Following the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Commerce between Korea and the United Kingdom in 1883, British travellers began to visit a country that was hitherto unknown in Europe. Marketed as a ‘hermit kingdom’ unchanged for 1,000 years, Britons were invited to imagine a country industrialising rapidly under the guidance of Japan, which had gone through the same process twenty years earlier. Such beliefs were reflected in books on Korea published in the years leading up to Japan’s annexation and colonisation of the peninsula in 1910.

This account of Korea, and an expedition to Baekdu, a mountain on the border with China considered sacred by Koreans, was published in 1894. The book contains Alfred A. E. Cavendish’s account of his visit to Seoul and his travels to the north and east of the country while on leave from Hong Kong. Ill health prevented Cavendish, a Captain in the 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, from making an ascent of Baekdu, but he included an account of it by his travel companion Captain H. E. Goold-Adams illustrated with photographs from the journey. In his introduction to the work, Cavendish noted that their photographs, excluding those of the mountain, were ‘total failures’ owing to the ‘defective state of the films’ and that he had included additional sketches of everyday life ‘executed for me by a Korean gentleman’. This copy was presented by Cavendish to Queen Victoria in February 1894.