Dear Friends and Family,

Almost four months in Korea and I continue to wonder about this place and its people - although I’m far, far from the first Westerner to feel this way and to write about it. Back in the 1980s, journalist and now-bestselling author Simon Winchester became intrigued by Koreans and in 1987, he took a long, exploratory walk and wrote a beautiful book entitled Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. Although frankly, his experiences and my own seldom match – I suspect for various reasons including time (1987 is eons ago in a rapidly changing country) – nonetheless, his story is never far from me. The beginning is especially memorable and I’d like to share. So the following is an excerpt of Winchester’s first chapter “In the Seamen’s Wake:”

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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 ad 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 fallen under the subtle spell of what they call Geordie country, one of the great streams of the world. It is neither a very long nor in truth a very great river, yet somehow in its brief passage from source to sea it managed to capture all the alluring mixtures and contrasts that make England what she is – grace and power, rustic charm and ironbound sinew, breeze-ruffled heather and hot industrial oil, lonely moorlands and bustling factory gates. These contrasts exist in many river passages, perhaps, but in the case of the Tyne seem to represent so accurately all that for which the country once stood and all that had been for so long part of the leitmotiv of Empire.

The Tyne rises high in the broom-covered hills near the border between England and Scotland. It chuckles merrily through narrow gorges and across small waterfalls. It matures and lazes through meadows and prosperous suburban villages. It washes grandly between the old cathedral cities of Newcastle and Gateshead, cities of grey sandstone and marble monuments, vaulted railway stations and imposing city halls; and finally it passes by the low-lying, swampy slakes of Jarrow and Wallsend - the latter named for the eastern end of the might wall Hadrian had built to protect Rome’s English dominion – on its way to the cold and grey heavings of the North Sea. And in those last ten miles of its brief course, by which time it has widened and deepened and slowed to a kind of majesty, the River Tyne became over the centuries the home of an industry that perhaps more than any other made the northeast of England famous throughout the world: on the lower reaches of the River Tyne they build ships.

Vessels of war and passenger liners, gritty little tramp steamers and sleek container ships, ugly grain haulers and bulk carriers, motor vessels of every imaginable type that now ply between faraway ports, Baltimore and Capetown, Pago Pago and Papeete, Shanghai and Port Moresby, Colombo and Mombasa and (with a cruel irony that will shortly be apparent) the Korean ports of Inchon and Pusan, and a thousand places besides. Anything that was made of iron, and that floated, and that was made in England seemed to have some inevitable association with the River Tyne. So many of these ships in their uncountable armadas have, on some ‘tween-deck bulkhed, an oval brass plate with the engraved name of the shipyard and a final phrase of simple geography that still stands out proudly like a mariners’ seal of approval – made, the plaques say, in Newcastle upon Tyne.

When I arrived there as a reporter in 1967, they had just started work on the last family of truly great ships ever built on the river. The first, the flagship, was called the "Esso Northumbria," and she weighed in at something like a quarter of a millions tons – a supertanker, everyone called her. The people of Wallend, where she was built, were glad indeed after many months of short orders and short time – to have won the order to build her. I was fascinated by her construction. (I had been brought up in Dorset, and the biggest boat I had ever seen was a six-man whaler built of teak.) Each weekend I, along with scores of local people, would drive down to Wallsend to watch her progress. I would walk down to the tiny lanes of terranced houses where the shipyard workers lived, and I would watch her mighty hull rise behind them.

Week after week a wall of steel, fireworked by rivet throwers and welders, resonant with hammering and flecked with red lead and rustproof paint, would rise higher and higher, blocking out the view, the light, and the wind. Wallsend housewives who where normally muffled to the eyes would walk to the shops in summer dresses. The icy gales that so often roared across the river had been stopped in their tracks by the "Northumbria’s" ever-growing hull, which, within its cobweb of cranes and scaffolding, climbed higher and higher into the sky.

And then one day in early May 1969, Princess Anne came by, a young girl in a big yellow hat and a warm yellow coat, and ended it all. She cracked a bottle of champagne over the bows of the mighty new ship. With a roar of drag chains and a muted roar of pride from her Geordie builders, the "Esso Northumbria" was let go. She gathered speed down the slipway, slid effortlessly into the dark waters of the Tyne, performed the traditional curtsy of buoyancy to the thousands waiting on the river banks, and proceeded downriver to be fitted out and to undergo her sea trials. Then, probably (for I lost track and now cannot find her in "Lloyd’s Register of Shipping"), she took off for the distant destinations of the petroleum trade, like Kharg Island and Kuwait, Philadelphia and Kagoshima, and all the oil ports of the world. Newcastle upon Tyne would never see her again. (She was broken up in Taiwan thirteen years later.)

The housewives in Wallsend complained that night that their protective wall had suddenly vanished and that cold gales blew grittily up their terraced streets once again.

What the women of Wallsend may then also have vaguely suspected, and what the months and years would confirm, was that Newcastle upon Tyne, and indeed the River Tyne itself, would never see so great a vessel again. It was not simply that the "Esso Northumbria" and her sisters were the last of the massive supertankers to be built there; they were also the last really big ships to be built in the English northeast. The "Northumbria’s" launching and the empty slipway she left behind were powerful in their symbolism. They represented in a mournful way the formal close to a lengthy and glorious industrial era – the end of a historical chapter for the Tyne, for Britain, for Europe, and, one might say, for the once-ascendant countries grouped around the Atlantic Ocean. As each tanker vanished downriver and out to the ocean, so it became the turn of the nations grouped around the Pacific to take up the duties of the Old World and begin to accept the benefits and the responsibilities of being the world’s new industrial powerhouses, for the remainder of the century and beyond.

Sixteen years after the "Northumbria" had gone I traveled on assignment for a newspaper out to that Pacific Ocean, and I spent a couple of weeks in the Republic of Korea. On the Wednesday of my second week I flew down to a small seaside town in the deep south of the country, an unloved place with the unlovely name of Ulsan. And in Ulsan I came to realize in an instant just why the River Tyne, so very far away and to these people so very unknown, was in the throes of dying.

For here, on a huge plain below a heather-covered bluff jutting into the Sea of Japan, was the headquarters of the shipbuilding division of a new Korean ‘miracle’ company called Hyundai. I was shown around, I remember, by a young man named Lee Seong Cheol (though some of his cards gave his name in a more Westernized style: Mr. S. C. Lee). He was an assistant in the company’s protocol division. What he showed me would make Tynesiders – any Europeans, indeed, and many Americans too – shiver in their shoes.

Any one of the yards on the Tyne, in the river’s heyday, could possible manufacture four or five ships at once – in wartime, perhaps, or during a period of grave emergency or extraordinary prosperity. The Hyundai Heavy Industries Company’s shipyard at Uslan, however, could make forty-six ships at once. And it could do so without any of the romantic Victorian nonsense of tallow and drag chains and bottles of champagne and princesses in flowery hats. Out here it was all much more business like – the yard had seven immense dry docs, and when a hull was finished the dock was simply flooded and the monster was floated away. In one of their docks – the biggest – they could build a million-ton tanker; two more of them could hold a 700,000-tonner apiece, two more could each build 250,000-tonners like the "Esso Northumbria," and one each could accommodate a 400,000-ton and a 350,000-ton monster – or any combination of smaller vessels that they buyers appeared to need. Three million six hundred and fifty tons of shipping could thus be manufactured at any one time in the Hyundai yards.

And superquickly, too. From the moment the immense plates of steel were cut in the foundry shops until the moment that dry-dock sluices were opened and the sea waters were allowed to float a new behemoth away, took the Korean workers only nine months. With a further nine months spent in the fitting-out yard, this meant that any new Hyundai vessel took just a year and a half to make. A ship order at Hyundai took half the time it would in a European yard – and at a price a good 10% lower than the nearest-priced competition (which happened to be, rubbing in the prosperity of the New Pacific, just across the sea in Japan).

Eighteen thousand men worked at the Ulsan yard. They worked six days a week. They started at 6:30 am with thirty minutes of compulsory jogging. They then reported for work at the yard at 7:30 am, and laboured uncomplainingly until they were allowed home at 5:30 pm. They had an hour off for lunch – invariably they would be handed a plastic box filled with the mess of Korean cabbage known as kimchi (which now has so much status as the country’s national dish that a museum has be dedicated to it in Seoul). They were permitted two ten-minute breaks, one at ten, the other at three. A worker of average diligence, competence, and seniority was paid about £300 a month. (Although, two years later in this story, this sum came to be regarded as so derisory that Korea suffered a period of major industrial unrest, with rashes of strikes and riots, [but] back in 1985, when I made my first visit, the workers seemed docile and content and behaved peaceably enough.)

They enjoyed, in any case, many fringe benefits. The men lived in Hyundai dormitories and ate at Hyundai canteens. They wore Hyundai clothes – even Hyundai underclothes and Hyundai plastic shoes – and were given, at appropriate times in the year, appropriate Hyundai gifts. They had a Hyundai motto: Diligence. Co-operation. Self-reliance. (The word "hyundai" simply means ‘modern.’) They read Hyundai newspapers. They watched Hyundai films. Every possible need, from the moment of a young man’s application until the moment of a foreman’s retirement, was taken care of by Hyundai. And further, to ensure that an employee, a member of the Hyundai family, spent as little time as possible in the uncomfortable and unknown world beyond Hyundai’s protective wings, he was allowed only three days’ holiday each year – and many of them seemed reluctant, so Mr. Lee informed us with gravity, to take even those.

I daresay most European shipbuilders could have learned a great deal from a visit to Hyundai – about styles of management, about efficiency, about the means of inculcating keenness in a work force. But the Europeans I met didn’t seem to want to know. They just seemed overwhelmed and rather miserable. During my expedition through the yard I had an instructive conversation with one shipowner from the Old World, a Swede, as lugubrious a man as a caricaturist might wish. He had come to Hyundai to inspect his company’s new ship, a 160,000-ton bulk carrier called the "Nord See" – a vessel that might once have been build on the Tyne but was now being finished in Hyundai’s Dry Dock Number Two.

I stayed with him for a good hour as he shinned up the "Nord See’s" companionways and clambered down her bulkhead ladders, peered at her tracery of pipework, measured the officers’ swimming pool (‘Nice time they’ll have in this, eh?’ he grinned, rather bitterly I thought), idly polished the brass journal at the end of her waiting propeller shaft, and knocked at the solid oak of the wardroom door.

Then he came out into the hot late-summer sunshine, and we clambered down the steps onto the dockside, and he looked admiringly up at the great wall of rust-red steel with fireflies of welding torches glittering here and there along its immense length. He turned to me and said, with a note of real sadness in his voice: ‘You know, I think that Europe is quite finished.’

I prompted him to explain. He warmed to his miserable theme as only a Scandinavian could: ‘There was a time, you know, when we were past masters at building things like this. Ships so grand, so beautiful… But now, looking at this… Oh, sure, from my owner’s point of view I’m pleased. We’ve saved some money, we’ve got a ship delivered on time, everything’s fine in the balance books. But seeing how they do it, these Koreans – I just can’t see how we can continue to have any real industry at all. I suppose what I mean to say is, I don’t see how Europe can survive in the face of competition from miracle workers like the people here. For that’s what this is – it’s a sheer, bloody miracle.’

And that, I suppose, is when my fascination with Korea began.

* * * * *

I knew, as my Swedish companion had, that Korea had quite literally rise form the ashes of recent ruin. Just thirty-two years before this particular autumn day, a war that had lasted for three years, claimed 1.5 million casualties, and raged quite pointlessly up and down the playing-card-shaped Korean Peninsula, had been concluded: a cease-fire had been announced, a truce that divided a nation in two and separated it by barbed wire and minefields and ever-vigilant guards was put into effect. And South Korea, utterly devastated and demoralized, an emasculated shambles of a country, started shakily to get up onto its two feet again.

And get up it most certainly did. With an effort that, more than any other post-war recovery effort in the world’s history, appears now to have been superhuman, truly miraculous, Korea stood, then took a first step, then began to work with confidence, then to trot, and finally to run until – as now – it has started seriously to challenge the world’s industrial leaders, with a seemingly unbeatable combination of energy and efficiency, national pride and Confucian determination.

There was no shipyard in Ulsan thirty years ago. There was not even a company called Hyundai. But now the Hyundai plant at Ulsan is one of the best and most productive in the world; and the men who had the idea to make it thus, and whose pride and visions have kept Korea’s shipyards and Korea’s car plants and, indeed, the Republic of Korea as a whole forging ahead and pulling away from all others, were, it seemed to me, true miracle workers.

I was not, I confess, either terribly interested in studying nor competent to explore the mechanics of Korea’s industry, nor the unfathomable mysteries of Korea’s economics. The price of steel plate and the costs of fuel oil, the insurance rates for the Strait of Hormuz and the cumbersome tables of freight rates for the North Atlantic Conference remain among the arcane that I could never hope to master. But I was, I soon discovered, fascinated by the Koreans themselves, by the Korean people. How, I wondered, had they managed it? What was it that had allowed them, or had perhaps impelled them, to become so hugely successful when all the Cassandras would have marked them down for Third World ignominy, for poverty, for oblivion. In short, what sort of people were they?

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This question, what sort of people are Koreans?, is a question that I’d like to answer myself, for myself, and for all of you while I'm here. Hmm...

Well, with, as always, thoughts in every which direction,

Laura

PS: The Hamel that Winchester refers to is Hendrick Hamel, author of the Description of the Kingdom of Corea, written in 1668 – the first Western account of the Hermit Kingdom.