From unwieldy pipes to black-market cigarettes, tobacco has been an important part of Korean society for over four hundred years....
Words by Vaughan Wallis, Illustrations by Pat Volz You may have heard of the Korean Wave, the spread of Korean...
Words by Robert NeffPhotos from the collection of Robert Neff Joseon Korea was generally perceived by foreign visitors as a land of extreme poverty. Even the Joseon government declared itself unable to establish trade agreements with the West because it had nothing to trade. But there were a lot of...
The children of Joseon period Korea may not have had a holiday dedicated to them, but they still had to shoulder heavy domestic and scholastic responsibilities like their counterparts today.
Sailors, adventurers, diplomats, and businessmen made up the initial foreign community in Chemulpo, known today as Incheon.
In 1882, three courageous American officers became the first Westerners to step foot in Busan. When the intrepid elderly British adventurer Isabella Bird Bishop visited Fusan (modern Busan) in January 1894, she declared, “It is not Korea but Japan which meets one on anchoring.” She was, of course, referring to the large population of Japanese that literally dominated the foreign settlement of that port, and, for the most part, the surrounding Korean community.
If you really want to learn about early Korean-Western relations, you have got to start by looking at Nagasaki, Japan....
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