Korea in the Opening-Port Era in the Glover Albums

Korea in the Opening-Port Era in the Glover Albums

In the winter of 2012, I once visited the Glover Garden in Nagasaki. Strictly speaking, I arrived after visiting hours and could only catch a glimpse of it from behind the wall. At the time, I had no idea that Nagasaki, Japan, and Incheon, where I live, had once been places so closely connected.

The Glover house in Incheon stood on the site where the now-closed Olympus Hotel once stood. I have never stayed there, but whenever I passed by and saw the building rising prominently above the sea, I would wonder what kind of view there must have been from the top. It must have been a naturally fortified position. Perhaps that is why it was completely destroyed during the Incheon Landing Operation in the Korean War.

There is something strange about looking at the photographs in the albums. The photographs begin in the 1880s, and there are several in which members of the Glover family appear together with Koreans—Joseon people, as they would have been called at the time—who apparently worked at the Glover residence. In some photographs, the Joseon people crouch down to pose alongside the Glover family; in others, they are driving oxen. With their darkened faces and white hanbok, they are Joseon people of the same bloodline as me. Yet when I compare them with the Glover family, with their fair faces and Western clothes, it is strangely the Joseon people who seem more unfamiliar to me.

Where, then, is the identity of a Korean like me, living in 2026?

• 모던인천 시리즈2: 글래버 앨범 속의 개항기 조선, 류은규 & 도다 이쿠코 & 야마다 유카리 저, 토향, 2025년 03월 27일 출간

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