Flora and There is a great variety of excellent hardwood timber on the east slopes and the northern mountains; in the west it is scarce and sparingly used; lack of coal has caused much wasteful denudation in other parts. The one surpassing animal of the na tive fauna is the man-eating tiger, who fills the native proverbs and literature, depopulates whole villages and even besieges houses for days, sometimes leaping on the thatched roof and tearing his way down through. Besides him there are leopards, tiger-cats and foxes; deer, beaver, badgers, otters, martens, etc., and a great variety of birds.
Products.— The great native crop is gin seng, which grows wild in the distant moun tains, and is extensively cultivated about Sunto; it is a government monopoly, and despite much smuggling yields a large part of the state revenue. Among other products are rice, wheat, millet, sesame, Indian corn, beans, cot ton, hemp and •erilla (for oil and pigment). The domestic animals are few. The cattle are excellent, the bull being the usual beast of burden; the ponies very small but hardy, fowls good, pigs inferior. Iron ores of excellent quality are mined, and there are copper mines in several places. In 1910 the value of gold exported was $3,053,038; the silver output is very small. Three-fourths of the trade is with Japan, and over four-fifths of the remainder with China.
Formerly a hereditary ab solute monarchy: till 1895 tributary to and re ceiving investiture from Chinaand like it in administrative forms, with officials appointed by examination in the classics. On the decla ration of independence (see History), the en tire system was abolished, as well as the privi leges of the aristocracy, and a cabinet of 10 ministers in charge of different departments formed, who with five councillors formed a grand council of state to lay measures before the emperor. Till 1896 the country was di vided into eight do or provinces; it was then redivided into 13, including a metropolitan province around the capital. There are now 12 urban prefectures, 317 local districts, 4,351 villages and 12 treaty ports.
Social Conditions and The usual dwellings arc one-storied. Fire is built at one end for the cooking and the heat is utilized by being carried along through the house by means of a system of flues, the chim ney being low down at the other end. Smoke is seen hanging at most Korean towns in the morning and evening, and the conditions of life for the masses, as in China, are hard and squalid; but actual distress is rare and beggars are few. Caste till recently was iron-bound, and no offices of even local importance could he held by other than nobles, who are distin guished by colored clothing and horsehair hats. Women are secluded; concubinage is allowed, but only one legal wife at a time. The im memorial system of education was almost wholly in Chinese, which contained the only written memorials needing it, and was of Chinese classics. The general course of cul ture, philosophy and the creed of the Korean educated gentleman was nearly the same in Korea as in China. In the reconstruction of the national education by the Japanese there were, in 1914, 366 public or government schools at tended by ,50,000 children, and 814 private (mostly missionary) schools for Koreans, at tended by 22,273 pupils, taught by 311 Japanese and 695 Korean teachers, female scholars num bering one-fifteenth of the whole. Under gov
ernment auspices are 60 industrial, 14 agncul tural and 2 commercial schools. There are also 149 schools with 17,264 pupils, with teach' ers for Japanese.
See History. There are now, by the Japanese official report of 1911, over 370,000 native Christians. The popular re ligion is the degraded Shamanism (q.v.); the higher classes are Confucians; the anciently all powerful Buddhism, crushed by the revolution of 1392, is slight and uninfluential, with a few ignorant monks.
The people are a mixed race of disputed elements, apparently Mongoloid and Ain with Manchu and Malayan infusions.
The chief cities are Seoul (Han-yang), the capital, estimated at over 200,000; Pingyang, perhaps 40,000, and Kai-seng. A trolley line nine miles long, built 1899, is operated in Seoul by Americans, and a trunk-line of railways with branches traversing the peninsula from Wiju on the Yalu River to Fusan. The total mileage of railroads open in 1914 was 934.7, and of light railways and trams, 109.8 miles.
The traditional founder of Ko rean nationality is the Chinese noble Ki-ja, who left China with 5,000 followers 1122 a.c., and established a kingdom with capital 3t Pjeng-yang. The first authentic history is the annexation to China 108 a.c. A century or so later it split into three princedoms, of which. about 960, Korai (Kao-li) came to the front, probably from borrowing the higher Chinese civilization. It recast the administration upon the Chinese model, introduced Chinese methods and arts, and initiated several centuries of brilliant progress and prosperity, enriched by art and literature. Buddhism was the para mount religion, and developed a powerful and rigid ecclesiastical hierarchy. As a result, a protestant movement took place, and in 1392 a revolution resulted in the fall of Buddhism and the exculpation of Confucianism. The cap ital (seoul) was fixed at Han-yang. When the Manchu power began to rise in the 15th cen tury, China, to protect herself against its rav ages, desolated a strip of fertile territory many thousand square miles in extent, then or early in the 17th century destroying four cities and many villages and removing 300,000 inhabit ants; and down to 1875 this zone of 60 miles wide by 300 long was kept as a permanent buffer between China and Korea. During the rise of the Japanese shogunate out of the 16th century anarchy, Hideyoshi, as a preliminary to invading China, sent an army into Korea, rapidly overrunning it. But Korea is like Spain, easy to conquer and impossible to hold; and the stolid resistance of the natives, with the Chinese armies, gradually forced the Japa nese out of the peninsula six years later, re taining Fusan on the southeast coast as a trading station. Thirty years later the Manchus, previous to their conquest of China, invaded it and exacted a tribute, which was continued to the Manchu dynasty in China; in 1653 it was reduced to a third, and for genera tions down to 1894, when it was finally abol ished, had been only nominal, as an acknowl edgment of Chinese supremacy and a trading license. But the Chinese wisely attempted no permanent occupation.