CHAPTER II
THE PEOPLE
THE study of the origin and the ethnological affinities of the Korean people is yet in its infancy. Not until a close and exhaustive investigation has been made of the monuments, the folk-lore, the language and all the other sources of information can anything be said definitely upon this question. It will be in place, therefore, to give here the tentative results already arrived at, but without dogmatising.
Oppert[1] was the first to note that in Korea there are two types of face, - the one distinctly Mongolian, and the other lacking many of the Mongolian features and tending rather to the Malay type. To the new-comer all Koreans look alike; but long residence among them brings out the individual peculiarities, and one comes to recognise that there are as many kinds of face here as in the West. Dr. Baelz[2], one of the closest students of Far Eastern physiognomy, recognises the dual nature of the Korean type, and finds in it a remarkable resemblance to a similar feature of the Japanese, among whom we learn that there is a certain class, probably descendants of the ancient Yamato race, which has preserved to a great extent the same non-Mongolian cast of features. This seems to have been overlaid at some later time by a Polynesian stock. The ethnological relation between the non-Mongolian type in Korea and the similar type in Japan is one of the most interesting racial problems of the Far East. I feel sure that it is the infusion of this type into Korea and Japan that has differentiated these peoples so thoroughly from the Chinese.
Five centuries before Christ, northern Korea and southern
- ↑ w:Ernst Oppert (Wikisource contributor note)
- ↑ w:Erwin Bälz (Wikisource contributor note)
