Corea or Cho-sen: The Land of the Morning CalmLandor, Arnold Henry Savage
History
Corea or Cho-sen: The Land of the Morning Calm
Landor, Arnold Henry Savage
Korea -- Description and travel
Women of the commoner classes can always be detected, not only by the
coarser clothes they wear, but also by the way their hair is made up. Two
long tresses are rolled up on the back of the head into a sort of turban,
and though to my eye, innocent of the feminine tricks of hair-dressing,
it looked all real and genuine, and a curious contrast to the infinitely
less luxuriant growth of the better classes of women, I was told that a
good deal of braids and "stuffing" was employed to swell their coiffures
into the much-coveted fashionable size.
One very strange custom in Corea is the privilege accorded to women to
walk about the streets of the town at night after dark, while the men are
confined to the house from about an hour after sunset and, until lately,
were severely punished both with imprisonment and flogging, if found
walking about the streets during "women's hours." The gentler sex was and
is therefore allowed to parade the streets, and go and pay calls on their
parents and lady friends, until a very late hour of the night, without
fear of being disturbed by the male portion of the community. Few,
however, avail themselves of the privilege, for unfortunately in Corea
there are many tigers and leopards, which, disregarding the early closing
of the city gates, climb with great ease over the high wall and take
nightly peregrinations over the town, eating up all the dogs which they
find on their way and occasionally even human beings. Tigers have
actually been known to rudely run their paws through the invulnerable
paper windows of a mud house, drag out a struggling body roughly awoke
from slumber, and devour the same peacefully in the middle of the street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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