“The position of court physician [in the mid-1880s] was no sinecure,” especially if you were a foreigner, declared Horace N. Allen in one of his many publications of life in Korea.
In the final days of February 1885, Seoul was awash with activity. The main city streets (especially the street running between Gyeongbok and Changdeok palaces), notorious for being cluttered with squatters shacks, unauthorized booths and extensions to the shops of merchants, were cleared out and all the debris was removed.
History often confines itself to narrating only the events surrounding key protagonists and antagonists, their exploits and faults and their eventual fates. But in my opinion, it is often the people surrounding these key figures who are the most interesting - the ways in which they interact with our heroes and villains, the subtle (and, sometimes, not so subtle) influence they exert and their own deeds that are sometimes misappropriated by or misattributed to the powerful political player.
History often confines itself to narrating only the events surrounding key protagonists and antagonists, their exploits and faults and their eventual fates. But in my opinion, it is often the people surrounding these key figures who are the most interesting - the ways in which they interact with our heroes and villains, the subtle (and, sometimes, not so subtle) influence they exert and their own deeds that are sometimes misappropriated by or misattributed to the powerful political player.
The titles of the songs on the program for “Hong Lanpa s Music Festival: 100 Years of Korean Gagok” on Dec. 27 have a beguiling plainness, recalling natural scenes and sentiments about them that nearly everyone living in Korea is familiar with: “Barley Field,” “Magnolia Flower,” “Rock Pass,” “A Moonlit Night,” “Inside a Flower-shaped Cloud,” “Snow,” “Southern Village” and “Spring of my Hometown.”