Seoul used to be full of tigers
In the early 1890s, Arnold Henry Savage Landor, an English explorer and writer, visited Korea and described the country as being full of enormous tigers that were “fond of human flesh” and terrorized the Korean population — despite their “almost religious veneration” of these great felines.
He went on to add: “Even the walls of the town are no protection against them. Not unfrequently they make a nocturnal excursion through the streets, leaving again early in the morning with a farewell bound from the rampart, but carrying off inside their carcasses some unlucky individual in a state of pulp.”
Seoul was no exception. An especially notorious site for tiger attacks was the pass near the Independence Gate. Once heavily forested, the tigers’ predation in this area was so severe that soldiers had to escort travelers through it.
Tigers were also fond of prowling near the royal graves.In the 1880s, King Gojong sent large numbers of tiger hunters (40 to 50 armed men) to kill these menaces lurking near his ancestors’ tombs, but, judging from the records, the tigers were too smart and easily avoided their pursuers.
Tigers also roamed the palaces. One legend claims that Gyeonghui Palace (also known as the Mulberry Palace and where the Seoul Museum of History now stands) was abandoned because “a certain geomantic tiger had his lair there, and, being displeased with the royal intrusion, had let loose a plague of man-eating tigers on the country that destroyed many lives, and to appease his tigership the King removed to the more beautiful grounds of the East Palace (Changdeok Palace).”
But Gyeonghui was not the only palace to be haunted by tigers. In the early 1890s, George W. Gilmore, an American teaching in a government school, claimed a tigress and her cubs had taken up abode in the ruins of one of the palaces. Even the palace in which the king dwelt was not safe from nocturnal visits. In early January 1894, a large number of hunters searched the grounds of Gyeongbok Palace for five days and while they found evidence of at least one tiger they were unsuccessful in tracking it down and killing it. However, one hunter, Yun In-chol, did manage to kill a fox (another feared animal) and was rewarded for his efforts.
One very memorable hunt in Seoul took place in the late 1880s when Alfred Burt Stripling, an Englishman working for the Korean government, and his Korean assistant tracked a big cat into the city’s sewers near the palace. After a long wait, the Korean assistant thought he saw the tiger slink out of another exit but didn’t tell Stripling. Wanting to impress his boss, he volunteered to crawl into the sewers and drive the tiger out. Unfortunately for him, he was mistaken: the tiger was a leopard and it was still in the sewer. Fortunately, Stripling’s aim was true and the big cat was killed — the assistant receiving several claw marks for his “act” of bravery.