露茶女

Rojanyeo, n. "Russian tea girl."

I confess that this entry was entirely inspired by "Gangnam Style."

There is a certain class of teahouse, in present-day Korea, that can be counted among the most exclusive, inaccessible places on the planet. The Chapel of the Tablet, the inside of the Ka'aba, and some parts of Mt. Athos are joined by cafes in P'yongyang, Wonsan and Chemulpo. Some of them are by invitation only, and the only unexpected guests allowed are of royal descent. Those are the less exclusive ones.

None of them are Korean teahouses. To be that kind of exclusive is, by definition, to be a Russian (or at least Russian-style) teahouse, the ones that epitomize P'yongyang modernity. You rent samovars? The samovars are lacquered and gilded, each one a masterpiece of Russo-Korean fusion artwork. Some of the teahouses let you rent specific ones; the most popular can be booked months in advance.

In the eyes of this tiny peninsular nation-state, nobody will ever step through those doors except for the only people in the world who will ever matter. Those teahouses are where you go to see the petty people being seen.

Korea and Cyrillization woes

I've mentioned, at various points, that Korea (whatever it's called) manages to pull a Meiji, modernizing in just under 40 years. I've also mentioned that Korea doesn't Westernize so much as it Russifies, consciously patterning itself off the Russian state under Evgeny IV.

Most of the early detailed maps of Korea are printed in Russia, with all the names written in Cyrillic. This is somewhat problematic because, early on, there are a few conflicting standards about how to Cyrillicize the Korean language, which includes a lot of sounds that Cyrillic represents poorly. Such as /w/, which in the end is rendered by the Cyrillic letter В в /v/.

Most of these maps are Latinized when they're passed off to neighboring states: Poland, Prussia, and Sweden mostly. Sweden continues to render в as "v"; Prussian and Polish both instead transliterate it with "w" /v/. And because it doesn't much matter to them (the Baltic states don't have a big stake in Korea), that mispronunciation continues to get passed along. As a result of this unfortunate transliteration, most of the world pronounces Wonju as "Von-ju."

Pretty quickly, this becomes part of Korean caricatures of foreigners: hypercorrecting all /w/ as /v/, sounding like a Nazi in a pulp action movie...

The Russo-Japanese War

Timeframe: 1904-1905.
Theater: Both sides of the Strait of Tartary.
Belligerents: The Russian Empire (under Evgeny the Old) vs. the Greater Japanese Empire.
Outcome: No official resolution; de facto Japanese victory due to the collapse of the Russian government.

In 1904, Russia and Japan get into a war with each other, and historians declare it "the Russo-Japanese War." After that point, the details start getting very different fast.