By Robert Neff

Following the opening of Korea to the West in 1882, the Korean government hired a number of Westerners to serve as advisors. Many of these advisors were very well paid and probably elicited great jealousy from their Korean peers. But how well paid were they?

The first and perhaps most famous of these advisors was Paul Georg von Mollendorff, a German national, who received a monthly salary of 300 taels (about 400 dollars). Mollendorff was so pleased with his role that he adopted Korean costume and “no one who saw him would suspect that he was a foreigner.” He soon found himself in hot water and was relieved of his several government positions (and was very lucky to have not been relieved of his head ― although there was talk of doing so) and forced to leave Korea.

One of his successors was Henry F. Merrill, an American appointed to run the Korean Maritime Customs and serve as Councilor of the Ministry of Finance. One of Merrill’s duties was to streamline the customs department by removing many of the Western employees who were paid much better than their Asian peers. It is somewhat ironic to note that Merrill was probably the most expensive advisor the court of King Gojong ever hired. Merrill allegedly received a yearly salary of 36,000 taels (about 46,000 dollars).

Clarence Greathouse, an American serving as the legal advisor, was also said to have received an enormous sum. Following his death in 1899, newspapers in the United States reported him as having received a “princely sum” of nearly 100,000 dollars a year which enabled to live like a Korean nobleman “wrapped in oriental luxury and jealously guarded from harm” by King Gojong. This was a gross exaggeration. Greathouse did receive a “princely sum” but it amounted to only $12,000 a year. In fact, Greathouse was one of the better paid advisors and most advisors received a great deal less.

Unlike Mollendorff, Greathouse did not “affect the peculiar oriental garb, the triple-decked headgear and jade..., but always wore the plain dress of an American citizen.” He “cared nothing for money, aside from what it would buy, and the life of oriental ease and splendor which he led in Seoul was said to be very agreeable to him.” He was described by the same newspapers as possessing a “clean-cut intellect, great ability and dreaminess.”

Obituaries, of course, do not speak ill of the dead but personal diaries and the writings of their contemporaries do. Yun Chi-ho, a Korean official who was well acquainted with the Western community, declared Greathouse’s “love of hoarding” was the reason that Greathouse did not take his very elderly mother ― who was “declining rapidly in health and spirit” ― back to America where she could happily live out her last days.

The Greathouses ― both Clarence and his mother ― were also very fond of alcohol. Yun noted that they lived in loneliness and drank copious amounts of makgeolli, a “Korean wine of the commonest sort.” William Franklin Sands, another American advisor to the Korean court, described Greathouse as “a first-rate lawyer, rarely sober, but a remarkable man. The drunker he got the more lucid he became. Nothing he drank ever muddled his brain, though it might paralyze his body.”

Sands’ own career in Korea was allegedly less-than-stellar. He first came to Korea as the American legation’s secretary but soon gave up his position to work with the Korean government as an advisor and ― if we are to believe his former supervisor at the American legation, Horace N. Allen ― lived well beyond his monthly salary of 300 yen (about 160 American dollars). By 1902, Sands was said to be nearly 30,000 yen in debt due to his extravagant lifestyle, gambling and his Japanese mistress who demanded a monthly sum of 700 yen, and it was feared that he would go postal and kill those around him.

Robert Neff is a contributing writer for The Korea Times.