Reading Colonial Korea Through Fiction by Chul Kim;

Author:Chul, Kim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 8

“She who returned like a return postcard”

Korean Fiction and the Postal System

It was in December 1881 that Chosŏn’s Yŏngsŏnsa (official delegate) Kim Yun-sik led a group of thirty-eight students to the Instrument and Machinery Office of Tianjin, China, with the purpose of learning and acquiring electricity, telegraph, and telephone technologies. Upon arrival in Tianjin, Kim Yun-sik came to see a most astonishing object, the first telegraph pole in China linking Tianjin to Shanghai. His diary, Ŭmch’ŏngsa (A History of Gloomy and Bright Days) conveys the sentiments of the first Korean ever to be stunned by the sight of a telephone pole:

Then I saw the telegraph line, which runs some four thousand li [approximately 1,600 kilometers] starting from Tianjin to Shanghai. Every scores of steps on the roadside stood a thing looking a lever, on which two strands of copper wires were linked. The passengers walk below but never dare break it; such was its conspicuous authority.

Of the visiting students, one named Sang-un was particularly talented. On March 22, 1882, as they were about to return home after completing the course of instruction, the Chinese government allowed him to carry back to Korea twenty-one electric instruments. Pretty much the first electrician of Korea, he packed among these gadgets two “Tŏngnyulp’ung” (telephones): in transliterating the English word they gave it a graceful sense meaning “virtue [Tŏk] generating [nyul] wind [p’ung].” This was the first telephone to enter Chosŏn Korea.1

Establishing postal and communication systems, such as the telegraph and telephone, needless to say, constitutes a core element of building a modern state. Along with railways, the postal system served as a most vital means of homogenizing the territorial space of a nation into a single space-time, and the case of Chosŏn, of course, was no exception. The fact that the Kapsin coup d’état took place at the reception celebrating the opening of the postal service on October 17, 1884, and that the main figure of the “three-day supremacy” of the coup was Hong Yŏng-sik, who was also the person responsible for opening the first chapter of the history of the Korean postal service, symbolically attest to the undeniable bearing the postal communication system has on the establishment of a modern state.

However, with the failure of the Kapsin coup and the assassination of Hong Yŏng-sik, the modern postal service of Korea came to suffer a long period of inactivity. At long last, delayed by various impediments, only in 1895, after more than a decade since the coup, could modern postal work be resumed. The telegraph service employing electric facilities rather than human couriers in the saddle or on foot was also launched in 1896 as telegraph stations opened in such cities as Seoul, P’yŏngyang, Kaesŏng, and Ŭichu.

On the other hand, it first became possible to send overseas post from Korea on January 1, 1900, when the Korean Empire under King Kojong, who took the title of Gwangmu Emperor officially, joined the Universal Postal Union. Up until then, all international mail leaving Korea had to make use of the Japanese postal service.

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