CHAPTER V.
The Village.
The village is the unit of social organization in Korea. It is not simply the home of the few who are engaged in manufacture or commercial life, as in some other countries; it is the home of the people. There is no such thing as country life as it is known in the United States, more especially in the South, where the farmhouse is the unit of rural society. The farmers live in villages with their farms surrounding them. It is literally true in Korea, as it was in Palestine, that "the sower goes forth to sow" — that is, his fields are often some distance from his house, and he must go out to them when he sows.
Our villages vary in size from a group of two or three mud huts to a town of a thousand or more houses. There are but few cities and large towns in Korea. As said in a previous chapter, everything outside of the capital is called country. Outside of the capital, Songdo is the largest city, and has a population of about forty thousand. There are several other places with a population of from five to twenty thousand. There is very little difference in the plan of the cities and the villages. Plan, did I say? There is hardly any plan to any of them. They all seem to have been built one house at a time, without the least reference to what would be needed in the future enlargement of the place.
You may always expect to find the village situated
