Korea and the Koreans. 941 
in Kyong-sang-do ; no ore of mercury is known to the Koreans, 
who import their supplies of the metal and its preparations from 
China. 
At the time of the opening of Korea by treaty, 1870-80, an 
Impression seems to have prevailed quite generally that the 
country was extremely rich in gold, that great quantities of the 
precious metals were soon to be exported, or that mines of great 
richness would be found and worked. he years that have 
elapsed since this date have partly served to prove the fallacy of 
these assumptions, yet the doubt is not yet fully removed. Gold 
is now known to occur in many places in moderate quantities : in 
alluvial deposits, from which it may be washed by simple me- 
chanical process, and in quartz veins, from which it is extracted 
in small quantities by crude and laborious methods of rock- 
pulverizing and washing. A small constant demand for the 
metal has always existed, for jewelry and gilding—the latter 
quite a common decorative process, which up to the present 
seems to have required the use of pure gold even for the crudest 
applications. The mines remain for the greater part unworked, 
however, for three reasons: (1) the native dislike for altering the 
geomantic conditions of any locality by digging holes in the 
ground ; (2) the laws forbidding the search for the metal, for 
gold mining in Korea is a government monopoly ; (3) the in- 
ability of the peasants to find a market for the gold that they 
surreptitiously work. There has always existed a chance of dis- 
posing of it by crossing the border into China, and there has 
probably long been a small steady export in this way; and a 
port has been opened near the capital where reside Chinese and 
Japanese merchants who must find a way of converting the 
Korean copper cash into some medium of exchange easily nego- 
tiable abroad, and who for this purpose have been known to 
purchase gold from the Koreans at a considerable premium. I 
have examined a number of specimens of Korean gold which had 
been brought to Che-mul-po and had passed into the hands of 
foreign merchants there. In several cases I found small pieces 
of quartz clinging to flat laminated grains of the metal of con- 
siderable size. 
In answer to inquiries that I made from time to time during a 
residence of more than a year in Korea I was told by the - 
Koreans of a number of localities where gold was supposed to be 
abundant. I have endeavored to show these collectively upon 
