Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.
The Korean pony: Equine wickedness in the Realm of the Morning Calm
Shoeing a Korean pony. The ponies were carefully tied up and restrained to protect the blacksmith from their dangerous hooves and teeth.
By Robert Neff
For Western travelers to Korea in the late 19th century, the pony was one of the most popular ― if not most exciting ― means of transportation. In the words of one British diplomat, the Korean pony “invariably afford(ed) an unfailing source of amusement and irritation according to the temperament of the traveler.”
This was especially true with the missionaries. One normally associates missionaries with a wealth of understanding and kindness but, judging from their correspondences, not for the poor little ponies.
In 1885, John Richard Wolfe excitedly explained his first encounter with a Korean pony. “As soon as the creature saw me approaching to mount, it reared and kicked furiously, and opened its mouth and flew at me like a tiger.” Perhaps it wasn't the fact that Wolfe was a British missionary but more a matter of girth ― if memory serves me right, Wolfe was said to have been on the large side.
The ponies did not discriminate by gender, nationality, age, occupation or even species ― they hated everyone and everything, including themselves.
Lillias Underwood wrote: “[T]wo of those poor little pack-ponies which I had been pitying all along for the terrible way their relentless mapoos [pony handlers] overloaded them, began fighting (loads and all), and after kicking each other in the liveliest fashion for some time, squealing like little fiends, while the poor mapoos were dancing and vociferating around them trying to bring about a truce, they finally scampered off in different directions, and then and there my heart hardened, and never since has pity for these animals entered it. They are, I firmly opine, as self-willed, spoiled, obstinate, quarrelsome, uncertain, tricky and tough little beasts as ever carried a load.”
Others didn't feel pity and even went so far as to describe in unchristian-like glee the immense satisfaction they received in seeing the ponies suffer.
In 1895, James Scarth Gale, a Canadian Presbyterian missionary, wrote: “I love to see the pony shod, see him pinioned teeth and nail, in one hard knot, lying on his back under the spreading chestnut tree, with the village smithy putting tacks into him that brings tears to his eyes.”
Perhaps the best summation of the ponies came from another Canadian ― not a missionary, but an artist. He described them as the “trickiest little devils for their size” that he had ever witnessed and declared them to be “equine wickedness in the Realm of the Morning Calm.”