Words by Robert Neff In this humorous anecdote from the turn of the 20th century, an American diplomat and a mob...
Words BY Robert Neff Photos courtesy of the Robert Neff collection A skirmish between Japanese and Russian warships in February...
Photos courtesy of the Robert Neff collection The anti-Western sentiment pervasive in Pyongyang today has a long history, as historian Robert Neff recounts. Much as it is now, Pyongyang in the late 1880s and early 1890s was pretty much anti-Western. The legacy of the General Sherman in 1866 gives testimony...
Words by Robert Neff, Photos courtesy of the Robert Neff collection As the primary way of accessing Seoul during the early...
The six-century old Wongaksa Pagoda lay in ruins until Westerners in Seoul began to take an interest in it. One of the most interesting but least known historic sites in Seoul is Tapgol Park (탑골공원), also known as Pagoda Park.
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.
2,500 years after his death, Master Kong’s ideas continue to shape life on the Korean peninsula.
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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