Reviews for Korea and her neighbours

The average rating for Korea and her neighbours based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-20 00:00:00 Michael Fleiss It would be more accurate to say that this book portrays an Englishwoman looking at Korea than to say it presents an accurate portrait of Korea at that time, though I don’t have anywhere near the expertise to say what she gets wrong and what she gets right, factually. This book is oddly heartbreaking: the average life in Korea at the time of Bird’s travels seems miserable and dirty. Bird is, as always, a walking definition of Eurocentrism, and her musings on the Korean character make the modern reader cringe. Like the rest of her books, this should not be taken as an unbiased, fully reliable historical account, but as an exploration of Victorian mindsets as much as an exploration of foreign lands. There are moments that bear no resemblance to the little I know of modern Korea, and moments that for me resonate with my little knowledge of North Korea, especially. During the recent funeral of Kim Jong-Il, I kept thinking of Bird’s description of the king’s yearly progress through the miserable city of Seoul. Bird does not present Koreans as a people who could achieve some of the things that South Koreans have accomplished since this time; Bird’s favorable view of the Japanese in Korea is also a little uncomfortable, given the actions the Japanese were shortly to take against the Korean Queen Min, whom Bird met and described as beautiful and intelligent. There is a lot to learn from this book, but they are not the lessons the book thinks that it is teaching.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-14 00:00:00 Patrick Malsberry Isabella Bird was an Englishwoman who had the wealth and the time to travel the world. Among the places she visited war Korea during the late Joseon dynasty, and here in this book, Korea and Her Neighbours, she records her travels over several visits to the country. Writing from a position of privilege, sometimes Bird's commentary is appallingly racist. But other of her more objective accounts of what is occurring around her is eye-opening, and useful history. For instance, we learn from the book that the women of Seoul were not permitted to come out to do their work, which mainly consisted of shopping and washing until the evening, a period when only they could be out and men had to be indoors, and then the women would have to return at midnight. Women, therefore, we learn, were mainly confined to their homes for most of the day. As one woman told Bird, she had never seen Seoul in the daylight. Another interesting account concerns the lives of ordinary people. She writes of how the mass of Korean people, inside and outside the cities, have learned to live on very little in the way of food and are able to pass their time with simple entertainment in the form of songs and games. They have to do this by necessity, she tells us, because the yangban, the upper crust of society, will extort money from them if they inherit or earn money or property. So the common person often took to hiding any new money or possessions should he come into it, and found a way to work more lethargically so as not to produce too much for his masters. Bird's book is not perfect by any means and perhaps you might find it a bit repetitive and mostly not fun. Still, it's a good book to skim for general information for what life was like in Korea as Korea was just coming into the 20th century.