Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.
When rumors turn deadly (2): Anti-foreigner fear in Korea’s past
A group of children peer warily out at the photographer in the early 20th century. Robert Neff Collection.
By Robert Neff
Most people have heard the story of a man who’s drugged at a party and wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice. Disoriented and in pain, he finds a note on the toilet telling him his kidney has been stolen — and there is nothing he can do about it. It is a terrifying cautionary tale, but nothing more than an urban legend.
Korea has its own share of dark rumors and legends about illegal organ harvests — stories that blend fear, superstition and a deep mistrust of foreigners in unsettling ways.
In the late 19th century, Korea was caught in a vortex of unrest stirred up by political intrigue and xenophobia. In 1883, a Chinese newspaper reported on turmoil in Seoul caused by the growing number of Japanese arriving in the city.
According to the report, the populace believed that the “terrible Japanese intended to draw blood from [Korean] girls and children for the purpose of concocting medicine. So great was the alarm among the maidens in the Capital that many betook themselves to flight, and others actually got married off post-haste without caring much what sort of husbands they were getting so long as they could save themselves from the impending danger to the unwedded.”
These fears weren’t confined to the capital. Hugh Cynn, who grew up in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, in the 1880s and later became a prominent Christian educator, recalled:
“One winter day, when I was about four years old, I was overtaken with fright, because my playmates told me that a candy peddler had appeared in the village. I had heard the grown-ups talking among themselves about the incoming to our country of the terrible ocean-men (Westerners), who sent their agents far and wide, disguised as candy-peddlers. The peddlers were supposed to give out candy to innocent children who upon eating this mysterious mixture would lose their mind and follow the agents to the ocean-men. These ocean-men, according to the story, were cannibals, and they relished the tender flesh of the children better than any other kind of meat. So, when I was told of the coming of the candy merchant to the village, I with my cronies, took refuge behind a haystack until sundown.”
Sometimes the fear was impossible to ignore.
In the summer of 1888, several children in Seoul were allegedly kidnapped and later found mutilated in the streets, with parts of their bodies missing. Suspicion quickly fell on Western missionaries, particularly the Americans. Dark whispers claimed the children’s eyes were used to develop photographs, their blood for sinister foreign medicines and their flesh for the dinner table.
Cynn, who had by then moved from Chungju to Seoul, remembered hearing a tale about a water-carrier in his neighborhood who delivered to a missionary’s kitchen in Jeong-dong.
“On finding no one in the kitchen [the water-carrier] took courage and went in and lifted the lid of one of the boiling kettles. Lo and behold; there was the body of a little child whose eyeballs were cooked white!”
Even the American minister to Korea, Hugh Dinsmore, was not exempt from suspicion. Rumors circulated that roasted Korean children were a staple of his dining room.
The situation in Seoul became so volatile that French, Russian and American marines were summoned to protect the Western community in Jeong-dong. Korean authorities, through public proclamations denouncing the rumors and the arrest of several agitators, were eventually able to restore peace.
The unrest, later known as the Baby Riots, may have been the product of internal Korean political intrigue or, as the American minister suggested, a ploy to destabilize King Gojong’s rule and replace him with a monarch more pliant to Chinese interests orchestrated by Yuan Shih-kai, the Chinese resident minister in Seoul.
If Yuan was involved, it was a calculated risk, for the Chinese had their own skeletons in the closet. It was also widely alleged that Korean children were being exported to China. According to Frank Carpenter, an American who visited Seoul in the late fall of 1888:
“Good, fat, well-disposed [Korean] babies bring from 5 to 20 dollars apiece, and a father has a perfect right to sell his children. Babies are sometimes bought for adoption, and as to the girls, they are sold for purposes of which the less said the better.”
About 35 years later, the pendulum of mistrust swung from the Western missionaries to Chinese commoners.
In the summer of 1923, residents of Hwanghae Province (in modern North Korea) became alarmed by the growing number of Chinese “suffering from strange diseases” arriving in the region in search of remedies. According to rumors, these Chinese desired the genitals of men and small boys, and Korean women’s breasts, to make a “six-spirit pill” that could cure any disease.
On June 7, a Korean woman named Jang awoke in the middle of the night to the touch of someone applying an ointment to her private parts. She was so frightened she could not scream, but her son — who heard strange noises at the door — managed to chase off the intruder.
They later found a crooked Chinese-style razor and, to their disgust, human excrement smeared on the walls, giving off a strong odor. Despite Jang’s efforts to wash away the ointment, it remained for several days.
According to newspaper accounts, 12 Chinese nationals were arrested for this and similar offenses. A newspaper editor expressed skepticism, writing: “Of course, it is a lie, but it is truly strange that such foolish rumors are popular in this enlightened world.”
Nearly a century later, in 2012, the Korean media had not outgrown the old fears of Chinese flesh peddlers. A brutal murder in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, reignited anxieties that organs and flesh were being illegally exported to China and Southeast Asia. Around the same time, Korean customs confiscated “Chinese-made capsules made from dead human babies,” which some believed could boost their stamina.
Rumors and anti-foreign sentiment circulate on social media platforms, showing that sometimes the living can be more terrifying than ghosts, evil spirits or demons.