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Korean nationalist-minded historians love to stress that the large-scale prostitution was introduced to Korea by the Japanese. The same historians feel a bit uneasy about the absence of established theatrical traditions in Korea, and often try to promote some local genres to the rank of “theater.” They also generally ignore the absence of restaurants in old Korea.
However, I strongly suspect that these three seemingly unrelated peculiarities of old Korea actually have something in common. A brothel, a theater and a restaurant in pre-modern society largely existed in cities and catered to the tastes of the urban commercial elite ― the group which in Korea of the 1700s and 1800s was relatively small and weak.
We do not know how many people lived in Korean cities on the eve of modern times. In old Korea population censuses were conducted exclusively for taxation purposes, and it comes as no surprise that taxpayers did what they could to avoid the officials’ gaze.
Thus, official demographic statistics before 1900 cannot be taken at face value: these figures tell more about the government’s ability (or inability) to enforce its regulations rather than about the actual population size.
In the cities it was more difficult to escape the attention of officials while in the countryside entire villages could avoid the census if they were lucky or could pay a sufficient bribe. Thus, the historians suspect that the absolute figures for the cities might be closer to the truth than the grand total for the entire Korean population.
At any rate, according to the official data, in 1789 ― the year when the French Revolution started the “modern age” in Europe ― there were 189,153 people living in Seoul. Then as now, it was by far the largest Korean city. Pusan which is now a distant second, did not exist yet in 1789, so the second largest city was Gaeseong, in what is now North Korea, with 27,769 inhabitants. Pyongyang was the third largest, with 21,869 people.
All other Korean cities had less than 20,000 inhabitants. There were five cities whose population was between 10,000 and 20,000 as well as 49 cities with population between 5,000 and 10,000. In total, 570,000 Koreans lived in cities in the year when the modern age triumphed in Europe. This is an official figure, of course, and the actual number was probably somewhat higher, as we have said.
If we believe the 1789 official ― and likely incomplete ― estimate of Korea’s total population at 7.4 million, this would mean that the share of the urban population was 7.8 percent. However, due to the reasons we just discussed, the actual share was probably lower.
If we compare this figure with the situation in neighboring countries, it will become clear that Korea around 1800 was indeed not doing very well as far as urbanization was concerned.
Around the same time, some 15 percent of all Japanese people lived in cities, and in the most developed part of China, in the low Yangtze River, the share of the urban population reached the level of 17 percent. Edo (now Tokyo) in Japan and Beijing in China had almost a million inhabitants each, while quite a few other Chinese cities approached this symbolically important level.
What were the reasons for such a difference? Nobody knows for sure, but it seems that one of the major factors was a disdain among the traditional Korean elite for artisans and, especially merchants.
Theoretically, the Confucian ideology held that the society should consist of the four classes: scholar-officials, peasants, handicraftsmen and merchants. Of these four groups, the scholar-officials, the ruling elite, were seen as the most prestigious and morally superior.
Farmers came second in their supposed moral virtuousness and social usefulness, while handicraftsmen ranked third. Merchants were seen as morally the most dubious group and also as the least necessary for the country’s survival and prosperity.
Confucianism was a common ideology of all East Asia, from Tokyo to Hanoi, but Koreans of the later Joseon Kingdom period practiced it with somewhat exceptional fervor. Hence, these theoretical concepts produced a deep impact on the actual daily life of the country.
Hence, had Korean statesmen and intellectuals learned in, say, 1789 that their country was lagging behind China and Japan in urban population numbers they would hardly see this as a problem. More likely, this would be perceived as a reason to be proud of Korea which, as they believed, kept the Confucian truth intact while in other countries (even in China itself) the morals were corrupted.
The low numbers of the merchants would not worry those stern gentlemen any more than, say, the low numbers of rock musicians or fashion designers in a particular country would worry its government nowadays. Less radical statesmen saw merchants as perhaps useful but still as a non-essential group while Confucian fundamentalists perceived them as a potential source of spiritual corruption.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.
