By Robert NeffAlcohol has always played a large part in Korean society and was often commented upon by early Western visitors. Many ship captains described their Korean visitors’ passion for a strong drink with both amusement at their antics and awe for the amount of alcohol the Koreans could consume. One early Western visitor to Seoul in 1882 likened Koreans to the French due to their extreme politeness to guests and to the Irish because of their partiality for whiskey.
In 1883, James Morrison, an English visitor to Seoul, noted many intoxicated Korean men reeling or lying about the streets of the city. At first he assumed that Koreans were somewhat alcoholic lightweights when compared to the Chinese. However, after conducting a “series of most careful experiments with Scotch whiskey” he concluded that Koreans were “much more advanced in the matter of the use of spirituous liquors than their neighbors, the Chinese.” He surmised that Korean alcohol was a great deal stronger than the ordinary spirits partaken by the Chinese.
“Makgeolli,” a traditional Korean wine that resembles buttermilk, was the primary drink in Korea except for in the Pyongyang area where soju was the drink of choice. According to Horace N. Allen, the American minister to Korea, the men of Pyongyang had “but one aim in life and that is to get enough money to buy a good drink of soju.”
But with the opening of Korea to foreigners and their products, many wealthy Koreans began to drink imported alcohol.
In the mid-1890s, Isabella Bird Bishop, a spry 62-year-old English woman known for her keen perception and strong opinion, wrote: “[D]runkenness is an outstanding feature in Korea. And it is not disreputable.” She went on say, “A great dignitary even may roll on the floor drunk at the end of a meal, at which he has eaten to repletion, without losing caste, and on becoming sober receives the congratulations of inferiors on being rich enough to afford such a luxury.”
William Franklin Sands, an American advisor to the Korean court in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, kept a small clubhouse in his backyard for members of the nearby Korean military academy. He recalled that one morning two lieutenants, both “with deep black lines under [their] eyes” and a “deadly green” hue to their faces came to tell him that they had spent the night in his clubhouse. Concerned about their condition, Sands asked them how they had spent the night and the officers promptly confessed “they had sent out for a bottle of something” to help pass the time. According to Sands, he was a little dubious of their story as “one bottle of anything seemed too little to have wrecked two rather sturdy lieutenants so completely, so I sent for the empty bottle. It was absinthe which they had drunk in liqueur glasses without water. I still do not think it was possible, but they did it and survived.”
Even politics and the lack of money couldn’t stop some drinkers. Despite the strong anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea following the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), a British diplomat noted that the average Korean was not above buying “anything that professes to be alcoholic” from Japanese merchants including “alarming compounds retailed by the islanders under the pseudonyms of brandy, claret, whiskey, or champagne, at a few cents a bottle…”
It is unclear how many of these desperate drinkers perished from the “alarming compounds,” but, judging from newspaper accounts, there were more than a few.
Robert Neff is a contributing writer for The Korea Times.
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