with the prospect of camping outside — a dangerous prospect considering the number of tigers that haunted Korea’s wilderness — or sleeping in a Korean inn.
Westerners had very strong opinions of these inns. In the early 1890s, Samuel Moffett, an American missionary who often traveled in the interior, said that staying in a Korean inn was a great way of winning the villagers over. Of course, getting the room wasn’t always so easy. Many times innkeepers insisted that they had no rooms and Moffett was forced to have the local magistrate intervene. Once the room was obtained the traveler was then faced with the inquisitiveness of his host. Moffett wrote:
“Not long after you have entered you are pretty sure to make the acquaintance of the landlord who considers himself entitled to the freedom of your room, a privilege which the whole community is apt to claim.”
Many of the early Western travelers wrote bitterly of their invasion of privacy while guests in these inns but perhaps none suffered more than Isabella Bird Bishop, an English explorer, who traveled extensively throughout Korea in the mid-1890s.
In one inn she was beset upon by a crowd of curious onlookers who, in order to get a better glimpse of the Western woman, tore the paper off the doors of her room and even forced their way in so that they could examine her goods. Some women even slid her sleeves up to her elbows so that they could pinch her and determine if her pale flesh was the same as their own. Several times her servant threw the curious mob out of her room but it was only after Bishop removed her gun for cleaning did she gain some degree of solitude.
Curious villagers were not the only unwanted pests that foreign travelers were forced to contend with while staying at a Korean inn. The heated floors and dark recesses of the inn provided a wonderful environment for vermin of all sorts. According to Bishop:
“(The intense heat of the floor) stood till morning, vivifying into revolting active life myriads of cockroaches and vermin which revel in heat, not to speak of rats, which ran over my bed, ate my candle, gnawed my straps, and would have left me without boots, had I not long before learned to hang them from the tripod of my camera.”
Bedbugs were common complaints of Western travelers but none of their stories can compare with that of James Scarth Gales — a Canadian missionary who traveled throughout northern Korea in 1891. According to his Korean guide, prior to the Joseon Kingdom, Songdo (modern Gaeseong in North Korea) was once home to more than a hundred Buddhist temples. After the Joseon Kingdom was founded, the Buddhists were forced out and their temples burned.
The only trace of these great temples was the infestation of bedbugs. “In springtime the stones underneath and about, are covered with bed-bugs, a yellow variety that have faded somewhat for having remained 500 years without the proper means of subsistence.”
Gales, who apparently did not witness this infestation first-hand, noted that he was informed “in all seriousness that notwithstanding their long fasting some (of the bedbugs) still weigh as much as a half a pound.”
Bedbugs that size kind of brings new meaning to the old phrase “sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Robert Neff is a contributing writer for the Korea Times