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During the late 19th century, Westerners in Seoul found the summers to be filled with extremes. The bitter cold of winter was replaced with the sweltering heat of summer and the intense downpours of the rainy season. Food ― especially fruits and vegetables ― was abundant but so too were cholera and insects.
Flies seemed to have been especially bothersome. In the early 1890s, one elderly American woman noted in her diary that she had never seen so many flies as she had seen in Korea. She apparently spent a good amount of time and energy in killing them with her fly swatter.
She wasn't the only one to be bothered. According to an account written by Sung Hyun (1439-1504), there once was a man named Yang who had an intense hatred of flies. He eventually became the magistrate or governor of Gongju and was shocked to discover that his residence was "particularly plagued with flies." Their constant hovering and buzzing nearly drove him insane and caused him to resort to drastic efforts:
"(He) set his secretaries, his writers, and all his runners, maids, slaves and everyone in fact, to work, ordering that each bring him a bowl of flies every morning. He made it a serious matter and urged them under penalty. The company fought each other over these flies. They feared to fail, and yet they hated the task. Some went about hiring others to catch flies for them, while they gave the governor the name pari moksa (fly governor)."
Unfortunately we do not know how successful his efforts were to eradicate the flies but we do know some five centuries or so later, another effort was made to rid Korea of these buzzing pests.
In July 1912, a notice was placed in local Korean newspapers declaring that the police, "with a view to preventing the spread of epidemics," were purchasing flies "at the rate of 5 sen per go." A go seems to have been about 150 grams in weight.
Korean dogs were also plagued by flies. Many superstitious Koreans would not feed their dogs on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year believing by denying the dog food it would protect the dogs from flies during the summer.
Mosquitoes were also a constant nuisance during the summers. On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, huge swings were erected from trees or massive wooden frames and men and women would swing to and fro. According to Horace Allen:
"The observance of this custom is supposed to mitigate somewhat the plague of mosquitoes during the ensuing summer."
It doesn't appear to have been too successful and so many people relied on netting hung on the windows and doors and over and around their beds in an effort to keep the mosquitoes from their human prey.
And while the nets may have kept the winged pest at bay, it did nothing to protect sleepers from the notorious bedbugs. Beds were often taken apart and painted or lacquered in efforts to seal the bugs up. Sheets and bedding were aired frequently and beaten but seem to have had little impact on these insidious predators.
Fortunately for residents of Seoul, they were not plagued by the legendary bedbugs of Songdo (modern Gaeseong in North Korea). These bedbugs were claimed to have weighed as much as a half a pound (0.23 kilograms). It is easy to imagine that sleep did not come easy to the residents of that city.
Robert Neff is a historian and a contributing writer for The Korea Times. ― ED.
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