Daily life in Hanyang during the early 20th century

A grounded look at an old capital adapting to trams, electricity, railways, piped water, wage labor, new shops, and colonial rule while household routines remained rooted in hanok neighborhoods.

At the opening of the 20th century, the city now called Seoul was commonly remembered as Hanyang and officially known as Hanseong. In 1910, Japanese annexation made it the colonial capital Gyeongseong, called Keijō in Japanese. This article follows ordinary city life from about 1900 through the 1920s, across that political break. The streets changed unevenly: electric trams crossed Jongno, lights appeared on central roads, rail connections widened, and a modern water system began operating, yet most residents still heated floors with kitchen fires, carried fuel, bought food in markets, and lived by family and neighborhood obligations. The result was not a sudden replacement of old routines but an unequal layering of new infrastructure and institutions onto the household world of Joseon-era Seoul.[1][2]

Housing and Living Spaces

Most Korean households lived in hanok built from timber, earth, stone, tile or thatch, and paper. Rooms gathered around a courtyard or narrow service yard, with ondol flues carrying heat beneath floors in winter and raised wooden-floored spaces offering ventilation in warmer weather. Papered doors and windows admitted soft light but needed regular repair. Rooms were not assigned a single purpose: bedding came out at night and was folded into chests during the day, while low tables turned the same floor into a place for meals, sewing, study, receiving visitors, and home-based work. Kitchens, storage spaces, fermentation jars, wells, drains, and fuel stacks formed a practical domestic system. Wealthier compounds separated family members, guests, servants, and ritual spaces; poorer families compressed these functions into a few rooms or rented part of another household's property.

Population growth and changing land markets made housing denser. Large compounds were subdivided, rooms were rented to lodgers, and builders began adapting traditional houses to smaller urban plots. Korean residents remained concentrated in neighborhoods north of Cheonggyecheon, while many Japanese settlers lived and did business to the south, though neither area was socially uniform. New Japanese-style houses, Western residences, missionary buildings, dormitories, official quarters, and shop-houses appeared beside hanok. Access to modern services varied by income and district, so a house near a tram stop or a piped-water connection could operate very differently from one reached through an unpaved alley.[3][4]

Water and sanitation demanded daily labor. Until the public waterworks opened in 1908, wells, springs, and streams supplied most households, and water carriers sold deliveries to residents who could pay. Even after pipes arrived, service did not reach every home. Water still had to be stored in jars and used carefully for cooking, washing, laundry, and cleaning courtyards. Smoke from wood or charcoal, household refuse, muddy lanes, contaminated wells, summer rain, and fire remained persistent concerns. Women, servants, and children performed much of the carrying, airing, sweeping, scrubbing, mending, and fuel management that made a dwelling habitable. Modern housing therefore arrived as a patchwork, while the daily work of maintaining a warm, dry, and orderly home remained largely manual.[2]

Food and Daily Meals

Daily meals centered on cooked grain, usually rice when budgets allowed, often mixed with barley, millet, beans, or other grains. Soup or stew, kimchi, soybean paste, soy sauce, seasoned vegetables, radish, tofu, seaweed, salted or dried fish, and small amounts of meat supplied flavor and variety. White rice and elaborate arrays of side dishes signaled means; poorer households relied more heavily on mixed grains, porridge, inexpensive greens, and preserved foods. Fermentation made the yearly food calendar possible. Families prepared jang pastes and sauces, pickles, and large stores of kimchi, with autumn kimjang requiring coordinated labor, vessels, salt, vegetables, and storage space. Meals were normally set on low tables and eaten on the heated floor, preserving older domestic habits even in homes newly connected to electricity or water.[5]

Household provisioning linked the city to farms, river traffic, railway depots, and market districts. Namdaemun, Dongdaemun, Jongno, and numerous smaller markets supplied grain, vegetables, fish, seaweed, fruit, firewood, charcoal, crockery, cloth, and prepared food. Street sellers and modest eating houses served porters, clerks, students, travelers, tram employees, and workers too far from home for a midday meal. Rice-soup shops, noodle houses, taverns, rice-cake sellers, and vendors of seasonal snacks extended the food day beyond the courtyard. New restaurants, bakeries, Japanese food businesses, and imported groceries became more visible, especially in commercial streets, but access depended strongly on income and neighborhood.[6]

Cooking remained time-consuming. A cook washed grain, cut vegetables, ground or pounded ingredients, tended a wood or charcoal fire, controlled smoke, and coordinated the stove with the ondol heating system. Iron cauldrons, earthenware pots, stone mortars, knives, wooden boards, strainers, ladles, baskets, and onggi storage jars were more important to most families than new appliances. Leftovers went into porridge, soup, or mixed dishes, and fuel costs encouraged cooking several foods over one fire. Women and girls carried most of this work, whether or not they also earned wages outside the home. Ritual days, weddings, funerals, and seasonal festivals brought rice cakes, liquor, meat, fruit, and formal dishes when resources allowed. Everyday eating thus joined continuity in Korean foodways with a changing urban marketplace and the strict arithmetic of cash, credit, fuel, and household labor.

Work and Labor

Hanyang's economy still rested on markets, government service, transport, household production, and craft skill, but its range of wage work expanded. Clerks copied documents and kept accounts; shop assistants measured cloth and wrapped purchases; porters moved rice, firewood, jars, and luggage; carpenters, metalworkers, printers, tailors, shoemakers, and repairers worked in small shops. Streetcar employees, railway workers, telegraph and electric-company staff, teachers, translators, bank clerks, postal workers, police, and hospital attendants belonged to a newer urban workforce. Rickshaw pullers, cart drivers, water carriers, domestic servants, cooks, laundresses, peddlers, and day laborers performed exhausting work that made these offices and commercial streets function.

Jongno remained a major Korean commercial district, while Japanese-owned businesses and colonial institutions expanded south of Cheonggyecheon and around railway and administrative sites. Markets and family shops sold food, medicine, paper, books, metal goods, ceramics, clothing, and daily necessities. A storefront often opened directly onto a household: relatives prepared stock in rear rooms, children ran errands, and women managed customers, sewing, cooking, or accounts. Credit and reputation mattered because earnings were irregular and many purchases were made through continuing relationships. Modern retailing widened during the 1910s and 1920s, but most residents encountered commerce through stalls, neighborhood shops, itinerant sellers, and market alleys rather than grand stores.[4]

Factories and mechanized workshops grew around printing, textiles, tobacco, food processing, electricity, rail repair, and light manufacturing. Women and girls entered factory employment as well as domestic service, sewing, laundering, food selling, and home-based piecework. Factory labor introduced fixed hours, close supervision, repetitive tasks, and injury risks, while wages were divided by gender, skill, age, and ethnicity. A family might combine a clerk's salary, a daughter's factory wage, a mother's market sales, and income from lodgers. Education could open clerical or teaching work, but keeping a child in school also meant losing immediate earnings.[7]

After 1910, colonial authorities reorganized administration, policing, licensing, taxation, education, and urban development. Japanese settlers generally had better access to official employment, municipal services, capital, and protected commercial networks, while Korean workers and merchants navigated unequal rules and opportunities. Yet daily work also produced constant practical contact in tramcars, stations, markets, shops, factories, schools, and construction sites. The city's labor world was therefore both integrated and sharply ranked: old trades persisted, new occupations appeared, and household survival continued to depend on combining several forms of paid and unpaid work.

Social Structure

Formal hereditary status categories had been abolished during the reforms of the 1890s, but lineage, land, education, gender, occupation, and former rank still shaped respect and opportunity. Established Korean families, landowners, merchants, interpreters, professionals, and educated officials occupied influential positions, while artisans, vendors, servants, porters, day laborers, and recent migrants had fewer protections. A growing middle range of teachers, clerks, technicians, journalists, medical workers, shopkeepers, and students based status on schooling, salaried work, and urban manners. Household standing remained visible through the size and location of a home, the quality of food and clothing, ceremonial obligations, and the ability to educate children.

Colonial rule added nationality and access to state power to this hierarchy. Japanese officials, business owners, and settlers were institutionally privileged, and investment in roads, sanitation, policing, and commerce was uneven across the city. Korean and Japanese residential and business districts overlapped at their edges but developed different reputations, schools, associations, and consumer spaces. Colonial power entered routine life through permits, police encounters, school language, workplace supervision, and the design of streets and public buildings. Modern infrastructure could benefit residents while also serving administration and settler interests, so electricity, transport, sanitation, and inequality were experienced together.[4][8]

Family remained the main source of security. Confucian expectations of respect for elders, ancestor rites, marriage, and gendered duty continued, but city work and education altered how those duties were performed. Women managed domestic production and family budgets and were increasingly visible as students, teachers, factory hands, vendors, nurses, and office workers. Young men and women in schools or wage work encountered new schedules, reading materials, fashions, and social networks. Churches, Buddhist institutions, schools, neighborhood groups, markets, newspapers, theaters, and voluntary associations created meeting places beyond the lineage household.

Daily sociability happened at wells, courtyards, street stalls, bathhouses, tram stops, shops, and neighborhood celebrations as much as in formal organizations. Residents exchanged food, arranged credit, watched children, shared news, and helped after illness, fire, or bereavement. Literacy and credentials became more valuable, yet craft training, market knowledge, and trusted connections remained essential. Hanyang's social order in the early 20th century was therefore neither simply traditional nor uniformly modern. It combined inherited distinctions, colonial inequality, new professions, consumer habits, and durable systems of family and neighborhood reciprocity.

Tools and Technology

New urban systems changed movement and time. Electric trams began running in 1899 and were used by people of different ages, genders, and social backgrounds. Electric streetlights appeared on central roads in 1900, while telegraph, telephone, railway, and postal networks sped communication and travel. The Ttukdo waterworks began supplying purified water in 1908. Street clocks, printed timetables, tickets, utility meters, and factory schedules made punctuality more important, especially for workers and students traveling beyond their immediate neighborhood. These systems did not reach everyone equally, but they altered expectations of distance, speed, light, cleanliness, and public service.[1][2]

Most daily technology remained hand-operated. Homes used iron cauldrons, charcoal braziers, oil lamps, onggi jars, water buckets, washboards, laundry bats, sewing kits, brooms, mats, low tables, and storage chests. Craftspeople relied on saws, planes, hammers, awls, knives, looms, dye vats, type cases, printing presses, scales, and measuring tools. Porters used jige back frames and carrying poles; goods moved by handcart, pack animal, rickshaw, tram, rail, and riverboat. The sewing machine, bicycle, camera, phonograph, and cinema projector became visible signs of a changing city, but repair knowledge was more common than private ownership. Technology in Hanyang was experienced through coexistence: a resident might ride an electric tram, carry water home in a jar, read a machine-printed newspaper by an oil lamp, and sleep on a floor warmed by a wood-fired ondol.

Clothing and Materials

Most Korean residents continued to wear forms now grouped under the term hanbok: jackets, trousers, skirts, long outer robes, padded winter garments, socks, hats, and cloth or straw shoes. White or pale clothing remained common, though indigo, muted colors, patterned silk, and brighter children's dress also appeared. Cotton served many everyday needs, hemp and ramie were valued in warm weather, and silk marked wealth or formal occasions. Clothes were expensive household property, so cuffs were replaced, tears patched, garments re-cut for children, and bedding or rags made from worn cloth. Washing, starching, ironing, airing, and sewing created a heavy cycle of domestic labor.

Western and Japanese-influenced clothing became increasingly visible in schools, offices, police forces, railways, hospitals, and modern shops. Men with clerical or professional work might wear a suit, shirt, tie, overcoat, brimmed hat, and leather shoes in public while changing into Korean clothing at home. Uniforms disciplined the appearance of students and employees. By the 1920s, some educated urban women adopted shorter jackets, simplified skirts, blouses, coats, heeled shoes, parasols, and bobbed hair, although these styles represented a visible minority rather than every woman's wardrobe. Japanese settlers followed their own mixtures of kimono, uniforms, and Western dress.[3][9]

Occupation still determined practical dress. Porters, builders, market sellers, domestic workers, and factory hands needed washable layers, aprons, head cloths, sturdy trousers, and shoes suited to mud, dust, weather, and repeated repair. Respectability could depend on presenting a clean collar, well-tied coat, polished shoes, or carefully laundered white garments despite limited means. Clothing therefore made the city's overlapping worlds visible: inherited Korean forms, colonial uniforms, imported materials, machine sewing, and modern fashion all shared the same streets.

Daily life in early 20th-century Hanyang was defined by uneven transition. Trams, railways, electric light, piped water, schools, factories, and new offices changed how residents moved and worked, while hanok rooms, ondol heat, fermented foods, market credit, repaired clothing, and family labor continued to organize the day. Colonial rule made those changes unequal, distributing services, authority, and opportunity unevenly. Ordinary residents met the modern city through practical acts: catching a tram, carrying water, tending a cooking fire, reading a timetable, sewing for wages, bargaining in a market, and turning a crowded home into a place for work, meals, study, ritual, and rest.

References

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