Korean inns in the 19th century part 2: bedbugs

Gaeseong in the early 20th century / Robert Neff Collection

While travelers may have welcomed Korean country inns as a sanctuary from tigers, wolves and the elements, they were not a sanctuary from other predations. Scattered amongst the articles published in newspapers and magazines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are accounts of robberies and murders that took place in lonely inns. Fortunately, foreigners were rarely victims of these violent attacks, but they, along with the other patrons of the inn, had to contend with the most notorious offenders: bedbugs.

George Heber Jones, a missionary, wrote:

“The meal over, your servants spread your bed on the floor; you close up the day’s account with them [the servants], clear them out, bring your journal down to that moment and then lie down to sleep, deceived into believing yourself the sole occupant of the room. It is not long, however, before you become conscious of companionship – little bits of fellows whose capabilities for inflicting misery are colossal, and whose multiplicity make them well nigh ubiquitous. Volumes can be said about the occupants of a Korean inn; indeed volumes are said whenever a layman from among foreigners falls among them.”

Maybe not volumes, but quite a few accounts describing bedbug infestations can be found in the books and magazines written by Westerners residing or traveling in Korea. Isabella Bird Bishop, an English woman who traveled extensively around the Korean Peninsula, wrote:

“On arriving at an inn, the master or servant rushes at the mud, or sometimes matter, floor with a whisk, raising a great dust, which he sweeps into a corner. The disgusted traveller soon perceives that the heap is animate as well as inanimate, and the groans, sighs, scratchings, and restlessness from the public room show the extent of the insect pest.”

Lillias Underwood echoed the above accounts when she wrote: “The mats which are placed over the oiled paper, or more likely directly on the earth floor, are full of dust and vermin of all descriptions, which run riot everywhere.” However, her fear of the mats wasn’t just confined to bedbugs: “It is best not to begin to think how many people have, in that room and lying on these identical mats, been ill, and died, of dysentery, smallpox, cholera or typhus fever, since the room was even swept or the mats once shaken.”

Deoksu Palace in the early 20th century / Robert Neff Collection

On this first trip into the Korean interior, she and her husband ordered a layer of fresh clean straw be placed upon the floor of their room. The straw was nearly 30 centimeters deep and seems to have worked – but not without a degree of discomfort:

“We spread thereon [the pile of straw] our bed, to the confusion and defeat of our little enemies, ploughing their weary way uselessly through the mazes of that straw all night. In this way we slept peacefully, except when the floor became intolerably hot, and our bed correspondingly so, then we rose, piled our straw in another place, remade our couch, and composed ourselves again in slumber. We never did this more than three times in one night, and it was a mere diversion.”

Of course, there were exaggerations as to how bad the infestations were and the size of the bedbugs. In the early 1890s, James Scarth Gale, a missionary, was told by one of his Korean servants that in Gaeseong (a city in North Korea) there were huge yellow bedbugs that weighed about a quarter of a kilogram.

A common bit of advice for travelers was to carry a large supply of insect powder. Jones liked to spread a liberal amount of powder on the mats and watch the pests die – “the slaughter which ensues can be enjoyed to its full only by one who has had to put up with this companionship with no possibility of help.”

Speaking from 20 months of experience traveling in Korea and China, Bishop insisted that “an oiled sheet is a better protection against vermin than a pony-load of insect powder.” She claimed she never suffered from bedbug attacks at a Korean inn because of her preparations:

“After the landlord had disturbed [swept] the dust, Wong [her servant] put down either two heavy sheets of oiled paper or a large sheet of cotton dressed with boiled linseed oil on the floor, and on these arranged my camp-bed, chair, and baggage. This arrangement […] is a perfect preventative.”

While she urged preparation, Jones urged speed:

“After a night in a Korean inn one can understand the wise saying, ‘Never be in a hurry except when catching fleas.’”

Inns were not the only places to find bedbugs. In 1901, the Jeong-dong area of Seoul (where most of the Westerners lived), was besieged by a horde of bedbugs that had allegedly been reawakened when the royal family moved to Deoksu Palace in 1897. Homer Hulbert, who had a wonderful flair for mixing legends with contemporary events, described Jeong-dong as historically “the den of bedbugs.”

During the 1592-98 Imjin War, the royal palaces in Seoul were all destroyed so the residence of a prince – located in Jeong-dong – was converted and named Gyeongun Palace (now known as Deoksu Palace). It was with the arrival of the royal family that a great host of bedbugs were awakened and infested the city until the monarchy took up residence at the newly rebuilt Changdeok Palace in 1618.

Seoul, however, was not the only place to suffer. In the 1930s, Sten Bergman, a Swedish zoologist and author, wrote:

“The Koreans, as I have perhaps remarked before, do not bother about bugs. I have on several occasions sat talking with Koreans who have sat smoking their pipes and watching with interest the progress of bugs up and down their walls without it occurring to them to kill the pests. Often their walls are covered with white paper on which the bugs stand out very conspicuously. In some houses the Koreans are wont to kill them on this white paper, which are thus horribly stained, of course. On several occasions when I have come into a room the white paper has been so covered with such stains that at first sight I have imagined that the room had coloured wallpaper!”

While these anecdotes may paint the Korea-of-the-past in a dark manner, the Korea-of-the-present looks a lot brighter when compared to many other countries.

Bedbugs are frequently in the news – especially the widespread infestation in Europe that seems to be growing and spreading at an alarming rate. Many worry that the upcoming Olympics in France could help facilitate their spread to other countries. But bedbugs are, and have always been, everywhere! Sniffer dogs, high-tech cameras and even AI are being utilized in this war against them – but so far, the pests are winning. The only bit of comfort the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention is able to provide is that bedbugs don’t appear to spread diseases like mosquitoes and ticks do.

Wishing you all a good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.

Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters.