FOREIGNERS WHO VISITED KOREA at the end of the nineteenth century – Elizabeth Bishop and the French anthropologist Bourdaret, for example – note that the Koreans are bigger and better-looking than their East Asian counterparts. They see the Koreans as multiracial in their origins, with Caucasian and Mongol characteristics. The Italian, Rossetti, said they were a mix of East Asian and South East Asian stock. The British painter, Landor, said it was as if all the different racial types of Asia had settled in the tiny peninsula. Yi Kwangsu, a prominent nationalist and educator, who was eventually tarred with the pro-Japanese brush, wrote in his Chosŏn minjok non (1933) that there was no record that Koreans were traditionally regarded as a homogenous people. Shin Ch’aeho, the noted historian of the first half of the twentieth century, had no problem with Koreans having multiracial origins. Yet every handbook on Korea notes on the first page that Koreans are a homogeneous people. It's that formidable excluding principle again – in Korea all the people are Korean – which keeps coming back to haunt foreigners who have ambitions to make a mark in Korean society. Homogeneity is obviously seen as something rare and precious, an identifying mark that singles Koreans out from the peoples of the world. What this means for mongrel people like the Irish with their mix of native Irish, Celt, Viking, Norman, Scots, English and God only knows what other blood is not quite clear. Identity is a crucial concern for Koreans, perhaps inevitably so against the backdrop of Japanese oppression. While Japan struggled to annihilate any notion of a Korean identity separate from that of imperial Japan, Korea struggled to preserve a clear national identity. That's why the provisional government in Shanghai adopted Taehanmin’guk in 1919 as the official name of the country, rejecting the name of Chosŏn which the Japanese favoured and the North Koreans still use. This clear vision of a distinct national identity led to a preoccupation with Koreanness, and a tendency to mythologize in order to achieve that goal, as evidenced by the claim to racial homogeneity, which takes no account of Arab, Indian, Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese intrusions into Korean bloodlines, not to speak of the gene input of Hamel's red-haired crew