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Updated: June 27, 2025
For several hundreds of years, Sunto had been one of the principal cities of Corea, when Wang, a warrior of the Fuyu race and an ardent Buddhist, who had already conquered the southern portion of the Corean peninsula, made it the capital, which it remained until the year 1392 A.D., when the seat of the Government was removed to Seoul. To return to Fusan and the Kyung-sang province.
Greathouse, who, like many of his countrymen, has a wonderful gift for telling humorous stories, of which he had an unlimited supply, kept us in fits all evening, and in fact the greater part of the night, so that when we passed the islands of Goto and Tsushima we were still awake and in course of being entertained by his Yankee yarns. The next day we reached the Corean port of Fusan.
In the end Hideyoshi, the shogun, died, and the army was withdrawn, Japan holding the port of Fusan as the sole result of its costly effort. This Corean port it still retains. And now three hundred years passed away in which Corea remained free and isolated from the world. It wanted no more intercourse with foreigners.
Here at Fusan all the foreign residents look down on him, and his only pleasure is to come on board when a ship happens to call, that he may exchange a few words in a European tongue, for no one belonging to this locality will speak to him."
No longer, however, were envoys sent from Korea to Japan, and evidence of the outrages committed from time to time by Japanese pirates is furnished by a decree of the Korean Government that a Japanese subject landing anywhere except at Fusan would be treated as a corsair.
It was no man's land, infested with wild animals and traversed by companies of mounted Tiger Hunters whose business was to kill any human being they found. That way there was no escape for us, nor was there any escape for us by sea. As the years passed my seven fellow-cunies came more to frequent Fusan. It was on the south-east coast where the climate was milder.
They sent a fleet to Seoul, the Korean capital, and by threat of war forced the government to open to trade the port of Fusan. In 1880 Chemulpo was made an open port. Later on the United States sent a fleet there which obtained similar privileges. Soon afterwards most of the nations of Europe were admitted to trade, and the isolation of the Hermit Nation was at an end.
Another clue: when was Hideyoshi the Shogun of Japan? In my time I heard the echoes of the two invasions, a generation before, driven by Hideyoshi through the heart of Cho-Sen from Fusan in the south to as far north as Pyeng-Yang. It was this Hideyoshi who sent back to Japan a myriad tubs of pickled ears and noses of Koreans slain in battle.
Still more recently I had noted the action of the Japanese soldiers when repressing the uprising in Seoul itself. Yet, whether the stories of the refugees were true or false, undeniably some interesting fighting was going on. By the first week in September it was clear that the area of trouble covered the eastern provinces from near Fusan to the north of Seoul.
On the 25th, Konishi's troops carried the castle of Fusan by storm, after a brave resistance by the garrison, and, on the 27th, the same fate befell another and stronger fortress lying three miles inland and garrisoned by twenty thousand picked soldiers. Thenceforth, however, it was really a race between the two armies as to which should form the van.
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