or American product. The peaches are of a deep red colour throughout and are of good size, but are not of superior quality. Plums are plentiful and of fair quality. A sort of bush cherry[1] is one of the commonest of Korean fruits, but it is not grown by grafting and is inferior in every way. Jujubes, pomegranates, crab-apples, pears and grapes are common, but are generally insipid to Western taste. Foreign apples, grapes, pears, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants and other garden fruits grow to perfection in this soil. As for nuts, the principal kinds are the so-called English walnuts, chestnuts and pine nuts. We find also ginko and other nuts, but they amount to very little.
The question of cereals is, of course, of prime importance. The Korean people passed immediately from a savage condition to the status of an agricultural community without the intervention of a pastoral age. They have never known anything about the uses of milk or any of its important products, excepting as medicine. Even the primitive legends do not antedate the institution of agriculture in the peninsula. Rice was first introduced from China in 1122 B.C., but millet had already been grown here for many centuries. Rice forms the staple article of food of the vast majority of the Korean people. In the northern and eastern provinces the proportion of other grains is more considerable, and in some few places rice is hardly eaten at all; but the fact remains that, with the exception of certain mountainous districts where the construction of paddy-fields is out of the question, rice is the main article of food of the whole nation. The history of the introduction and popularisation of this cereal and the stories and poems that have been written about it would make a respectable volume. The Korean language has almost as many synonyms for it as the Arabic has for horse. It means more to him than roast beef does to an Englishman, macaroni to an Italian, or potatoes to an Irishman. There are three kinds of rice in Korea. One is grown in the water, another in ordinary fields, and another
- ↑ In Korean, 앵두 (Wikisource contributor note)
