taken place in the capital. It is twenty years since Chemulpo was opened to foreign trade, and to-day it boasts a magnificent bund, wide streets, imposing shops, and a train service which connects it with the capital. Its sky is threaded with a maze of telephone and telegraph wire, there are several hotels conducted upon Western principles, and there is, also, an international club.
At the threshold of the new century, the port presents an interesting study. With the adjoining Ha-do, a hamlet of military pretensions, it has grown in the twenty years of its existence from a cluster of fishermen's huts behind a hill along the river at Man-sak-dong into a prosperous cosmopolitan centre of twenty thousand people. Its growth, since the first treaty was negotiated with the West upon May 22, 1882, by the American Admiral Shufeldt, has been extraordinary. Its earlier years gave no promise of its rapid and significant advance. Trade has flourished, and a boom in the trade of the port has sent up the value of local properties. There is now danger of a decline in this state of affluence which may, in view of the chaos and uncertainty of the future of the kingdom, retard the settlement and disastrously affect its present prosperity. From small and uncertain beginnings four well-built, well-lighted settlements have sprung up, expanding into a general foreign, a Japanese, a Chinese, and a Korean quarter. The Japanese section is the best located and the most promising. The interests of this particular nation are also the most prominent in the export and import trade of the port, a position which is emphasised still further by the important nature of its vested interests among which the railroad between Seoul, the capital, and Chemulpo, with the trunk extension to Fusan, is paramount. The Japanese population increased by nearly five hundred
