Korea and Her Neighbours Author:Isabella Lucy Bird Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXI THE KING'S OATH—THE KING AND QUEEN Leaving Wladivostok by the last Japanese steamer of the season, I spent two days at Won-san, little changed,... more » except that its background of mountains was snow-covered, that the Koreans were enriched by the extravagant sums paid for labour by the Japanese during the war, that business was active, and that Japanese sentries in wooden sentry- boxes guarded the peaceful streets. Twelve thousand Japanese troops had passed through Won-san on their way to Phyong-yang. At Fusan, my next point, there were 200 Japanese soldiers, new waterworks, and a military cemetery on a height, in which the number of graves showed an enormous Japanese mortality. Beaching Chemulpo on 5th January 1895, vid Nagasaki, I found a singular contrast to the crowd, bustle, and excitement of the previous June. In the outer harbour there were two foreign warships only, in the inner three Japanese merchant steamers. The former predominant military element was represented by a few soldiers, ten large hospital sheds, and a crowded cemetery, in which the Japanese military dead lie in rows of 60, each gravemarked by a wooden obelisk. The solid and crowded Chinese quarter, with its roaring trade, large shops, and noise of drums, gongs, and crackers, by day and night, was silent and deserted, and not a single Chinese was in the street as I went up to I-tai's inn. One shop had ventured to reopen. At night, instead of throngs, noise, lights, and jollification, there was a solitary glimmer from behind a closed shutter. The Japanese occupation had been as destructive of that quarter of Chemulpo as a mediaeval pestilence. In the Japanese quarter and all along the shore the utmost activity prevailed. The beach was stacked with incoming and outgoing cargo. The streets were...« less