Fans, detractors of legation guards
Posted : 2021-07-03 09:56
By Robert Neff
At the beginning of 1904, Seoul was a city filled with soldiers. Lillias Underwood, an American missionary, described the capital as having many long rows of barracks all over the city, for the Emperor had nearly ten thousand troops and the streets nearby Deoksu Palace were constantly filled with Korean soldiers and their officers guarding the Korean monarch. War between Russia and Japan was expected to begin at any moment.
However, the Koreans were not the only soldiers in the city. She recalled that soldiers arrived in goodly numbers at the Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, German, English, and American legations. Arms bristled everywhere, uniforms of many nations varied the almost universal white of the Korean people; there was marching and countermarching, sentinels as thick as flies…