to their affinity for Catholicism, and his parents had farmed on the island. Apparently, little Cheoljong wasn’t terribly studious, and the guidebook Moon Handbooks: South Korea politely referred to him as “uneducated and somewhat of a country bumpkin; he was definitely unprepared for his role as head of the nation.” It was said he was living in terrible poverty and unable to read when he was chosen to be king — precisely the type of man needed to lead a country to prosperity. Heju recalled that during her school years, Cheoljong was one Joseon king that her teachers did not expand on. I suspect he was rather like poor old Chester A. Arthur or Benjamin Harrison — American presidents who sadly are consigned to presidential oblivion for eternity. Cheoljong died in 1863 at age thirty-two, reportedly a victim of foul play. His home, “Yongheun Palace,” was reconstructed in 1974.
Heju and I drove from Goryeo Palace to a clearing nearby where there was a row of foundation rocks. Officials believe that these belonged to the original palace site.
And up a slight hill from the site of this place is the Ganghwa Anglican Church, built in 1900 under the direction of Charles John Corfe, the Church of England’s first bishop to Korea (1889–1905). In an effort to try to integrate the Anglican Church into Korean culture, its missionaries, who began arriving in the late nineteenth century, built several churches in the traditional Korean architectural style. This was the first constructed.
Bishop Corfe apparently wasn’t terribly enamoured with his posting in Korea. He was educated at Oxford and served twenty years as a chaplain in the Royal Navy before being sent to Korea at the age of forty-six. He spent sixteen years in the country, and recounted his experiences in his book The Anglican Church in Corea.
The one-storey building was a mix of Western and Korean architecture with Buddhist elements. Rust-coloured brick covered the lower walls, and above this was a narrow row of wooden shuttered windows, painted turquoise. Vertical wood beams painted deep red were inlaid in the walls. The roof was massive, constructed in the traditional Korean style, double-tiered with grey tile shingles and wooden rafters painted a light greenish-blue. The church had been refurbished in 1984, and it was indeed a beautiful work of architecture.
Along one end of the church were four faded turquoise wooden doors. We noticed one of them was ajar, so we popped our heads in. A woman was sweeping the floor. “Are you open?” we asked.
“No, only on Sundays,” she answered.
It was Friday. “Is it okay if we come in and look around?”
“Yes, come in.”
We took off our shoes and entered. Inside we discovered an architectural treasure. I felt as if I had been transported back to Victorian England. The basilica-like interior featured sumptuous polished dark red wood on the floor, ceiling, and rafters. The interior was bathed in a soft golden glow. Nine floor-to-ceiling vertical beams more than a foot thick ran along each side of the church, shouldering the weight of a second-floor wooden walkway and the heavy-looking roof. Across the high ceiling ran nine large beams. The walls were of white clay framed in wood. Above the walkway on each side was a row of windows, and several chandeliers, each with a set of six small delicate white ceramic shades, hung from the ceiling.
The aisle was flanked by ten rows of redwood chairs. We sat down and soaked up the ambiance. It really was an exquisite building, peaceful and calm. The artisans who refurbished it had obviously been master craftsmen.
“It’s beautiful,” said Heju, in a state of ecclesiastical bliss. “I love it here; I could stay all day.”
Even I was imbued by a temporary wave of serenity.
Three women were cleaning the interior, so we asked one of them whether they had to polish the wooden floors, which would be quite an undertaking.
“We polish them twice a year,” she told us, “but we don’t wax them anymore. Our parishioners are old and they slip if we do.”
I had a brief vision of Sunday morning worship service, with elderly churchgoers taking long runs in stocking feet, sliding briskly over the smooth surface, whooping and hollering in delight, then tumbling like bowling pins.
Noticing two portable gas heaters in the corner, we asked if it got cold in the winter.
“Yes, the church isn’t insulated. We need to use heaters,” she said.
Two men then entered the church and sat down. We exchanged pleasantries. One had a German accent, and when I inquired, he told me his name and that he taught choir composition at a university in Seoul. Like Heju, he preferred that I didn’t talk, and was content to sit in a trance-like state and soak up the ethereal ambiance. Later, I discovered he had been the music director at the Spandau School of Church Music in Berlin, and was a composer too.
Heju and I stayed in the church for about an hour in order to properly receive blessings of good fortune from above. Finally, I suggested to Heju that we should get going.
* * *
Driving west from Ganghwa town along the north part of the island, Heju and I had stops at a roadside insect museum, a hillside crematorium, a millennium-old dolmen, and a “five-storey” pagoda — the latter, in actual fact, a five-rock pagoda the height of a small child. Back on the blacktop after a few hours, with evening settling in, we swung south along the west coast, though unfortunately a range of low wooded hills blocked our view to the sea. A short way south, in an area called Mangwol, we turned off the main road and headed onto a muddy and rutted side road that led to the coast. I turned on the headlights and illuminated a vast bleak stretch of muddy paddies. We soon reached the sea; it was desolate and grey. As we emerged from the car, we were met by a cold salty wind blowing off the water. About a mile out, a twinkle of yellow lights shimmered in the darkness from a small village on Seongmo Island. The tide was out, exposing a deep morass of brown goo and deep, wide, muddy moats and trenches that led from the shore to the sea and looked large enough to swallow a small house. I had never seen such treacherous mud flats before.
“No wonder people drown here!” I exclaimed.
We wandered along the shore to nearby Mangwol Dondae, a low sentry post constructed of small rocks. It had been built in 1679, and I found it exhilarating to imagine that more than three centuries earlier soldiers would have manned this now-crumbling structure and gazed out to sea, on the lookout for foreign vessels.
Back in the car, Heju and I continued south along the island road, and soon rolled into the small coastal village of Oepo, located about halfway down Ganghwa. We puttered through its “downtown” area, a short, narrow section of road with no sidewalks, lined with brightly lit restaurants with long aquariums full of fish on display outside. It was Friday night, but the restaurants were empty; the crowds from Seoul would arrive by the carload the next day.
We stopped at five different modern-looking motels within a stone’s throw of downtown and Heju went into each one to check the room rates. She was informed by each one that they charged between 40,000 and 50,000 won, which sounded reasonable in comparison to Western prices, but was far more than the usual room rate of 25,000 to 30,000 won. “This is an Oepo Motel Cartel!” I charged in vexation.
The rates were unacceptable, of course, and having passed a castle-like five-storey motel along the road leading into town, we backtracked and pulled into the lot; Ganghwa Haesoo Sauna was quiet and dark.
Although there was no motel or hotel in the title of this establishment, it was indeed a motel that included a sauna (hot tubs, cold tubs, and a steam room) for customer use. In Korea, a sauna has tubs and steam rooms, and is typically used by Koreans for daytime use. But some saunas, also known as jimjilbangs
