[KS] Chinese influence and communities in Korea

Donald Clark dclark at trinity.edu
Sat Jul 2 15:31:36 EDT 2011


I too remember the Chinese community in the streets of Myongdong in
the fifties and sixties, and also the small "Chinatown" in Inch'on.
But I want to call attention to the fact that there were many more
Chinese resident in the various cities of Korea during the Japanese
period, into the 1930s.  There were quite a few Chinese merchants in
Korea, some of them famous suppliers of things to the Western expat
community.  A Chinese known at "E.D. Steward" (name derived from
former career as a steward on a  British ship) ran a store that
supplied exotic Western foodstuffs, with a branch in Pyongyang and
seasonal branches at the summer beach resorts at Sorai and Wonsan.  A
Chinese tailor named "Taion" supplied suits and other clothing to the
Western residents of Pyongyang.  And so forth.  Steward and Taion were
Chinese residents; there were thousands of temporary Chinese migrant
workers in Korea who came and went during spring and summer. Some of
these stayed on and settled down. The Government General's annual
report for 1930 shows as many as 67,000+ Chinese residents in Korea.
     Many subscribers to this list know about the Wanpaoshan Incident
in Manchuria in 1931 and its aftermath in Korea.  The situation in
Korea was that Korean migrants--some of the people displaced by
Japanese land grabs back home--became irritants to Chinese in
Manchuria and there were clashes between them. It was typical for
Chinese in Korea to suffer various kinds of abuses whenever reports
came back about these clashes in Manchuria.  I did some work on this,
relating to eyewitness accounts by missionaries in Korea of violent
reprisals against Chinese residents by Koreans.  The Wanpaoshan
Incident itself is better-known than the aftermath in Korea and the
way the Japanese colonial authorities appear to have manipulated
Korean anger there as a way of cleansing Korea of its Chinese
population. The following paragraph is based on work I did for my book
Living Dangerously in Korea (Eastbridge, 2003), p. 162 ff:
     In July 1931, there was a climactic confrontation between Korean
farmers in northern Manchuria and local Chinese over water rights and
the building of an irrigation ditch near the town of Wanpaoshan
[Korean: Manposan] in the vicinity of Changchun. The fields' owners
had attacked Koreans digging the ditch across some neighboring fields
without permission.  It seemed that Japanese intentionally exaggerated
reports of the incident reaching Korea in an attempt to inflame the
Koreans.  The news touched off a wave of reprisals against Chinese
people and neighborhoods in towns within Korea.  In Pyongyang, a
Korean mob laid waste the Chinese business quarter, burning and
looting the shops and covering the street with Chinese belongings.
Chinese truck farmers working little patches of land on the edges of
the city were set upon and actually killed by rioters.  My grandfather
Charles Allen Clark wrote in his diary about seeing Chinese houses set
on fire by angry Koreans.  The Chinese manager of Taion's (the tailor)
lost family members in the fracas and shortly left Korea.  The Taion
store was stripped and bolts of Taion's best cloth were strung on
telephone wires and lampposts.
     A summary article in the Seoul Press on July 10, 1931 reported
that an estimated 4,000 Chinese had fled across the Yalu into
Manchuria during the preceding week, and that a thousand more had left
Inch'on by ship. Accounts through the remainder of the year show a
continual exodus of thousands of Chinese residents from Korea to China
by rail and ship.
     An interesting aspect of this is the way the Japanese manipulated
the situation.  I always thought it was ironic that they seemed to
support the Korean migrants' claims in Manchuria against the Chinese,
and that they stood by as Korean rioters wrought violence on Chinese
residents in Korea--at least according to missionary accounts.  The
missionaries in Pyongyang employed Chinese as gardeners and were
mainly sympathetic to their plight.
     An elaborate account of the Wanpaoshan Incident and its aftermath
in Korea is in the U.S. Consular archives for Seoul, in the National
Archives.  I used this along with newspaper accounts and missionary
archives to reconstruct the story of what happened inside Korea after
Wanpaoshan.
Don
-- 
Donald N. Clark, Ph.D.
Murchison Professor of History and
    Co-director of East Asian Studies at Trinity (EAST)
Trinity University, One Trinity Place,  San Antonio, TX 78212 USA
+1 (210) 999-7629;  Fax +1 (210) 999-8334
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/history/html/faculty/donald_clark.htm




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