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suggested that one might well explain away the odd construction by saying that Mr Park had only one leg or that the dog had savaged the other shoe, whereupon Mr Kim brightened a little. He then asked for reassurance that another of his sentences was correct. Garlic and sugar, he wondered, they were usually usedin the plural, were they not, as in ‘There are quite a lot of garlics in that soup, Mrs Lee’?
    In the end I decided to walk.
    I was not accustomed to walking, nor was I very fit. But it was a means of journeying born of a noble tradition: Belloc and Byron and Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor had all walked, and none of them, so far as I could learn from their accounts, had previously been renowned for athleticism nor belonged to any rambling club. Providing I had enough warm clothing, stout boots, and enough money to buy dinner and a bed at an inn each night, the journey could be nothing less than pleasurable. I would see the Korean people at ground level; I could linger where I wanted, go where I wished, stop and start at moments convenient only to myself. I mentioned the idea to friends at home, and they scoffed amiably. I mentioned it to Koreans, who took the Confucian view that to journey long distances alone was highly disagreeable and an almost unhealthy practice. But the more I considered it, the more the idea appealed. The only matters remaining, after buying boots, a rucksack, and an ample supply of adhesive bandage and Kendal Mint Cake, were to choose a route and select a date on which to begin. History provided me with a perfect design.
     
    Korean history is a mysterious subject and like many Eastern histories is as much a mixture of legend and hyperbole as of documented fact. If it is uncertain when the West first became officially aware of Korea’s existence, it is by no means clear when and how Koreans first came to know of the existence of the strange-smelling, pale-skinned ghosts—the yangnom —who lived in the vast world beyond the sunset. China, Japan, and Mongolia formed the essential boundaries of Korean geographical knowledge until as late as the sixteenth century; and after two successive and brutal invasions and sieges by the Manchus, the Koreans withdrew into themselves so decisively and effectively that they referred to their land as the Hermit Kingdom, a country deliberately shunning contact with the outside Oriental world andhaving virtually no conception of another world in the Occident.
    But Roman coins have been found in Korean burial urns, suggesting that traders must have reached Korean shores, bringing at least some form of contact with the Mediterranean civilizations. And the tentative contacts made with the West by the Chinese offered some later links between the Koreans—who sent peacetime envoys to the Peking court—and the cultures of London and Paris and Venice and Madrid. Korean writings of the early sixteenth century refer to people called the ‘Fo-lang-chi’ overrunning the Chinese tributary state of ‘Man-la’—the Portuguese, undoubtedly, who annexed Malacca. A Spaniard, Gregorio de Cespedes, actually served in Korea as chaplain to Hideyoshi’s troops during the Japanese campaign of 1593, but no reference can be found in any Korean source to the appearance of this strange-looking barbarian.
    It was some time towards the end of the reign of King Sonjo, around 1606, that a Korean diplomat returned to Seoul from Peking with a map of Europe, offering the first certain, and presumably dismaying, knowledge that there was an advanced and civilized world beyond the great tracts of China. Then again, in 1631 an envoy named Chong Tu-won returned from a mission to the Celestial Kingdom with a collection of Western objects—a musket, a telescope, an alarm clock, a map of the then-known world, and books on astronomy. Thirteen years later still, when the Korean prince Sohyon was taken hostage by the invading Manchus and brought back to China, he met and was befriended by