A visit to the Keum-Kang San elevates a Korean into the distinguished position of a traveller, and many a young resident of Seoul gains this fashionable reputation. It is not as containing shrines of pilgrimage, for most Koreans despise Buddhism and its shaven mendicant priests, that these mountains are famous in Korea, but for their picturesque beauties, much celebrated in Korean poetry. The broad backbone of the peninsula which has trended near to the east coast from Puk-chöng southwards has degenerated into tameness, when suddenly Keum-Kang San, or the Diamond Mountain, with its elongated mass of serrated, jagged, and inaccessible peaks, and magnificent primæval forest, occupying an area of about 32 miles in length by 22 in breadth, starts off from it near the 39th parallel of latitude in the province of Kang-wön. Buddhism, which, as in Japan, possesses itself of the fairest spots in Nature, fixed itself in this romantic seclusion as early as the sixth century A.D., and the venerable relics of the time when for 1,000 years it was the official as well as the popular cult of the country are chiefly to be found in the recesses of this mountain region, where the same faith, though now discredited, disestablished, and despised, still attracts a certain number of votaries, and a far larger number of visitors and so-called pilgrims, who resort to the shrines to indulge in _ku-kyöng_, a Korean term which covers pleasure-seeking, sightseeing, the indulgence of curiosity, and much else. [Illustration: THE DIAMOND MOUNTAINS.] So far as I have been able to learn, there are only two routes by which the Keum-Kang San can be penetrated, the one which, after following the bed of a singularly rough torrent, crosses the watershed at An-mun-chai, and on or near which the principal monasteries and shrines are situated, and the Ki-cho, a lower and less interesting pass. Both routes start from Chang-an Sa. The forty-two shrines are the headquarters of about 400 monks and about 50 nuns, who add to their religious exercises the weaving of cotton and hempen cloth. The lay servitors possibly number 1,000. The four great monasteries, two on the eastern and two on the western slope, absorb more than 300 of the whole number. All except the high monastic officials beg through the country, alms-bowl in hand, the only distinctive features of their dress being a very peculiar hat and the rosary. They chant the litanies of Buddha from house to house, and there are few who deny them food and lodging and a few _cash_ or a little rice.