The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture

10. The Northern Region of Korea as Portrayed in Russian Sources, 1860s–1913

10 The Northern Region of Korea as portrayed in Russian Sources, 1860s–1913 german kim and ross king There is an old Korean proverb that goes “Namnam, pungnyŏ,” meaning literally “In the south—men, and in the north—women,” hence “Korean men are more handsome in the southern provinces while women are more beautiful in the north.” This particular proverb resonated in the South Korean popular imagination during the 2002 World Cup soccer championships hosted by Japan and South Korea that year. The South Korean media devoted an inordinate amount of attention to the charm and beauty of the 300 North Korean cheerleaders who, in effect, often garnered more attention from South Korean fans than what was happening on the soccer field. So are there really physical differences in appearance and/or differences in character between “northern” and “southern” Koreans? Certainly the Korean traditional sources contain well-known discussions of the issue, and claims of this nature were frequently made by western European observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—some on a merely impressionistic basis, and others on more pseudo-scientific (phrenological or eugenistic) grounds. But neither the Russian observations of an ethnographic and pseudo-scientific, racist nature, nor the specific features of Russian “Orientalist” discourse as revealed in Russian-language narratives about Korea from this period, have been collected and analyzed in a comprehensive manner. Thus, this chapter attempts to survey the Russian sources on northern Korea from the 1860s to approximately 1913, and to demonstrate how Russian observers during this period described the northern region of Korea and the Koreans living there. Our presentation begins with a short introduction to some of the theoretical and methodological problems in any examination of Russian narratives of exploration and discovery in Korea. Then we The Northern Region of Korea as portrayed in Russian Sources 255 proceed with an overview of the Russian materials on the Russo-Korean “contact zone,” which we define as northeastern Korea, the Korean border along the Yalu and Tumen Rivers where many of the early Russian expeditions conducted their work, and the South Ussuri krai (region) in the Russian Far East with its new communities of recently arrived Korean settlers, predominantly from the northeastern Korean province of Hamgyŏng. THE RuSSo-KoREAN “CoNTACT zoNE” AND RuSSIAN NARRATIvES oF TRAvEl IN KoREA In her classic work on western European travel literature, Mary Louise Pratt defines the notion of “contact zone” as follows: “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict.”1 In this chapter we borrow this notion of contact zone and apply it to those regions in the Russian “Dal’nyi Vostok” or Russian Far East, in northeastern Korea, and along the Sino-Korean and Russo-Korean borders where Russians and Koreans first came into regular contact beginning in the 1860s. The narratives of contact and encounter explored in this paper were rendered by a wide variety of Russians: travelers and explorers, merchants, regional government officials, administrators and their representatives, military officers, scholars and representatives of Russian learned societies, missionaries, students from the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok, writers, ethnographers, and anthropologists. In some cases, the authors and their backgrounds are wellknown , while in others, as G. D. Tiagai notes, we know almost nothing (e.g., K. N. Dadeshkaliani, P. M. Delotkovich, F. M. Vebel’, V. P. Karneev, V. A. Al’ftan).2 There are, to be sure, Russian sources from this period on the central and southern regions of Korea, but for obvious geographical reasons, there is a large and important body of Russian work devoted to the description and study of the northern region of Korea—in particular, the Korean northeast, which we treat here as extending beyond the Russo-Korean border and into the South Ussuri krai in the Russian Far East. This fact alone—the abundance of Russian-language materials on northern Korea from the 1860s until the Japanese takeover of Korea in 1910—suggests the necessity to go back to german Kim and Ross King 256 these little-known materials and examine them. As V. T. Zaichikov, the noted Russian geographer of Korea, notes: “If, during all this period, Korea was studied geographically quite weakly in general, then the northern region bordering Manchuria was completely inaccessible for investigations of any sort.”3 A decade later, another Soviet...