This isn't normally the kind of thing I would post, but it's an interesting story and I hadn't seen much about it in the K-blogosphere. It's a NYT article from last month about the nearly-forgotten house of an American man in Korea back during the Japanese occupation period. Pretty interesting read and not too long either. Here's a nice snippet:
I don't know how to end this, so I'm just going to take a page from friend-of-this-blog ROK Drop and say it: Read the rest at the link.
 |
| Image: NYT |
Mr. Taylor arrived in Korea in 1896. He mined gold, ran an import business and worked as a correspondent for The Associated Press and The Japan Advertiser, a now-defunct American-owned English newspaper in Tokyo.
He happened upon his worldwide scoop while visiting his wife at Severance Hospital in Seoul, where she gave birth to their son on Feb. 28, 1919. Unknown to Mr. Taylor, a group of Korean patriots, inspired by President Woodrow Wilson’s speech supporting countries’ right to self-determination, were printing their manifesto in the basement.
When he lifted up his newborn son, he found under his wife’s sheets copies of the “Korean Declaration of Independence,” which called for an uprising against Japanese colonial rule the next day. Japanese soldiers had raided the hospital and found the printing press but not copies of the declaration; a nurse had hidden them in Mrs. Taylor’s bed.
“To this day, I aver that, as a newly fledged newspaper correspondent, he was more thrilled to find those documents than he was to find his own son and heir,” Mrs. Taylor wrote in her memoir, which was published in English in 1992, 10 years after her death.
[New York Times | Seoul Celebrates the Home of an American Hero]
I don't know how to end this, so I'm just going to take a page from friend-of-this-blog ROK Drop and say it: Read the rest at the link.
Comments