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did make it into the heart of Chosun Minchu-chui Inmin Konghwa-guk , and I heard the bands there play ‘ A chi mun bin na ra I gang san ’ (‘Shine bright, O dawn, on this land so fair’). If I close my eyes and try to forget for amoment the discordant awfulness of the Leaders Great and Dear, I can hear in the rhythms of North Korea, if all too faintly, the sighing of the grass and the weeping of the birds, and I can feel a hint of the ineffable sweet melancholy of all Korea, a melancholy that is all too easily drowned out by the honking of the car horns and crash of cash registers and the relentless pulse of techno music in a South Korea that often, and in many cases, no longer feels like Korea at all.
    SBAW
Sandisfield, Massachusetts, January 2004

Author’s Note
    Throughout this book I have generally used the McCune-Reischauer system of transliterating words originally written in Korea’s hangul script. In addition, and to help make the acceptance of many unfamiliar Korean words a little easier for the innocent reader, I have left out all but the most essential hyphens and all of the apostrophes and other diacritics with which romanized Korean is liberally littered. I hope purists and linguists will forgive this deliberate lapse, which was perpetrated with the very best of intentions.
    In a while, with good luck and a fair wind, the people of South Korea will enjoy a high degree of human rights. But for now it is a sad reality that they do not. So to protect a small number of people who were good enough to talk to me during my journey, but whose remarks might well cause offence to some of the more sensitive members of the republic’s hierarchy, I have changed some names and muddled some identities. The events they described, however, remain unaltered.

1. In the Seamen’s Wake
    The Kingdom known to us by the Name of Corea, and by the Natives call’d Tiozencouk, and sometimes Caoli, reaches from 34 to 44 Degrees of North Latitude, being about 150 Leagues in length from North to South, and about 75 in breadth from East to West. Therefore the Coresians represent it in the shape of a long square, like a playing Card. Nevertheless it has several Points of Land which run far out into the Sea. It is divided into 8 provinces, containing 360 Cities and Towns, without reckoning the Forts and Castles, which are all on the Mountains. This Kingdom is very dangerous, and difficult for Strangers…
    From The Description of The Kingdom of Corea , written in 1668 by Hendrick Hamel—the first Western account of the ‘Hermit Kingdom’
    This story starts a very long way from Korea—indeed, very nearly halfway across the world from Hendrick Hamel’s ‘dangerous and difficult Kingdom’—on a gloomy, rainswept, industrial street in Newcastle upon Tyne.
    Newcastle was where I had my first job on a newspaper in the middle sixties: it was a grimy and then rather depressed old place tucked away up in the far northeast, a place of deep coal mines and half-closed factories that were worked by men (the luckier ones, that is—many had been out of work for years) who still wore overalls and cloth caps, drank the strongest beer brewed in Britain, and had a tradition of making the sturdier items of advanced society—things made of iron and brass and heavy alloys, things like battle tanks and cantilever bridges, artillery pieces and cranes, telescope mirrors, power-station turbines and railway locomotives.
    But it had a softer side, too. As robust and no-nonsense a place as it might have been, the Newcastle I came to know was a city surrounded by and shaped by a wild and starkly beautiful countryside, and a place whose whole life and economy and folk history were dominated by two mighty waterways that were born high up in the nearby hills, the River Tees and the River Tyne.
    The Tyne! Such—or so it seems at this distance—such a grand old river and such grand old memories! The Tyne remains for me, and probably for anyone who has ever