The _raison d’être_ of Ma-cha Töng, and the numerous coast villages which exist wherever a convenient shore and a protection for boats occur together, is the coast fishing. The fact that a floating population of over 8,000 Japanese fishermen make a living by fishing on the coast near Fusan shows that there is a redundant harvest to be reaped. The Korean fisherman is credited with utter want of enterprise, and Mr. Oiesen, in the Customs’ report for Wön-san for 1891, accuses him of “remaining content with such fish as will run into crudely and easily constructed traps, set out along the shore, which only require attention for an hour or so each day.” I must, however, say that each village that I passed possessed from seven to twelve fishing junks, which were kept at sea. They are unseaworthy boats, and it is not surprising that they hug the shore. I believe that the fishing industry, with every other, is paralyzed by the complete insecurity of the earnings of labor and by the exactions of officials, and that the Korean fisherman does not care to earn money of which he will surely be deprived on any or no pretence, and that, along with the members of the industrial classes generally, he seeks the protection of poverty. The fish taken on this coast, when salted and dried, find their way by boat to Wön-san, and from thence over central Korea, but in winter pedlars carry them directly inland from the fishing villages. Salterns on the plan of those often seen in China occur frequently near the villages. The operation of making salt from sea water is absolutely primitive, and so rough and dirty that the whiteness of the coarse product which results is an astonishment. In spite of heavy losses and heavier “squeezings,” this industry, which is carried on from May to October, is a profitable one. The road beyond that noisome halting-place traverses picturesque country for many miles, being cut out of the sides of noble cliffs, or crosses basaltic spurs by arrangements resembling rock ladders, keeping perforce always close to the sea, now on dizzy precipices, then descending to firm hard stretches of golden sand, or winding just above high-water mark among colossal boulders which are completely covered with the _Ampelopsis Veitchiana_, the creeper _par excellence_ of Korea. The sea was green and violet near the shore and a vivid blue in the distance, and on its rippleless surface fishing boats with gray hulls and brown sails lay motionless, for the rush and swirl of tides, rising and falling as they do on the west coast from 25 to 38 feet, are unknown on the east coast, the variation between high and low water being within 18 inches.