The Prophet of the Wharf (1)
Not long after we passed Samnye Station, Un-hong suddenly said, “Let’s eat first!”
You could have said that back at the post-station market inn.
At the very least, we’d be eating something tastier than this millet powder and steamed rice snack junk.
It wasn’t as if we were short on money. We’d made plenty on the way down here.
But there was no point wasting Porter space lugging around meat and vegetables that wouldn’t last even three days. I hadn’t even considered pickled jars.
That left only portable rations, and Joseon didn’t exactly have any such thing as “premium” portable rations.
There was no reason to be surprised. If aliens came to Earth, they’d probably ask why everyone from commoners to conglomerate heirs was using the same smartphone. The ceiling of civilization was just too low.
The closest thing to luxury was what I’d just taken out: little rice cakes made from pine nut powder and buckwheat flour kneaded with honey.
But Un-hong didn’t look like she was planning to settle for Joseon-style anti-aging snacks either.
She pointed at my backpack. “If you crack something open in an inn, the other people at the table will ask you to share, or try to buy it off you.”
I really didn’t want to look stingy.
So I boldly popped open the Spam.
That was the curse of having gotten drunk on the seashore in Hongju and gotten carried away with modern snacks. I’d covered the can’s label as discreetly as possible, just in case someone saw the writing and thought King Sejong had conquered the West.
Un-hong puffed her cheeks out and turned into a grinning hamster with a mouth full of sunflower seeds. Just like when I’d given her cube steak before.
“The Westerners brought something similar, so I tried it, but it really isn’t as good as yours. Where on earth did you get this?”
Well. If you let a can sit for about a hundred years, the country that made it will probably be able to open it again. By then, it still wouldn’t have gone bad, would it?
Or maybe the West would make something better in the meantime.
I’d only recently learned that the Westerners had already invented canned food themselves. Our Porter was carrying some too.
De Thierry said it was military issue, but it had the same vibe as Korean combat rations. Good for the first bite, and after that nothing but salt.
Hey, asshole. This is dead stock, isn’t it? You thought Asians wouldn’t know what a can was?
Ah! No, no! It’s canned goods from Cross & Blackwell that I painstakingly smuggled—er, purchased from the British navy! The Duke of Wellington said it was delicious!
What the hell does Wellington have to do with it? Is he some British chef? You trust a British tongue?
W-well, you’re not wrong, but it is definitely genuine!
As I was remembering old memories, I suddenly realized Un-hong wasn’t going to drop the question.
So, as always, I changed the subject.
“I got this through a money transfer and delivery, so I don’t really know much about it. But I did hear how it’s made.”
Sure enough, Un-hong’s cheeks were still stuffed with Spam as her eyes sparkled. “You seal food inside a hard can—no, a metal container—and boil it to kill the poison and the bugs. Then nothing can get in from the outside, and anything inside is dead, so it keeps for a long time.”
My best Joseon-tailored explanation seemed to have worked. Un-hong swallowed the Spam and nodded.
“I see. I don’t know how one would manage to hammer metal this thin and make it fit so tightly, but we should test it once we get back to Goerido.”
What was Goerido, a dwarf village or something?
I felt bad for the Goerido craftsmen who’d be dragged into an Impossible Mission, but since I’d said it out loud, I couldn’t exactly refuse to make them do it.
Before things got any more out of hand, I stopped leaking future technology to this other world.
Then I snatched the Spam away from Un-hong, who had been shoveling it into her mouth raw, and quickly grilled it for her.
It was an effective strategy.
“Good heavens. There really is always a higher mountain above the first. At this rate, even Gunchil—the eighteenth-century Joseon restaurant franchise that makes three hundred nyang a day selling beef skewers and soup rice—could be ruined without ever getting off the floor.”
When our eyes met, she gave me a smile unlike any she’d worn before.
“You’re not telling me to quit peddling and start selling meals instead.”
Of course not. Even including the Spam, what I carried in my backpack was only so much. I could turn that into a business all I wanted, but the ending would be obvious.
But it seems like there’s a more important reason.
And then I understood.
Even if I could open a gate to the modern world and bring back Spam whenever I wanted, I still wouldn’t feel good about it.
Because then even if I succeeded in Joseon, that success would be thanks to the gate, not something I’d achieved through my own will.
That would be no different from admitting that my life in the modern world had turned out the way it had because I was lacking.
In practical terms, and in policy terms too, I couldn’t depend on otherworldly magic items. Not that I couldn’t use them at all.
And when should I use them, if not now?
“If I sell it as food, I can’t share it with you. Let’s just eat it ourselves.”
Un-hong had been staring at me like she was trying to read my mind, and then she burst out laughing.
Hey, hold on. Don’t hug me. Your sleeve’s going to catch fire.
Cha Un-hong believed she had no choice but to take the lead in the “opening the West” business. Not out of greed, but because she’d been the one to say it first.
But after the business in Wonsando, her thinking began to change.
She had regarded Taesu’s unification of the Bobusang merely as an opportunity to gather capital and manpower.
But Taesu was looking much farther ahead.
As Un-hong listened to his plan to establish a Wonsando base for Im In-son, she suddenly understood.
The trade with the West I talked about can’t happen without the sea anyway.
By expanding the Bobusang’s destinations beyond inland markets and all the way to the coast, Taesu was trying to realize a vision of Western trade “through the Bobusang.”
No matter how clever Cha Un-hong was, she was still a Joseon woman.
She hadn’t immediately connected overseas trade and navigation either.
She had assumed the West would simply come to places like Seogeomdo. It was too difficult to do anything with ships in Joseon.
But business, after all, is won by the side willing to go farther.
That was why the Westerners kept crawling in despite themselves. Just as Taesu had guessed.
At that moment, Un-hong shivered.
Taesu had a clear blueprint.
That kind of certainty was something that needed no explanation. All the more so for someone as close to him as she was.
I came to help him, and in the end I’m the one being helped.
It looked like there was a future ahead far bigger than merely monopolizing imported Western goods.
And to walk that future together, Cha Un-hong decided to show what she could do as well.
Unlike Gyeonggi and Chungcheong, which people often lump together under the label of “the capital provinces,” Honam was very different in terms of scholarly lineages, traditions, and products.
And since the Bobusang’s branch offices weren’t centralized, it was fair to say the same went for information. Honestly, Taesu didn’t even know which guild office was the key one in Jeolla.
Cha Un-hong bit into the oily Spam with her fang-like teeth.
It was time for a merchant of national stature to step forward.
Even so, this was as far as Cha Un-hong had ever traveled in person.
So for the road itself, she’d simply followed Taesu’s mountain-spirit navigation, asking the spirit as they went.
Still, knowledge was valuable precisely because it let you know things you’d never experienced.
Cha Un-hong squared her shoulders proudly toward Taesu. The bewildered man asked, “Is there a big market here?”
“No. The great markets of Honam are Jeonju and Namwon. The reason we came here is that Gyeokpo—yes, the present-day Gyeokpo Port in Buan—is a strategic point for sea routes.”
The court minister Won Gyeong-ha, in the reign of King Yeongjo, had emphasized the importance of Honam with these words:
From Ganghwa, hoist your sails once in a favorable wind and you reach Anheung. From Anheung, hoist them once more and you reach Gyeokpo.
Ganghwa was Taesu’s base.
Anheung was near Wonsando and Hongju, where Taesu had established his foothold.
And Gyeokpo was this Buan.
Even after Ganghwado lost its geographic defensive value, it remained important for one reason: this was the starting point of the warp network.
That was why there was a Gyeokpo temporary palace here too, just like on Ganghwado. A waypoint set up so Injo could become the “maritime ancestor” through bitter reflection.
After the Manchu invasion, though, the Qing and Joseon got along well enough that people didn’t really know the Gyeokpo temporary palace existed. They only remembered the symbol of bilateral friendship, the “first Jurchen-style posthumous title in Joseon,” King Jangmok.
In any case, Gyeokpo was a major route for the Joseon royal family.
And as the Mongols and the British both showed, routes of invasion and routes of trade are always the same.
That was the “scheme” Cha Un-hong believed Taesu had in mind. She said, “Let’s meet a few people in Gyeokpo. There’ll be merchants coming in from the islands all along the coast with fish and salt, so the peddlers will be active too.”
Gyeokpo’s signature specialty was, without question, yellow croaker.
The Chilsa Fishery, as famous as Yeonggwang’s Beopseongpo, lay right out in front of them.
The season for yellow croaker here ran from the third to the fifth month of the lunar calendar. Right now, it was peak season.
Cha Un-hong, being from the north, marveled at the sheer scale of the croaker laid out in rows to dry.
“I thought Haeseo yellow croaker was the best, but apparently not.”
That made sense, since the fish migrated through here first and only then on to Hwanghae-do, where the leftovers were caught.
The glory of yellow croaker fishing along the southwest coast would continue until twentieth-century humans, with their “advanced technology,” wiped it out through overfishing.
There was a reason Im Gyeong-eop was somehow worshipped as the god of yellow croaker on the west coast. Honestly, how many fights does a man have to survive before the war god title starts selling?
But Cha Un-hong never said they should buy yellow croaker.
It was something a peddler could carry, sure, but the two of them and Porter couldn’t haul enough to make a profit.
What Un-hong was looking for was another local specialty of the Byeonsan Peninsula.
She approached the women carrying baskets of shells and bundled seaweed and bought a few crabs.
Then she took out one of the Worcestershire sauce bottles from their luggage.
The contents were already gone. She’d kept the glass bottle because it was expensive, and this time the wide mouth was what mattered.
As Taesu cleaned the crabs the way Un-hong asked, she packed them into the bottle.
Then she poured soy sauce in until it gushed and overflowed. A few seconds later, Taesu nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Wait, that’s way too much!”
“Ah. Is it?”
“You’ve never even made crab jeotgal before, so why are you pouring it in like you’ve got something to prove?”
“I’m not making crab jeotgal...”
“Whatever you’re making, that salty you won’t be able to eat it.”
In the end, they had to buy more crabs.
The woman selling them was delighted, and the other merchants moved quickly at the sight of customers. Grumbling, Taesu went and bought more green onions, chili peppers, ginger, and other things to throw in as well.
Still, Cha Un-hong wasn’t lacking in manual skill. After corking the bottle, she sealed it neatly by dripping candle wax over the top.
“What are you doing?”
“Didn’t you say that thing called canned food doesn’t spoil easily? I’m trying to see whether this can be boiled and still eaten without going bad.”
Her invention sequence was backwards, but she had looked at a can and thought of a glass jar for preserving food.
“That awful smell from the seasoning—your Worcestershire sauce—hasn’t leaked out at all. Then surely a glass bottle can be used in place of metal, can it not? Seafood spoils even more easily than meat. It reminded me of some king who died after eating bad crab jeotgal.”
“I think I’ve heard that story somewhere too. Something about persimmons, as well...”
The advantage of canned food that Cha Un-hong had grasped so easily was preservation.
Then it made sense to apply it to seafood.
Seafood is dangerous enough to change kings over a single mistake. In actual history, Joseon’s first canned foods were abalone and crab.
“If, as you say, we’re going to sail great ships out onto the wide seas someday, this will be invaluable.”
Making proper cans was extremely difficult. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Korea could produce them domestically.
But that was modern canned food. If you made something a bit more primitive in nineteenth-century style, it was at least worth trying.
If they started with jarred food and worked their way forward step by step, it might be possible. Taesu, having no idea about the history of technological development, just took it all in stride.
He even bought some of the expensive abalone. Un-hong had advised him it would be good to earn goodwill if they intended to use this place as a maritime base.
“If the soldiers or clerks come sniffing around, they’ll find some pretext to squeeze us and take it for a song, so I’m grateful you’re buying it at such generous prices.”
“I knew it just from your imposing bearing—you must be a man of great breadth!”
The harbor people treated their VIP customer with due respect.
They even kindly lent them the fire pit they all used for everything and anything.
There, Cha Un-hong boiled the jarred abalone and crab.
While doing so, she told the people sitting around the fire the tale of “Park Axe, who drove off the Westerners.”
The contents were roughly the same as the story that had spread along the Imjin River. Taesu interrupted several times to correct the disaster, but each time Un-hong stomped hard on his foot.
The usual reaction of Joseon people, who ranked among the world’s all-time top contenders for irritability, was a savage “Don’t talk nonsense.”
But since Taesu was the VIP customer, wore an axe at his hip, and had a build like a mountain, everyone pretended to be moved by the tale. Making a living was never easy.
As Un-hong rattled on, Taesu heard the mountain spirit’s voice in his head.
[A Westerner.]
At first, my impression was that the mountain spirit had fallen asleep and started muttering a curse in his dreams, which wasn’t exactly rare. It was that abrupt.
But he really was talking about someone for my benefit.
Hesitantly, I asked, ‘You mean the local god told you that?’
[Indeed. He says one is likely to arrive soon.]
‘Come to think of it, you said you could divine things too. Can gods see the future?’
[Not quite. The future is not fixed; how could one know what does not yet exist? We merely live longer than humans and know more, so our guesses often prove correct. Even divine readings miss plenty of times. It depends on the rank of the god.]
Then he added something completely unnecessary.
[For example, in my own case, I am a god of such long standing that I can tell at a glance that you and Cha Un-hong would end up attached to each other.]
Save the pointless commentary.
[The god here is called Gaeyang Halme, a deity said to reveal her clogs and the tops of her feet if one stands in the middle of the sea. She’s the sort of god who’d know.]
So she could see far because she was tall?
‘But why are you telling me this? I thought if it was your crowd, you’d just sink the French ship.’
[When some odd creature is wandering around outside, you’ll go out immediately and kill it—ah, right, you’d just kill it. Anyway, not everyone in the world is like you.]
While I was looking for words to rebut that insult to my character, the mountain spirit added,
[And they are not people of France.]
Author’s note
1. Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, was not a chef but a general. Strictly speaking, the “tasty Wellington” here refers to the beef canned goods first invented and supplied by Donkin during the Napoleonic Wars. In the time frame of this story, Donkin had already been absorbed into Cross & Blackwell, which is why it appears that way. Cross & Blackwell survived until 2002.
2. Gunchil is the owner of a restaurant in Hanyang. The business did so well that it apparently branched out into locations called Namgunchil and Yeogunchil.