Free Korea by Simon Winchester

with getting up at five to put on all that makeup. And there are the boys who are quite terrified of what they’ve got to do next, and they just want to stay together in the bar and get drunk. But slowly we push them all out, and by one o’clock we lock up downstairs, and take a look around to make sure no one’s lingering by the indoor waterfalls [of which the hotel has many, as well as lots of pools stuffed with sluggish, barely mobile, and very fat old carp].
    ‘Then, once we know they’re all in their rooms, we all go back to the office for a drink. We have a saying for what happens next. We say we’re “waiting for the earthquake”.’
    The next morning the young couples, who did not appear at all sheepish, emerged and tucked into their fish and seaweed and kimchi breakfasts. Hundreds of taxi drivers were on hand—each man in uniform, each advertising the fact that he carried a prodigious amount of colour film and a camera, and each keen to take the new Mr and Mrs Park or Mr and Mrs Kim or Mr and Mrs Lee on a whirlwind tour of the island. The important thingfrom this moment on was to go everywhere and be seen to have been everywhere, hence the cameras and the self-promoting Cartier-Bressons manqués who, sad to say, had each found his career prospects so limited (as he would recount in the car) that he had been forced to take this menial job of taxi driving in order to support wife, children, and family dog. The couple wouldn’t care: all they needed—and they really needed it—was a photographic record of the honeymoon, to fulfil the Confucian desire to be seen to be doing the right thing and to have proof of having done it for the elders back home.
    (Strangers might find it perplexing—I certainly did—to confront a population that is overwhelmingly composed of people all seemingly belonging to the same very small number of families. Most Koreans are either called Park, Kim, or Lee, which latter is also spelled Rhee, Ee, Ea, Yi, Yih, Lih, Li, Ri, Rhi, Rii and Ree—the Koreans having a great talent to confuse—and it can on occasion be trying if a Mr Park wishes to marry a Miss Park, or a Miss Kim a Captain Kim, or Ms Rhee a Mr Li. Only if it can be proved that the pair do not belong to the same clan are they permitted to marry. A Kimhae Kim—a Kim from the Kimhae clan—may marry an Andong Kim without any major problems; but it can happen that two less well-distanced Kims may to their horror discover on consulting their chokbo , the family-tree book most Koreans keep in a bottom drawer, that they share the same recent antecedents and are thus of the same clan . They are forbidden by law to marry. They often do, but illegally, and their children will not be registered.)
    Thus we talked, late into the night and over tumblers of brandy, my Hong Kong friend drinking his with peppermint cordial, a mixture of such stunning vulgarity that only the Cantonese, I thought, could conjure it up, let alone drink it and stay living. Dawn was beginning to break when I finally slumped into my bed, my head reeling with Andong Kims and Pusan Parks and Namwon Rhees. And when I woke, head still reeling, the sun was glaring down on a copper sea. I had a mountain to climb.
     
    ‘In this Island there is a Mountain of a vast Height,’ wrote Hamel, ‘all cover’d with woods and several small Hills which are naked, and enclose many Vales abounding in Rice….’
    Cheju Island, to which Hamel referred, is a vast volcano, the flanks peppered with fumaroles and lesser escape routes—now built into substantial hills themselves—from which steady streams of basalt lava once eased themselves down towards the sea. The island summit is in fact Korea’s highest mountain, Halla-san, 6,397 feet, and at this time of early spring, quite covered with snow. (British charts once named the peak Mount Auckland. The Royal Navy had brief imperial ambitions for Korea’s southern coast, annexed a tiny island now named Komun-do, and with