ТРАДИЦІЙНЕ ЖИТЛО НЕПРИВІЛЕЙОВАНИХ ПРОШАРКІВ КОРЕЙСЬКОГО СУСПІЛЬСТВА НА МЕЖІ XIX–XX СТОЛІТТЯ (ЗА СВІДЧЕННЯМИ ІНОЗЕМЦІВ)

Abstract

Until the middle of the 19th century, the world of the Far East was almost unknown to Westerners. Travelers, missionaries, diplomats and writers from Europe and America, exploring the world of the Far East, inevitably came across buildings radically different from European views about architecture. Curved tiled and straw roofs, paper walls and high fences forming a labyrinth of city streets – all this greeted foreigners who visited Korea at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. On the eve of the annexation of Korea in 1910, states from different parts of the world fought for hegemony over the territory of the peninsula, primarily the Japanese and Russian empires. When the world monarchies fought for influence on the Korean peninsula, elements of Western architecture, such as brick temples, high buildings, asphalt streets, etc., came to Korea. However, the effects of Westernization remained too weak to change the traditional landscape of the Korean city fundamentally in the late Victorian era. Traditional Korean «hanoks» were widespread on the territory of the Korean peninsula from the rise of the Joseon dynasty (end of the XIV century) to the post-war modernization of Korea in the second half of the XX century. We find many descriptions of this type of housing in the works of Western authors of the late XIX and early XX centuries, such as the American writer Louise Jordan Miln, the British researcher Isabella Bird, the American missionary Homer Hulbert, and the Russian Orientalist Dmitriy Pozdneev. In this article, we investigated the hetero image of traditional Korean architecture of the underprivileged part of the Korean population in the works of Western authors at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. Also, we analyzed the image of traditional Korean architecture through the point of view of travelers from Europe and the USA.