Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection: An Annotated Selection

By William Eilliot Griffis, Fernanda Perrone, Ross King and Soo Hur

William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as "the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.

The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781978828803

Book preview

Fragments of Information across the Borders

SOO HUR (PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY)

The Griffis Korea Letters are being published. William E. Griffis is best known for his role as a writer who informed the Western world of Korea with his publication of Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882). As a Korean historian, I am very excited to welcome this invaluable resource into the world. At Professor Young-mee Yu Cho’s request, I am adding a few words here.

There are 370 letters in the Korea Letters section of the William E. Griffis Collection, the majority of which were addressed to Griffis directly. The letters dated from the year 1874, right after Griffis left Japan for the United States, until 1927, one year before his death. As letters that are sent to someone presuppose a receiver, the collection of Korea Letters directly and indirectly reveals Griffis’s unique interest in Korea. The period covered by the letters is one of the most tumultuous periods of change in modern Korean history. Korea, which had been a member of East Asian Confucian civilization for millennia, suddenly encountered the capitalistic, material civilization of the West. As the clash of Eastern and Western civilizations intensified, the traditional social order premised on ascriptive status began undergoing a reconfiguration. I believe the unique characteristics of modern Korean history can be found in the transformation of the emerging social order in the complex context of the imperial-colonial nexus among the East Asian countries of the late nineteenth century.

The main function of correspondence is connecting people of different localities. Therefore, it is essential to understand the Griffis Korea Letters in terms of space. The Korean geo-space of the time was undergoing an unprecedented transformation. For years, the Korean Peninsula had belonged to the periphery of East Asian civilization, but with the opening of the country Korea suddenly emerged as the borderland where East and West began to clash. Even after colonization by Japan, Korea continued to maintain its border status. The clash of civilizations can be understood as a long-lasting process that indelibly penetrates a society to a microscopic level. Griffis, who was positioned on the outside of the border, diligently collected and systematized extensive information on Korea when he worked in Japan as a modern educator as well as after his return from Japan to the East Coast of the United States. For his writing, he needed firsthand information from people working on the ground in Korea. Horace Allen, Henry G. Appenzeller, James S. Gale, Homer B. Hulbert, and Horace G. Underwood, among other Western missionaries, served as valuable informants on the ground. In this respect these letters are analogous to messages sent by carrier pigeons.

The perspective of an outside observer maintained by Griffis leaves behind a blind spot, irrespective of his personal passion, diligence, or intentions. For instance, in his book Corea: The Hermit Nation he devoted two pages to the foundation of Tonghak and the 1893 movement to exonerate the name of the Tonghak founder. A new religious movement known as Tonghak (Eastern Learning) was founded by Ch’oe Che-u, who was executed in 1864 by the state, which was threatened by his call for sweeping social reform. Tonghak leaders petitioned for the posthumous exoneration of Ch’oe’s honor. Meanwhile the Tonghak Revolution of 1894, a significant historical event that led to the Sino-Japanese War, received only four to five lines in the book. The leader of the Tonghak Revolution, Chŏn Pong-jun, was not even mentioned, in contrast to a rather detailed account of Ch’oe Che-u. Perhaps this has something to do with Griffis’s focus on religious issues as a Christian missionary. However, it is also very likely that it could be attributed to a different viewpoint that he adopted in assessing Korean history. For Griffis, the clashes in the borderland remained in the background while the task of civilizing a barbarian society was foregrounded. The letters will illuminate how to interpret such idiosyncratic discrepancies we find throughout his books.

I expect this book to be of great use for the reasons listed below. First, it will provide a most relevant example in examining the process of knowledge formation in the West and the resulting knowledge structure with regard to Korea. Second, it will stimulate future research that will lead to a much more nuanced view about Korea that Griffis might have held throughout his life. So far, the research on Griffis has been mainly based on his publications. Third, it will provide novel clues that could illuminate many unknown details about the Korean independence movement of the 1920s. Besides, fragments of information contained in the Korea Letters, whether big or small, will work as mirrors that reflect myriad facets of modern Korean society.

In conclusion, I expect the letters to be utilized in the important task of contextualizing outside perspectives. Every act of observation carries with it its own unique blind spots. Just as there are blind spots resulting from Griffis’s foreign perspective that I mentioned above, the Korean internal view of history also cannot avoid carrying blind spots of its own. A concept of history that is absolute and nonchanging does not exist and, therefore, I can say that it is rather fortunate to obtain more mirrors that reflect history. Today we witness ever-increasing global interest in Korean society and culture. No doubt Korean history is inextricably part of world history. The thought-provoking letters from a century ago in the Griffis Collection will allow for new ways of understanding Korea by unsettling any unitary historical framework. I give my sincere compliments to the people at Rutgers involved in this long and tedious project of transcribing handwritten letters to make the content available to the public.

An Appreciation

THE KOREA LETTERS AND MANUSCRIPTS IN THE WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS PAPERS AND ANGLOPHONE KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ABOUT KOREA, 1888–1927

ROSS KING (UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA)

Young-mee Yu Cho and Sungmin Park are to be congratulated for this carefully curated and richly documented collection of fascinating letters from the William Elliot Griffis Collection at Rutgers University. While the Griffis letters are interesting enough in the broader context of the history of American faith-based/missionary engagement with the Orient during the heady two decades or so on either side of the beginning of the last century, they are particularly useful to students of the history of Protestant missions in Korea and especially to those of us trying to unravel the missionary contribution to and impact on modern knowledge production about Korea. In this short appreciation, I therefore highlight what I found to be some of the more interesting and intriguing nuggets buried here and there throughout the letters. For convenience’s sake, I divide my appreciation into the following sections:

A Missionary Republic of Letters: Griffis’s Epistolary Network

Missionary Praise for Griffis’s Publications—Especially the Hermit Kingdom Book

Korea Watcher in Absentia: Griffis’s Tireless Attempts to Chase Down Data and Sources

Revealing (and at Times Gossipy) Insights into Other Observers of Korea

Life under Japanese Colonialism

A Missionary Republic of Letters: Griffis’s Epistolary Network

The first impression that emerges from a thorough acquaintance with the Griffis letters is the extent of Griffis’s personal epistolary network. Though Griffis himself never visited Korea until the very end of his life in 1927, he made up for this lack of direct personal experience in Korea with a thriving correspondence that connected him in one way or another—often quite intimately—with virtually every notable leader and opinion maker in the Korean missionary and diplomatic community. And although the bulk of the letters are responses to missives from Griffis, the originals of which are no longer available, it is easy enough to discern in these replies to Griffis his main interests and obsessions: Korean history writ large, religion in Korea (but especially the progress of Protestant missions), the place of women in Korea, photographs (this bordered on an obsession, as it is clear he was constantly pestering his correspondents for pictures and photographs), and language and writing in Korea—especially the role of the Korean alphabet in modernizing Korea.

Griffis’s correspondents included US missionary-turned-diplomat Horace Newton Allen (1858–1932) (to whom Griffis dedicated his Unmannerly Tiger and Other Korean Tales of 1911), Korean diplomats posted to the Korean legation in Washington, DC, leaders of the Korean independence movement like Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) and Hugh Cynn (Sin Hŭngu 申興雨, 1883–1959), prominent Japanese and Korean Christians, high-placed officials in the Government-General of Korea (including governors-general themselves), and of course a wide range of Western missionaries based in Korea.

It was these Western missionaries who provided the great bulk of both raw information and interpretation to Griffis for his writing projects, and two names in particular stand out: the Appenzellers and Homer Bezaleel Hulbert (1863–1949). In the case of the Appenzellers, there are letters in the archive from pioneer Methodist missionary Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902) himself, but also letters to Griffis from his wife Ella Jane Dodge Appenzeller (1854–1916) and from all of his children: first child Alice Rebecca (1885–1950), Henry Dodge (1889–1953), Ida Hannah Appenzeller Crom (1891–1955), and Mary Ella Appenzeller Lacy (1893–1963). Griffis’s intimate connection to the Appenzellers can be seen from his sympathetic and detailed biography of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, A Modern Pioneer in Korea (Griffis 1911).

But Griffis’s close ties to this remarkable missionary family (Henry Gerhard founded Paejae Haktang, the school for boys, and his daughter Alice served as president of Ewha Womans University from 1922 to 1939) can also be sensed from the letters themselves. More so than with any other letters in the collection, the tone is intimate, as if writing from one family member to another. For example, on December 4, 1926, Henry Dodge, upon learning that Griffis has arrived in Japan en route to Korea for his first visit ever to the Land of Morning Calm, writes, Welcome to Japan and to the Land of Morning Splendor! … The tribe of Appenzellers extends open arms to you and what little we have is yours so long as you are with us. Henry Dodge’s letters also reveal occasional insights into missionary life—both its lighter moments and its denominational squabbles. In a letter dated January 30, 1921, Henry relates to Griffis an anecdote about Western missionaries in Korea who enjoyed delicious Korean persimmons for breakfast, and he spoke fondly of Korea as the "land of the morning kam" (kam being the Korean word for persimmon). In the same letter, Henry (a Methodist, recall) makes a disparaging remark about P’yŏngyang as the center of Presbyterianism and therefore pre-mil-ism and conservatism.

In many ways the most detailed letters belong to the pen of Homer Hulbert, who was clearly an important source of Korean historical information for Griffis. But Homer’s letters are also full of insights into Hulbert’s own research and projects. One such project of Hulbert’s that has won him an honored place to this day in South Korean history and church circles was his campaign against sinographs (the Chinese character) and Literary Sinitic (hanmun) and in favor of the Korean vernacular script. Thus, as early as May 10, 1892, Hulbert writes to Griffis, I hope in a day or two to send you a geography of the world in Korean which I published just before leaving Korea. I wrote it in the native character rather than the more scholarly Chinese because I wanted to help along the good work of popularizing the native character and weaning the people from their absurd prejudice in favor of the Chinese. This decision on my part insured the financial failure of the scheme but money has been well lost.

A few months later, on September 26, 1892, Hulbert continues about his campaign on behalf of the vernacular script, and his affirmation of Korea’s abiding respect for literary culture accords well with observations made in later years by Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale (1863–1937):

The work to be done in Korea is first and foremost to set in motion some sort of sentiment which shall point in the direction of popularising the true Korean alphabet as distinguished from the Chinese. That work has already been begun. Before I came away I saw a change begun in this particular. Koreans have told me that within two decades the Chinese character will be discarded in that country. That was a very sanguine estimate and yet I am sure it will come sooner or later. The reason of this is two-fold. In the first place the idea of literary culture can never be eliminated from the Korean mind. Nor would anyone desire to have it so eliminated for it is the one bright spot in the darkness of their lives. The second reason is that the Koreans are coming to see and will come more and more to see that they have not the leisure to prosecute the study of the Chinese character as they have always done.

Other letters from Hulbert give precious insights into his history writing projects—projects that he began substantially earlier than Gale began his. On December 11, 1893, he wrote to Griffis, "Korean History is my special Fad. I am now having the Tong Kuk Tong Gam [Tongguk T’onggam 東國通鑑, General Chronicle of Korea] copied. It is a heavy 27 volume work and gives a most thorough and interesting account of Korean history from the earliest times. I have already translated another Korean history of even greater value & these two together with others in my possession will furnish abundant material for a history of Korea. Unfortunately, Hulbert’s letter does not offer more details on this translation" work, but it is safe to assume he was translating not from hanmun but from Korean cribs prepared for him by a Korean scholar capable of navigating the hanmun sources. Incidentally, this and other letters also reveal that Hulbert had sold various antiquarian books and maps to the British Library, so here too Hulbert was a step or two ahead of J. S. Gale, who later purchased hundreds of antiquarian books for the Asiatic Society in New York and the Library of Congress (among other collections—see King 2012 and forthcoming for details).

What has never been clear about Hulbert and his work on Korean history is whether he actually learned hanmun well enough to use the sources on his own, or whether he relied entirely on Korean scholars to translate them for him. I have yet to encounter any evidence that Hulbert learned hanmun to any degree of comfort (unlike Gale, who clearly did, while relying heavily on Korean pundits whom he nonetheless named and thanked); given Hulbert’s especially vocal and vehement opposition to the use of the Chinese character by Koreans and his generally antisinographic sentiment, it would be surprising if he had ever made an investment like this. So it is interesting to find in one of his letters to Griffis dated November 30, 1896, the following: When I returned to Korea in 1893 I immediately plunged into the interesting field of Korean History. I found a man who for 6 years was a secretary to His Majesty and who had spent fourteen years in working up the history of the present dynasty. I have also had access to some rare manuscripts which help me to carry the ancestry of Kija back some thirteen generations and which give a detailed account of the Kija dynasty. This is a ms that has just come to light in Pyeng Yang among descendants of Kija himself.

The nature of and identity of these rare manuscripts will have to remain a mystery. Hulbert does not name the mysterious Korean individual either, but it is almost certainly Yun Ki-jin 尹起晉 (dates unknown), compiler of Taedong Kinyŏn 大東紀年 (Chronology of the Great East, the work alluded to in another of Hulbert’s letters to Griffis, dated February 18, 1900: I have had a long hard time getting the history of the present dynasty in Korea printed in Chinese in Shanghai but it is almost done now and will be out this Spring. It is in five volumes and will circulate somehow in Korea and China. According to Yun Kyŏngno’s short description of this work in the online Han’guk minjok munhwa taebaekkwa sajŏn,¹ Yun worked from 1883 until July 1884 as a low-level official in the T’ongni Amun (Foreign Office). Hulbert confirms final publication of this book in a letter dated December 5, 1903: I have just published the history of the present Korean dynasty in Chinese 5 vols. 547 pp or rather leaves.² It sells here like hot cakes. The first lot of 100 sets from Shanghai went off in 48 hours and dozens of applications are filed waiting a new invoice for which I have cabled to Shanghai. I have heard some extravagant words about it all of which must be heavily discounted. You know the Koreans have absolutely no history of the last 120 years. I bring the history down to 1896. Given the lack of any evidence that Hulbert had the hanmun skills to undertake a project like this on his own, it is curious that he makes no mention of Yun Kijin’s role and takes credit for the authorship of this book himself.

In another letter on the topic of historical research, Hulbert (June 22, 1901) makes an interesting comparison between historiographical practices in Korea and Japan: The grand difference between the ancient records of Korea and of Japan is that in the Korean records the supernatural is the exception & not the rule, while in the Japanese records it is only once in a while that you meet anything that could even be guessed to be history.

Missionary Praise for Griffis’s Publications—Especially the Hermit Kingdom Book

We have already seen the breadth and depth of Griffis’s epistolary network within the missionary community in Korea. First published in 1882, his seminal work (and the book responsible for the enduring but in many ways inaccurate epithet Hermit Kingdom for Korea) Corea: The Hermit Kingdom was required reading for new arrivals in the Korean missionary field, so in this sense Griffis was already a household name in the missionary community. But what emerges from the letters is a genuine sense of not only gratitude for Griffis’s book (and other writings on Korea), but also amazement and wonder at how Griffis could write such works without ever having set foot in Korea. Here are some examples attesting to the appreciation felt for Griffis—typically expressed in letters responding to requests from Griffis for precisely the information that was channeled into his writing and research.

Henry Gerhart Appenzeller (March 10, 1890): I have the pleasure to acknowledge the receipt of Corea: The Hermit Nation 3d-Ed."³ and in the name of the mission to sincerely thank you for your magnificent work on Korea. The book will be placed on the shelves of the Library of our school, Pai Chai Hakdang—Hall for rearing useful men, where it will be read not only by us foreigners but by some of our students. I congratulate the reading public in the U.S. that the best work on Korea is by an American."

Daniel L. Gifford⁴ (March 13, 1895): Considering however the size & scope of the work, the few blemishes which I have been able to detect with the aid of the microscope, affect very slightly the solid merit of the book. Indeed we think it remarkable that a person who had never seen the country, should be able to write a book of such permanent value upon Korea. It may be a source of some satisfaction to you to know that the Manual of the Presn Mission (North) requires your new Corea the Hermit Nation, as being the standard work upon Korea.

Horace Allen (July 24, 1895): You are still the authority on Korea. By the way, why don’t you visit the country for which you have done so much. I will agree to get you an audience and see that the King appreciates you. Then ten years later Allen again writes (May 24, 1905), You seem able to write of places and people where you have not been and whom you have scarcely seen.

James Scarth Gale (May 7, 1904): Even though your thoughts and just heart are much in the Far East you cannot know how thoroughly your name has become a household word and familiar to diplomats and to missionaries alike, held in esteem and respected and loved by all.

Homer Miller, writing from Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (January 7, 1907): I was delighted more than words can express by the receipt of a copy of your scholarly and charming work, Corea the Hermit Nation. Having read most of the books written on Korea there is no doubt in my mind that your work is the standard history of Korea.⁵

Lillian May Swearer, writing from Kongju in Korea (August 10, 1911): We are glad to hear you are to add a chapter to your book, Corea: The Hermit Nation but as to letting it drop out of public view, I hardly think other people will let it. It is read by all the missionaries for it is in the second year’s course of study. I have often thought and have heard others express the same, that if is quite remarkable that one who has never been in this land could depict the life and customs so accurately.

Koreans too were generally quick to note their gratitude to Griffis, but the following letter from two towering intellectuals of the colonial period, historian and independence fighter Park Eun Sic 朴殷植 (1859–1925) and novelist and father of modern Korean literature Lee Kwangsoo 李光洙 (1892–1950), also allows a much more cynical and patronizing reading. The letter is dated June 23, 1920, and was sent from Shanghai—presumably from the Republic of Korea (ROK) government in exile: It is an undisputed fact that your former work ‘Corea, the Hermit Nation’. although seriously mistaken in minor details in certain places, is one of the best, if not the best, records of Korean history existing. We are afraid that we can not be of very much assistance to such a great scholar as you are, but we will do our best to furnish you in so far as possible all the data and facts that you care to incorporate into your new book.

The letters in the Griffis archive also include correspondence with publishers like Fleming Revell, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and Harper and Brothers. Prolific and well connected as he was, Griffis clearly had no major problems finding publishers for his works, but we know from the experience of James Scarth Gale during the same period that it was never easy to persuade publishers to take on titles related to Korea—the market and reader interest simply were not as strong as they were for works on Japan or China. There are indications in the Griffis letters that even he was challenged at times to place his books. For example, a letter from Harper and Brothers (August 22, 1919) states, [W]e wish to thank you for having proposed the matter of a history of Korea to us.… Even with the generous suggestion of Dr. Rhee [Syngman] that he would provide for the sale of five hundred copies, we do not believe that there will be enough in the book commercially to make it worthwhile either for you or for us to publish it.… We have no doubt at all of the interest of the book, but we do have much doubt as to the interest of the American reading public in Korea.

Korea Watcher in Absentia: Griffis’s Tireless Attempts to Chase Down Data and Sources

It is clear from the majority of the letters to Griffis that they are responses to specific requests (often quite long and detailed lists of questions) for information—for data, observations, photographs and photographers, introductions, and so forth. In short, one of the secrets to Griffis’s productivity appears to have been spending inordinate amounts of time writing letters to everybody he could think of and constantly pestering them for raw material for his writing and research. As can be seen from the appreciations of the missionary community above, another secret to his success was that most of his interlocutors were only too happy to oblige. In the case of missionaries in particular, an added reason for their cooperation was that so many of them felt too overwhelmed by their day-to-day duties in the field to make the time to write anything themselves. Here below are some tidbits gleaned from the letters about Griffis’s ongoing quest for source materials.

In King (2019), I noted that Griffis (1911, 187–188) describes two Korean novels in his possession. Though he does not name them, they too are among the materials in the Griffis archive at Rutgers University and turn out to be kyŏngp’an (Seoul commercial xylographs) editions of So Taesŏng chŏn (The Tale of So Taesŏng, in 23 leaves) and Yang Sanbaek chŏn (The Tale of Yang Sanbaek, in 24 leaves). In a footnote I wrote, He must have received them as a gift from Appenzeller or some other westerner in Korea prior to 1912, but the letters now allow confirmation of how and when he acquired them. In a letter dated November 27, 1890, Horace Allen wrote, [I]n reply I will say that I am sending you a couple of Korean novels such as the common people read. The photographs I will have to give up. And again on December 12, 1890, By last mail I sent you a letter and a roll of two Korean novels. How are you going to read them? This makes these two vernacular narratives (kojŏn sosŏl) among the earliest to arrive in a Western nation, rivalled only by the collection of sixty or so books (mostly similar vernacular narratives) acquired by German linguist and polyglot Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) and mobilized in his pioneering paper of 1892 on Korean writing and phonetics.⁶

In a letter dated December 18, 1894, George Albrecht supplies information in reply to a query from Griffis about papers and letters by George Clayton Foulk (1856–1893), a U.S. Navy officer who served as U.S. naval attaché to the kingdom of Korea in 1876. At the time, the papers were held by members of the Foulk family, but now they are held by the New York Public