Since the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876 was signed, the Joseon kingdom was forced to open seaports for Japanese merchants to trade, starting from the port of Busan. Around this time, a collection of pictures titled “Korea Ants of Literature” was born.
“Korea sees the map of understanding” includes 41 paintings painted by an unknown Japanese artist around 1892, recreating many scenes of life of Joseon people in the Busan port area at that time.
Each picture has a caption in Japanese next to it. Through them, it can be seen that the artists of the paintings have quite negative thoughts about the country and people of Joseon. This person repeatedly mentioned that Joseon is a barbaric country, the people are poor and ignorant.
The cover of the picture book “North Korea’s understanding of literature”. Photo: chefjhkim
In 2016, the collection of paintings was one of 200 artifacts presented by the Busan Museum of Modern History at the exhibition to celebrate the 140th anniversary of the establishment of the port of Busan – today the largest port in Korea.
Thanks to this special exhibition occasion, the resulting picture painting of the scene Lottery in the picture book has attracted a lot of attention and became a hot topic. Many people find it extremely interesting to “witness” a lottery that took place more than 100 years ago.
It is known that in the Korean peninsula, lottery types began to appear at the end of the Joseon Dynasty and quickly became extremely popular. Looking at the sea of people in the picture looking at the stage at the same time, it can be understood how popular this activity was at that time.
The drawing depicts the scene of the lottery with Japanese captions. Photo: grandculture.net
Lottery methods in the Joseon era were quite similar to today. There were three people filming the cage on a stage that was raised very high so that people from afar could still see. From the cage, a bamboo card with a random number will drop out, which is the lottery result.
Next, the bamboo card is passed to the mandarins on the other side through a rope. These people will write the numbers in a notebook and then announce the results to the crowd below. Whoever owns a ticket containing the winning number will be the winner and receive a cash reward.
At that time, the price of a lottery ticket was 50 jeon (100 jeon is equivalent to 1 won). Lottery tickets are widely sold to both Joseon residents and foreigners who come to this area to buy, sell and exchange goods.
With the depiction of interesting activities of the people of Busan in the Joseon period, who had just opened their doors to the outside world, the drawing of the lottery scene as well as the entire episode “Korea saw the solution to solve the puzzle” has become a masterpiece. extremely important data for the study of modern Korean history.
The large number of players showed that lottery activities were very popular at that time. Photo: Busan Museum of Modern History
at Blogtuan.info – Source: Soha.vn – Read the original article here
