The remains consist of an approach to the main platform on which the palace stood, by two subsidiary platforms, the first reached by a nearly obliterated set of steps. Four staircases 15 feet wide, of thirty steps each, lead to a lofty artificial platform, faced with hewn stone in great blocks, 14 feet high, and by rough measurement 846 feet in length. On the east side there are massive abutments. On the west the platform broadens irregularly. At the entrance, 80 feet wide, at the top of the steps, there are the bases of columns suggestive of a very stately approach. The palace platform is intersected by massive stone foundations of halls and rooms, some of large area. It is backed by a pine-clothed knoll, and is prettily situated in an amphitheatre of hills. Song-do as a royal city, and as one of the so-called for- tresses for the protection of the capital, still retains many an- cient privileges. It is a bustling business town, and a great centre of the grain trade. It has various mercantile guilds with their places of business, small shops built round com- pounds with entrance gates. It makes wooden shoes, coarse pottery and fine matting, and imports paper, which it manu- factures with sesamum oil into the oil paper for which Korea is famous, and which is made into cloaks, umbrellas, tobacco- pouches, and sheets for walls and floors. In answer to many inquiries, I learned that trade had improved considerably since the war, but the native traders now have to compete with fourteen Japanese shops, and to suffer the presence of forty Japanese residents. I have left until the last the commodity for which Song-do is famous, and which is the chief source of its prosperity — ginseng. Panax Gifisettg or qiiinquefolia (?) is, as its name imports, a "panacea." No one can be in the Far East for many days without hearing of this root and its virtues. No drug in the British Pharmacopoeia rivals with us the estimation in which this is held by the Chinese. It is a tonic, a febri- fuge, a stomachic, the very elixir of life, taken spasmodically or regularly in Chinese wine by most Chinese who can afford it. It is one of the most valuable articles which Korea ex- ports, and one great source of its revenue. In the steamer in which I left Chemulpo there was a consignment of it worth ^140,000. But valuable as the cultivated root is, it is nothing to the value of the wild, which grows in Northern Korea, a single specimen of which has been sold for ;!^4o ! It is chiefly found in the Kang-ge Mountains ; but it is rare, and the search so often ends in failure, that the common people credit it with magical properties, and believe that only men of pure lives can find it.