Points of interest in a Korean city are few, and the ancient capital is no exception to the rule. There is a fine bronze bell with curiously involved dragons in one of the gate towers, cast five centuries ago, an archery ground with official pavilions on a height with a superb view, the Governor’s _yamen_, once handsome, now ruinous, with Japanese sentries, a dismal temple to Confucius, and a showy one to the God of War. Outside the crowd and bustle of the city, reached by a narrow path among prosperous ginseng farms and persimmon-embowered hamlets, are the lonely remains of the palace of the Kings who reigned in Korea prior to the dynasty of which the present sovereign is the representative, and even in their forlornness they give the impression that the Korean Kings were much statelier monarchs then than now. The remains consist of an approach to the main platform on which the palace stood, by two subsidiary platforms, the first reached by a nearly obliterated set of steps. Four staircases 15 feet wide, of thirty steps each, lead to a lofty artificial platform, faced with hewn stone in great blocks, 14 feet high, and by rough measurement 846 feet in length. On the east side there are massive abutments. On the west the platform broadens irregularly. At the entrance, 80 feet wide, at the top of the steps, there are the bases of columns suggestive of a very stately approach. The palace platform is intersected by massive stone foundations of halls and rooms, some of large area. It is backed by a pine-clothed knoll, and is prettily situated in an amphitheatre of hills. Song-do as a royal city, and as one of the so-called fortresses for the protection of the capital, still retains many ancient privileges. It is a bustling business town, and a great centre of the grain trade. It has various mercantile guilds with their places of business, small shops built round compounds with entrance gates. It makes wooden shoes, coarse pottery and fine matting, and imports paper, which it manufactures with sesamum oil into the oil paper for which Korea is famous, and which is made into cloaks, umbrellas, tobacco-pouches, and sheets for walls and floors. In answer to many inquiries, I learned that trade had improved considerably since the war, but the native traders now have to compete with fourteen Japanese shops, and to suffer the presence of forty Japanese residents.