class, who study Chinese, have any practical knowledge of it. Women of the middle and lower classes are ignorant of Chinese. Again, the proportion of upper class women who can read the Chinese classics is very small. It is probable that, out of an unselected assembly of Koreans, not more than five per cent. would be found who could take up a Chinese work and read it as glibly as a similar gathering of English might be expected to read ordinary Latin prose.
In relation to the ön-mun, the common script of Korea, there is, however, no such ignorance; the upper and middle classes study their native writing with much intelligence. The language of Korea is altogether different from that of China and Japan; it possesses an alphabet of its own, which at present consists of some twenty-five letters. It has been ascribed by certain Korean annals to the fifteenth century, A.D. 1447, when the King of Korea, resolving to assert his independence by abandoning the use of Chinese writing as the official medium of correspondence, invented an alphabet to suit the special requirements of the vernacular. Conservatism proved too strong, however, and the new script was gradually relegated to the use of the lower classes, and of women and children. There is an extensive literature in the vernacular. It includes translations from the Chinese and Japanese classics; historical works on modern and mediæval Korea, books of travel and hunting, of poetry and correspondence, and a range of fiction, dealing with those phases of human nature that are common to mankind.
Many of these books are regularly studied by Korean women, ignorance of their contents being regarded with disdain by the women of the upper classes, and, in a less pronounced degree, by those of the middle classes. The
