A Journey to the East

Minister of Foreign Affairs Lord Adam Frakes-Sturgill Excerpts from his Diary - 9 March 1938 to 15 May 1938

9 March 1938 - Trans-Manchurian Railroad

Port Arthur, en route to Hanseong

Considering the fact Manchuria is largely a warzone between China and Korea, the Trans-Manchurian railroad runs remarkably well. After all, while there is an armistice in place, as long as there is no state of war between the Chinese and the Koreans, trade continues at a brisk pace. The line to Beijing has been completely obliterated over the years, but the Pyongyang-Port Arthur and the Port Arthur-Nanjing are still operational.

One cannot help but notice that things are changing. Almost immediately outside of the garrisons along the Great Wall, the landscape is withered and parched. A terrible blight followed a year-long drought in Manchuria. Manchurian herders have all abandoned the region, while only brave Korean miners still operate limited ore mines. The collapse of the Manchu tribes in the region has resulted in a drastic power-shift not only in East Asia but in the heart of the Chinese court, as the Qing courtiers are being replaced by Han Chinese. Soon, China will be under the Qing Dynasty in name only.

Port Arthur is the last bastion of green in western Manchuria, where snow melt narrowly averted what would have been a catastrophic dry spell. My Chinese friends write to me explaining that the Koreans and their geomancers are sucking the energy of the entire Northeast Asian region dry. A scientific answer most probably exists for this drastic change in weather patterns, but I humour them, as I humoured my younger brother, who fancies himself as a Druid or whatever you call them out in Amesbury.

14 March 1938 - Korea National Railroad, PyongHan Line

Pyongyang, en route to Hanseong

Crossing the Tumen River and into the Korean peninsula, one can see a sharp change in the fortunes of weather. The rugged mountainous landscape is sharply greener and farmers are about, planting their rice. It is rumored that the bounty of the fields for the past two years in this region has been a remarkable double crop - the bounty in the southern parts of the country entering into legend for the first triple crop of rice in the known world.

We stayed a day in Pyongyang after we met with the Great Regent’s Assistant Deputy Minister of Rites, who will be hosting us on a private train until we arrive at Hanseong. Pyongyang is the industrial heart of the Korean peninsula and it is still a backward city, such as the ones that are seen in the Kingdom of Sicily or Spain, but it is growing into a forest of brick, concrete, and steel.

It is said that through some sort of Korean geomantic artifice, the fires burn hotter in Pyongyang, producing some of the best steel in the world. Of course, Korea is inherently devoid of natural resources except for small deposits of rare metals, tungsten, and coal, so one can argue that the steel is a function more of the iron ore than Korean refining processes. The city is immaculate and well-ordered, with trees lining every avenue and Korean cars reminiscent of older Ford cars before the collapse.

Pyongyang is the center of the Korean aeronautical industry and while they do not yet produce Aerodreadnaughts, but the Koreans produce what they call the Gwanggaeto-Class zeppelins, large cruiser-class zeppelins armed to hilt and with a special steel alloy that keeps them armored without the need of Halo-X. A prototype being built for the Great Regent, called the Wanggun-Class ship that is roughly 2/3 the size of our Aerodreadnaughts and somehow managing to get sufficient lift despite substantial armor… something that my companion, the Minister of Science and Technology Lord Nicholas Byron is still ruminating over.

16 March 1938 - British Consulate - Hanseong

Hanseong, the capital of the Empire of the Great Han, is something short of magnificent, putting the European capitals to shame. Adorned by centuries of historical artifacts and expansive palaces seeming to be in harmony with their surroundings. Nothing quite as monumental as what’s left of the Imperial City in Beijing or romantic as the burned out shell of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the Hanseong palaces are frankly, for the lack of better words, beautiful, indicating the order that the Koreans are seeking in the world.

The entire city is caught between past elegance and modernity. It is the first city to have a subway system in Asia and Hanseong Station is the beating heart of Korean logistics. Heavy industry is banned in the capital, focusing primarily on things that promote proper pung su (feng shui). Universities, temples, and gardens adorn the banks of the River Han and throughout the city. Care has been taken in new developments to line each street with ginko trees and manicure lawns in a fashion of a proper British layout with indigenous plants.

At the heart of Hanseong, however, is the ominous omen that the locals call the Obsidian Diamond. A large monolithic stele of a strange, translucent, obsidian material, nothing is able to cut through it or carve it, but it indicates the magnificence of the Great Regent. Said to be found in Manchuria and part of a dragon’s heart, the stele is guarded by a massive marble and granite pagoda that rises at least 200-300 feet into the air. One cannot escape its view, hovering from the horizon, as it almost seems to draw in the breath of the collective population.

18 March 1938 - Hanseong

A long lunch with the Minister of Rites and the Minister of Foreign Relations before we spent the day exploring the city. Called the Never-Ending Bloom, some strange force at work… or some magnificent hoax… is present in this city. The trees are forever green, the water forever crystal clear, and the peninsula in a state of constant abundance. If paradise has a name, it would not be Shangri-la but Hanseong.

At the formal gardens in the consulate, I plucked a rose from the bush, and almost like magic, another blossom bloomed in its place. Roses do not even bloom until the summer… but here, everything seemed like… forever. I witnessed a mystic tap the cliffside of a mountain, and almost instantly, it sprang forth a waterfall. A child showed me a piece of paper with some strange writing that seemed to defy Galileo’s explanation of gravity!

When I first visited Hanseong as a child many years before, this city was backwards and desolate and miserable. Its people were in the worst of poverty and it seemed at the time that the Japanese would bring modernity to this land. Today, I was told that Korean engineers had perfected a model for a perpetual motion machine - a device that our greatest physicists and alchemists failed to do in our centuries of enlightenment. How did these Koreans, with whom we barely shared our own technological secrets, manage to do all this?

I am told that at least Korean progress was the byproduct of the Great Regent and his daughter, the Empress of Korea. Their foresight led to the defeat of the Japanese and the rise of Korean civilization from centuries of factionalism, decay, and complacence. I have so many questions to ask when I meet with them next week…

19 March 1938 - Hanseong

After a brief trip to Namsan (South Mountain) fortress and visiting the eastern port of Incheon, I returned to Hanseong to marvel at the intensity of life that I had seen throughout the country. Its people well fed and well-stocked with European conveniences as if something to be taken for granted, I remain shocked at the difference between the desolate hills of Manchuria and the overabundance of life in Korea, just across the border. No where in Hanseong can one escape the views of flowers in bloom, even as they produce ripe seeds and fruit. The smell of blossoms and the seemingly eternal bloom must be of some strange magic. I pluck a flower and three rows in its place. When I set an apple seed into the ground, the next day, an apple sapling starts emerging, so powerful that it breaks the pavement of the streets.

Having gone out to the country, the miasma of Hanseong is suffocating. Despite the thoroughly clean air, as only bicycles and horses are allowed in the streets of the city and diesel powered engines are prohibited five miles from the city limits, there is something that keeps me uneasy and nervous. Something ominous and dangerous and raw and primal… something that human beings were not meant to tamper with - that is the feeling I get in this city. Is it hubris? I do not know, but I have noticed that after my jaunt to the country and outside the capital, there is a ringing in my ear, as if I was in a military radio box or in a Tesla power plant filled to the ceiling with light bulbs and radio static. The intensity of life and the primal energies that seem to flow in this land - they are choking my head, making me dizzy with each breath. Even the pure water that flows from the springs… now taste almost too sweet… too saccharine to be real.

How much of this is real and how much of it is illusion? The Obsidian Diamond is silent.

21 March 1938 - Suwon

The British Royal Geological Survey Society, a group of the so-called Druids of a more intellectual, less superstitious predisposition are attached to the British Consulate in Hanseong as a vestige of Great Britain’s former alliance with the Koreans. Mistress of the Art Catherine Lextia Shelby is the daughter of my old friend and school colleague Simon Franklin Shelby, and she has been explaining how this geomancy mumbo-jumbo works in Korea. While she is only a middling adept in the society, she was personally tutored by Grandmaster Lord Richard Reynolds III while she was still in London, and she wields a disproportionate amount of influence in the Korea chapter, with her fluency in the local language.

She explained that several treatises have emerged in the Hanseong Royal Academy regarding the shifting of these so-called leylines that criss-cross our planet. I am not sure what she really means, but she has mentioned in several occasions that the Japanese had first found out that metal is a powerful inhibitor of these leylines, through which the planet’s raw energy flows. East Asia is peculiar because the leylines operate not in straight lines like most of the world, but in circular feedback loops. She explained that metal inhibitors placed in, say, the Dublin Sea Leyline would largely be ineffective because leylines in straight paths will just rush through the metal as if setting a bridge pylon into the middle of the river.

The leylines in East Asia are different. They’re more like mountain streams that meander and gain in strength to a vast river. In 1901, the Japanese secretly began planting huge metal rods into sacred mountains in Korea to try and divert energy towards Mt. Fuji but the Great Regent discovered this plot and pulled out the huge metal rods that were jammed into some of Korea’s great mountains. In recent memory, the Great Regent has been plunging huge metal rods into various sacred mountains in Japan and Manchuria, ‘damming’ these mountain streams and forcing energy onto the so-called Baekdu-Taebaek leyline which runs through the mountainous ‘backbone’ of the Korean peninsula.

There is a profound effect, if all of this is true, upon the Korean people. The surge of energy being diverted through the leyline is imbuing its people with mystic powers that had not been seen on the peninsula since the rise of the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy in 1392. More importantly, Catherine explained that raw elemental energy is the source of the incredible, miraculous things occurring across the peninsula, including the Never-Ending Bloom in Hanseong and the fires of Pyongyang. Suwon, one of the most auspicious cities on the Korean peninsula, enjoys a phenomenon called the Purity, where the waters that flow through the city allow for the recovery of health and vitality by drinking this water. Guarded by the locals, this phenomenon is considered even more incredible than the Never-Ending Bloom.

22 March, 1938 - Suwon

If Hanseong is the beating heart of Korea, Suwon is the de facto brain of the country. This is where the Great Regent administers his authority, the actual authority on the Korean peninsula. While we wait for the arrival of the Great Regent from his annual visit to Jeju Island, the Minister of Rites graciously showed me the throne room of the Great Regent.

Posted on September 18 2010