Dear Professor Lee Hae Kang,<br><br>Thank you for sharing.<br><br>Please let me know ISBN no. of the book and name of publisher.<br><br>Thank you,<br><br>Kwang-On Yoo<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Henny Savenije <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:webmaster@henny-savenije.pe.kr">webmaster@henny-savenije.pe.kr</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Korea through Western Eyes by Robert Neff and Professor Sunghwa Cheong<br>
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This book is a treat for anybody with some historical interest in Korea. The authors describe the lives of the first foreigners living in Korea at the end of 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth. Many of the chapters have been published before in several newspapers or elsewhere but are now bundled together in a readably book<br>
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The first people coming to Korea were a mix of people for whom Korea was a new frontier. These people of course were also living in relatively closely knit communities mainly in Seoul, Incheon (Chemulpo) and Pusan (Fusan) and they had to rely on each other, how uncomfortable that sometimes was.<br>
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The book describes the relationships between some these Westerners and their struggles while living in Korea. They introduced new technologies which were met by the unfamiliar Koreans with a mix of feelings often also with a lot of superstition. Often the westerners looked down upon these feelings with disdain but some inventive people used this to their own advantage. Korea was notoriously bad with paying their hired foreign advisors and engineers but also for Koreans stealing from their superiors. So the foremen of the Oriental Consolidated Mining Company in northern Korea would use their phonographs which they hid with prerecorded Korean messages proclaiming to be the miners ancestors who told them to stop stealing and bring back the already stolen goods. The frightened miners would just do that. Another engineer who helped construct the power plant to provide the palace with light removed some screws so the plant would run but provided no electricity. When everybody was upset and turned to the engineer he told them that the spirits were upset since the engineer didn't get his pay and would only work again after he was paid. He got his salary immediately.<br>
These and other amusing stories are abundantly in the book available.<br>
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At other times these superstitions caused problems at the time that Koreans believed that the westerners used Korean babies to make medicine and their ground eyes were used to spread it out on glass for photographic plates. For a while the sentiments ran so high that many foreigners feared for their life.<br>
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As the foreigners were curious about the Koreans the Koreans were equally intrigued by these foreigners sometimes much to their annoyance. Many of them knew the king and his wife because also the king wanted to know about these foreigners.<br>
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Lucky for us, many of these foreigners kept diaries and wrote letters to their families back home and many of these sources are still available. The authors went to great efforts to bring all these sources together in a readably concept and used many sources which were not available before.<br>
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The book is divided into four groups. The coming of Modernization. Life in Korea. Tales of Chemulpo. Perceptions and the press.<br>
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It's a pity that the authors don't provide a time line and assume sometimes a too great knowledge of what happened in Korea at that time.<br>
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However that's a minor flaw and it might invoke further interests and questions for those who are not so familiar with Korean history.<br>
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The authors rely an a wide range of sources and the book is richly annotated and the notes are often an invitation to read more as well.<br>
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oOOO----(_)----OOOo---<br>
Henny (Lee Hae Kang)<br>
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