Chindo, where we met him—and he disappeared over the northern horizon within half an hour, eager to get home before nightfall—is an island I had been to a few months before. It is in no sense a spectacular island, being merely a half-drowned range of low hills, about fifteen miles long and ten miles broad, and having just one scruffy county town and a handful of fishing villages. There are oddities about it, though, one of the more spectacular occurring each March when there is a great tamasha, widely attended by people from as far away as Seoul, for the ‘miracle’ of the Parting of the Waters. Thanks to the mutual exertions of the gravitational fields of the sun and moon, a narrow finger of sea between Chindo and the tiny neighbour island of Modo dries up for a few hours; Koreans unversed in Newtonian mechanics believe various gods to have done the trick. Legends, not unnaturally, abound, and the island fills up for days beforehand as local shamans and other practitioners of the occult arrive to see the wondrous event. The hoteliers and the sellers of ojingoa make a good deal of money.
There is a more sober reason for taking note of this otherwise unremarkable place. On a bluff above a pretty little bay is a memorial, a large cross mounted—improbable though it may sound—on the back of an enormous turtle that stands in the middle of a shallow pool. The day I was there the turtle’s gleaming white marble back was covered with thousands of red chillies, drying in the sun. But the farmer who placed them there would have meant no disrespect: every Korean I met along my route spoke adoringly of the man for whom the memorial was built—the man who was perhaps the country’s greatest wartime hero and whose most celebrated battle took place in the waters off Chindo.
He was called Yi Sun-shin, and he was an admiral in the Royal Korean Navy of the sixteenth century. He is revered today as the man who, almost alone, administered a series of stunning defeats to the Japanese and proved that Koreans are capable of seeing off the ambitions of their most loathsome neighbours, if only they really try.
The Japanese made their first concerted attack on Korea in the spring of 1592, when the warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi sent an army of 150,000 men storming through the peninsula on their way to China—Korea being thought of by the Japanese as merely a springboard or a convenient walk-way for the acquisition of the larger prize. The invading troops had already been blooded in Japan during the Warring States period, and they were armed, moreover, with muskets, of which the Koreans were profoundly ignorant. Every Korean army encampment Hideyoshi encountered was routed in hours. He took Seoul within a fortnight and was leading his armies north of Pyongyang and heading for Manchuria within the month.
It was at this point that the then fleet commander of Left Cholla Province, Yi Sun-shin, began to display his brilliance—a brilliance that has led students of naval warfare the world over to compare him with Drake and Nelson and Halsey, as one of the great naval strategists of all time.
He was forty-seven years old; he had been in the navy for just sixteen years and had been appointed to his post, defending the southern sea frontier of his country, for just a year. It was an important job and one he had taken particularly seriously since discovering that, in his view, the coast was woefully badly defended. It was, he decided, sorely lacking in the kind of strong, fast and well-armed capital ships that a country with so huge and vulnerable a coastline clearly needed.
So he set about building a new fleet. The core of the flotillas, he decided, should be a vessel of an extraordinary new design, although based on the crude, half-armoured ships used a century before. The entire craft would have a roof built over it so that it resembled a floating house rather than a ship. The roof would be made of thick wood covered with iron plates, and hundreds of sharp iron spikes would project from it. The gunwales would be solid, too, without the wide galleries from within which the guns could be trained to left and right, and that were so vulnerable to incoming shellfire. Admiral Yi’s ships were built for maximum protection, and if that meant that to aim a cannon the ship herself had to be turned by her steersmen, then so be it. His ships may have been clumsy, but they had enormous firepower, and they wouldn’t sink. They were, in fact, the world’s first truly ironclad battleships—built two centuries before the Monitor—and they utterly changed both the face and the tide of battle. The admiral called his craft kobuk-son (turtle ships), and the thick-shelled chelonian has been both his symbol, and the symbol of stubborn Korean resolve, ever since.
For his boats did the trick. His tiny but brilliantly organized squadrons set out from their bases hidden in the south coast fjords, and they stormed cheekily up to the huge Japanese imperial fleets. Each time he assaulted the enemy’s wooden barques with his cannon fire, he crippled them; and each time the Japanese responded, their cannonballs bounced harmlessly off Yi’s vessels and splashed into the sea. Even when the more adventurous and cunning Japanese vessels came close enough for their sailors to board the kobuk-son, the matelots found their passage frustrated by the iron spikes and beat a hasty retreat. One after another the Japanese forces were routed; at the great encounter of Hansan Bay only 14 ships survived of the total Japanese battle group of 73 capital vessels; and even when the Imperial Navy sent a further 500 ships across the Sea of Japan (the East Sea, to Koreans) to meet Admiral Yi in battle off Pusan, 130 of them were lost to a force of Korean ships barely one-third the size of the enemy’s.
The results were catastrophic: Hideyoshi’s army was by now in the far north of the peninsula, the supply line was three hundred miles long, and no reinforcements, no ammunition and no food could be sent up for them. Moreover, Korean guerrillas were organizing themselves to make hit-and-run expeditions against the invading troop columns, and fifty thousand soldiers from the Ming relief army in China poured south to help. The tide was turned, and for the while the Japanese were forced to retreat, lick their wounds, and think again.
But they came back and tried once more. There had been all manner of jealousy and intrigue within the Korean court, and Admiral Yi, despite his victories (the more scholarly historical works published in Seoul refer to the Battle of Hansan Bay, perhaps not totally hyperbolically, as ‘the Salamis of Korea’), had been demoted. An unknown sailor, one Admiral Won Kyun, took over and was promptly and roundly trounced by the Japanese—so roundly, in fact, that Yi’s painstakingly accumulated naval force was reduced at one stage to just a dozen ships.
The defeat made the bureaucrats in Seoul forget the palace intrigue for a while and discuss the dilemma. Inevitably the call went out: Get Yi! The admiral, a dignified Confucian whose personal life is said to have been utterly without blemish, agreed without demur to return to his old command and then fought his most glorious battle at the spot from which I had gazed from the turtle monument on Chindo. It was on a narrow neck of sea at a place named Myongnyang, and the official name of the turtle on which the farmer had set his red peppers to dry was the Myongnyang Great Victory Monument, commemorating the events of the afternoon of 16 September 1597.
The Japanese armada of 133 ships was heading west, bound for the Yellow Sea. Admiral Yi’s dozen vessels made a ragged line across the strait, beneath the cliffs of Chindo and the long, low peninsula where the road, Route 18, now runs to the town of Haenam. It was a brave and brilliant manoeuvre—the ships came under a withering fusillade from the scores of Japanese craft but withstood it all and returned cannon fire as if all Korea depended on it. Thirty Japanese vessels were destroyed and either sank or were abandoned, burning, on the rockbound shores. The remaining ships then turned tail and fled, back to the protection of Japanese territorial waters. It was the beginning of the end of this particular attempt on the integrity of Korea, and there is no doubt—nor was there ever any—that Admiral Yi Sun-shin was the hero of the hour.
He died during his next battle—the campaign’s last—at a place called Noryangjin. His strategy had already cost the Japanese two hundred ships when the fatal bullet struck him. His behaviour in death had a more than passing similarity to that of Nelson on the Victory, two centuries later and man
y oceans away. He knew that he had been mortally wounded, but he ordered his closest colleagues to prop him up so that none of his sailors would know he had been hit. Only when the battle was over and won did the officers involved in this final small conspiracy allow his body to slump to the deck. He was fifty-three years old, arguably the greatest of Korean heroes, the subject of heroic sculptures and paintings from one end of the country to the other. He is less well known abroad, of course, but among naval historians, who have studied the details of battles that he so carefully documented in his diaries (themselves preserved at his gravesite, some sixty miles south of Seoul), he is regarded with awe.
And there is a third reason for my having taken a more-than-cursory interest in Chindo as the island slipped further astern and as the Dongyang Express Number Two growled ever nearer the mainland. It all had to do with a dog—a chowlike animal with a short, off-white coat, an arched tail with a splash of ochre along its inner edge, and a face of great friendliness, determination and, dare one say it, chutzpah. The Chindo-kae, the only dog wholly peculiar to Korea, is a remarkable beast—and that, the government has decreed, is official.
The decree is something I found rather more interesting than the dog. Ever since Korea was a Japanese colony there has been a frantic desire, by government officials with nothing better to do, to classify almost anything of value as a ‘national asset’ and, moreover, to give it a number. I was already dimly aware of having seen such things: the tomb of a long-dead king somewhere in the deep southeast had been styled National Asset Number 38, I remember, and a library of Buddhist books in a mountain monastery was National Treasure Number 32. It all smacked of rather too much organization, I thought, and anyway, I didn’t believe the numbers. I assumed they had been given randomly to make visitors think that Korea had a lot of whatever the things were—at least thirty-seven other tombs and thirty-one other libraries, for instance. But when I met my first Chindo-kae, and the little devil came wagging and yelping across to me, and its mistress informed me sternly that I was about to offer a bowl of Purina Puppy Chow to Natural Protected Resource Number 225, I started to take the classification system more seriously.
The supreme orders of classification are included in a trinity known as the Objects and Sites with Historic and Artistic Value. The first of these are the kukbo, the National Treasures, of which at last count there were 206—castles, palaces, Buddhas, tombs and memorials, all of the very best quality and the most venerable antiquity. Next, rather more prosaic sounding, are the pomul, the Treasured Things, of which there were 734 listed in the 1958 reclassification—old village guardian stones, pots and pans of various dynasties and kingdoms, and temple bells and celadon vases. Third, there are the sajok, the Historic Sites—battlefields (such as where Admiral Yi was killed at Noryangjin), landing places (such as where MacArthur came ashore at Inchon), the grounds of old palace complexes, and long-ruined temples.
Below this esteemed series come five lesser levels. There are 5 Scenic Sites; there are 120 items officially designated as Folklore Material; there are 12 Historic Places of Beauty; and there are 72 Intangible Cultural Assets and Living National Treasures—my own favourite classification, which includes aged but nonetheless indisputably living men like Mr Kim Tong-yon, who, in a ‘culturally intangible’ way, makes bamboo baskets in Tamyang town. He has a number, which he will show you on request, and he is delighted to have been informed that he cannot be done away with (because he is an Intangible Cultural Asset) except on the specific instructions of the government. (Mr Kim’s baskets belong later in the story: they are remarkably pretty and complicated affairs, which he has been making for sixty years. He doubtless deserves his status and the popular adulation it brings in its train.)
The final category, which brings the total number of cultural assets in Korea to well over a thousand, is the one that holds the 235 Natural Protected Resources. Trees, flowers, birds and wild animals (of which there are precious few in Korea, for reasons I will discuss later) are on the list in huge numbers, and so is one domesticated animal—the Chindo-kae.
To the stranger who happens across one of the many breeding kennels on Chindo, the Chindo dog may just seem a pretty little animal, a feisty, protective little ball of fur and teeth. But it would be unwise to forget that it is Natural Protected Resource Number 225, and thus subject to the rigours of the law. In order to protect the dog from itself (which means, of course, from its ever forging meaningful relationships with dogs of less impeccable family backgrounds and with sullied gene pools) and to protect it from Koreans (who, as like as not, would boil the dog up in a stew and serve it with onions and garlic—of which, too, more later), one is expressly forbidden to take any dog off the island.
The Chindo Great Bridge (built by Hyundai, a small-scale version of that mighty Korean-built bridge that links Penang Island with the Malaysian mainland) has armed guards at both ends. Their ostensible purpose is to prevent any North Korean spies getting on or off the island, but when they open the boot of your car and peer into the boxes on the back seat, they’ll tell you with a grin that they are actually out hunting for contraband Chindo-kae, and woe betide you if you happen to have smuggled one out. I had once entertained a pleasant fantasy of walking the length of Korea with a little off-white dog by my side and was saddened to learn of the restriction and that my dream was not to be.
We arrived at Mokpo with a rush. The ferryboat rounded a headland, scattered some small fishing boats, bumped through a white-capped tide race, and there, suddenly, like a new slide flashed onto the screen, was the town, a cluster of houses ranged at the base of a steep little mountain. It looked to me exactly like a little Greenland town called Sükkertoppen, a dusting of sugary white crystals on the hill, a village of little dockyard cranes and bobbing masts down at sea level, a fresco of small old houses hugging the contours in between. I half expected to see Greenland fishermen—indeed, the Koreans were none too different in appearance, and those in oilskins looked, at first glance, as though they could well do their fishing in Disko Bay or the Davis Strait. An anthropologist could have made more of the connection; for me it simply offered a powerful blast of déjà vu.
Seagulls mewed and wheeled in the sky above the nets; the streets were lined with small fish tanks from which old women sold the smaller fry from the boats; the ground, when I stepped off the ferry, was slippery with fish oil and guts and scales. The whole place smelled of cold halibut oil and yontan smoke, and there was a gritty dust in the wind. I snapped on my pack, said my farewells to the honeymoon couple—the poor girl could barely keep her eyes open—and strode off to the north.
The town thinned out, and away from the sea and out of the wind it grew pleasantly warm. The sun came out, lighting up the meadows and the little lakes, putting everyone in a good mood. Koreans are very quick to change their moods, I had always found (dangerously quick, one might say in other circumstances); today they waved and smiled at me, and every car that passed, and particularly every bus, honked its horn, gave the double-finger V-for-victory sign—the Korean equivalent of thumbs-up—and cheered at my strange but apparently praiseworthy effort. Quite a few cars going the same way stopped and offered me a lift. I learned the polite rote: ‘Gwen chan sumnida!’ I would wave back (No thanks!), ‘Panmunjom kkaji goro kamnida’ (I prefer to walk all the way to Panmunjom). And they would whistle with amazement, ‘Panmunjom, chong mal?!’ and offer sweets and chocolate, anything they had, to help me on my way. (The gift that came most often was a small can of mandarin orange juice called Sac Sac, a most peculiar drink full of the uncrushed sacs of juice that the drivers seemed to think would most refresh a perspiring yangnom, as the Koreans rather impolitely call a Westerner. I became positively addicted to the stuff as the journey progressed.) That day, in the sunshine, it seemed that there were no more hospitable people on earth.
I was making for a village called Illo, and for a Korean family that my friend Oh Kyoung-sook had said were distant friends of hers and would be sure
to put up a stranger for the night. I was a little apprehensive: Father McGlinchey had also given me a string of Irish addresses, of people he knew in the province of Chollanam-do, where I would be walking for the next few days. ‘Cholla people have the reputation of being absolute bastards,’ he had said. ‘They say the Cholla people are lazy, parochial and boring—and not at all hospitable either. I don’t say that, other Koreans do. See if you like them. I always find them okay, although they absolutely hate the government in Seoul. They’re a bolshy lot, as far as the government is concerned. But don’t let me put you off. If you like them, fine. If not, have these addresses. They’ll look after you, for sure.’
But, tempting as it might have been to spend time with the Irish, I did actually want to meet Cholla people, obstinate and inhospitable though they might well be. So I dug out the address of Mr Kim Jung Jin and quickened my pace a little to be sure of arriving well before dark.