As noted earlier on this website, the Ford Model T was not only the first mass produced car but also the first world car, assembled on all continents and used in practically every country on the planet. An unusual example of the worldwide distribution and use of the Model T appeared when the author conducted research in a somewhat obscure archive for a book on a subject unrelated to automobiles: a road trip during the 1920s that started in Pyongyang, then in Japanese-occupied Korea, now capital of North Korea.
Unknown to most Americans today, Pyongyang during the first several decades of the 20th Century had the nickname “The Jerusalem of the East.” It was home to a community of American Christian missionaries who had made it the most heavily Christian city on the mainland of Asia, with a large Korean Christian community and church-sponsored universities, hospitals, seminaries, high schools, and elementary schools. The American community replicated some aspects of their lives in the U.S. in Korea, including American-style houses and a few imported American automobiles.
In this instance, the driver was a Dr. J.J. Moore, and the car was church property donated by a church in Colorado Springs. The road trip went from Pyongyang to Haeju, a port city approximately 100 kilometers south of Pyongyang. In this photo, Dr. Moore drives the church’s Model T down smooth, traffic-free city streets past a building owned by Standard Oil – later Esso (S.O.), and known today as Exxon.
Leaving the city, an entirely different environment confronted Dr. Moore. City streets gave way to country dirt roads and finally to rutted mud vaguely resembling a road. The off-road capability of the Model T received high praise then and now, but here the mud has defeated even the Model T, and help from nearby farmers is needed. Note the two digit number plate, an indication of how rare automobiles were back then.
If you were lucky, when you encountered a river, it had a ferryboat to ride when crossing it. A pier or ramp would be helpful, but sometimes a jetty of nearly submerged rocks was all that you had to work with. Reversing along a wood board onto a pile of rocks while making a sharp turn with people and draft animals only a few feet behind you is a challenge in car control that exists in few places in the world today.
At other times, a ferryboat was an unavailable luxury and a combination of ingenuity and muscle power was necessary. For this river crossing, Dr. Moore (or more likely the people manning the ford, not the driver of the Ford) built a hydroplane of wood planks in front of the front axle, to buoy the front end in order to keep the engine dry and running.
Apparently this method worked, at least with more than half a dozen helpers available to stand in the water and push. Help or no help, it is a testament to the adverse conditions that a Model T could survive and overcome.
Nine decades later, nothing remains the same in the places covered by this road trip. The American community in Pyongyang disappeared by the end of 1941, most departing ahead of the looming war and the rest being interned after the attack on Pearl Harbor and repatriated to the U.S., never to return. The North Korean regime that took over after 1945 created a country whose people mostly live in abject poverty, while the state maintains a huge military and builds nuclear weapons. The Christians of North Korea fled to the South or have lived underground under persecution unseen since two millennia ago in the Roman Empire.
This Model T probably lasted for many more years, possibly in Japanese hands during the Second World War and maybe even under North Korean state ownership. It must have been scrapped and melted down decades ago, but some of its parts may live on somewhere. Perhaps its engine powers an irrigation pump on a farm, or its windshield serves as a house window, each of these products of River Rouge continuing to improve people’s lives in some way in a very dark place.
All photographs courtesy of the United Methodist Archives Center. The author is currently working on a book on “The Jerusalem of the East.”
Interesting photos.
I have to disagree that the T was the first mass produced car. Olds was mass producing the Curved Dash model in the thousands before the Model T existed. Olds also used a crude version of assembly line technique before Ford ever thought to use it.
I didn’t know about “the Jerusalem of the East”. I’ll have to read up on that. Please let us know when your book comes out.
To clarify the Model Ts significant place in history (from Wikipedia), “The Model T was the first automobile mass-produced on moving assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts, marketed to the middle class.”
Missionary work must’ve been full of risks. But this Model T seems to have gathered lots of help along the way.
Wiki is wrong this time. Or, more accurately, in conflict.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile_Curved_Dash
The copy matches perfectly, for both entries, but for the last part…
If you read the quote I included above, it finishes with this last line…
“… with completely interchangeable parts, marketed to the middle class.”
Henry created the middle class with the five dollar day. Cadillac blew everyone away with the concept of interchangeable parts. Xerox invented the mouse and drop down menus, but Jobs made them a success. Innovation vs successful commercialisation.
Great photos and history. I’m a big history buff, and it’s always interesting to see countries around the turn of the century before they were ravaged by war and dictator regimes.
Fascinating account, and great pictures. Best of luck on your book project.
Thank you Robert for this tour through a time in history that most of can’t imagine. No roads, bridges, turnpikes or even a rest area to stop in. And no gas stations, what did they do haul there own gas, or make do with the local farmers distilled alcohol? I just love these old car trip journals, especially with photos like you have here.
Take a trip thru outback Aussie when it rains Nth korea then pales in comparism for” road” conditions but at least now mudgrip tyres exist and 4WD.
An excellent piece on an obscure but fascinating topic. Your book sounds quite interesting, best wishes on its completion.
Roads why would you need roads for a Model T nobody else had paved roads and Ts worked fine here on horse & wagon tracks,
Very interesting story, especially for someone who spent almost a decade in South Korea….
You have spent 9.5 more years there than I have. May I ask what brought you there, and in which time period you lived there? Given the pace of change in South Korea, you must have seen a lot of differences in the course of 10 years!
I went to Korea the fist time for a visa run while I was working Japan. The contrast when I got off the Beetle hydrofoil ferry (very cool btw) in Pusan was amazing: quiet and orderly Japan and frenetic, wild Korea. I was instantly in love with the place. I walked up the street and found a place to eat. I didn’t know a thing about Korea and its food and I got kimchi chigae. It was so spicy I cried and I love it even today.
The next year I was in Seoul to but a cheap ticket back to Canada for Christmas. A man chased me down on the street, bought me and excellent bulgogi dinner, offered me a job and supplied a paid-up round trip ticket. This was 1994 and with the exchange rates at the time, I was making really good money.
After two years, I got a job in a famous university in Deagu, where I stayed until the end of my Korea tenure. It as an excellent job, good pay, low hours (16 a week) and five months’ vacation every year. Loads of classes were cancelled due to events, festivals, etc, and since Korean uni students don’t do homework, I never gave any. Really, it was the world’s easiest job.
Korea really changed between 1994 and 2004. Really, all the gritty old stuff built after the Korean war was all knocked down and replaced with glittering glass and steel. I was there briefly in March of 2013, and it’s really up-market now. This is sad in a way because the raw gritiness of traditional Korea is what attracted me to the place to begin with. I get grit these days when I visit China with my wife!
Oh and never go drinking with a group of Korea men. Sure, you’ll have a great time as it’s a no-holds-barred man’s world in Korea.
Interesting that the T is RHD, I would have imagined that it would have been LHD?
I was asking myself the same question. My educated guess is that the car was produced in RHD at Ford’s assembly operation in Japan. The donor church sending money to its overseas missionaries to purchase a car locally would have been much easier than shipping a car overseas from North America. Also, trade restrictions were much greater then, and Korea was colonized and used as a captive market by Japan, so importing a major item like an automobile most likely would have been difficult.
So it is quite likely that in these photos you were seeing a car of US-made River Rouge parts shipped overseas in a CKD kit, assembled by Japanese workers at.a Ford overseas subsidiary, then purchased and used by Americans in Korea.
There was the tradition of cars for the ‘well-to-do’ being RHD before things were standardised.
Having been part of Imperial Japan until 1945, Korea followed Japan’s rule of driving on the left during this time. So RHD would have been normal, just as it was in Japan.
I also look forward to your book. For those wanting a contemporary account of North Korea, I recommend “Escape from Camp 13.”
I second that recommendation, and suggest also trying to catch the co-author/subject of “Escape from Camp 13,” Shin Dong-Hyuk, at a speaking event if possible in a city near you. I saw him last year and had a chance to talk to him briefly, and he was even more impressive in person.
“Aquariums of Pyongyang” by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulet is another outstanding first-hand account of North Korea.
Apparently the orientation of traffic in Ontario changed from “keep to the left” to “keep to the right” at some point early in the 20th century. Is this true for other provinces and states?
Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right in 1967, in one day. Here is a description of the transition: http://www.volvoclub.org.uk/history/driving_on_right.shtml
Korea also switched from driving on the left to driving on the right, but in 1945. Until then, Korea was part of Imperial Japan and followed Japan’s rule of driving on the left. The US Army (which accounted for the vast majority of the vehicles in Korea in 1945!) made driving on the right the rule when it arrived in Korea in September 1945, and it has been that way ever since.
The Wikipedia article below claims that Quebec and Ontario have always driven on the right, but some other Canadian provinces drove on the left until switching over to the right in the 1920s. Newfoundland, which did not join Canada until 1949 (before that it was a separately administered British possesion), drove on the left until 1947.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic
Korea changes so quickly it’s crazy. The pace of change in non-Japan Asia is sometimes dizzying. You can literally watch a skyscraper get built in about two years; 24 hour, 7 day a week construction.
Go to China. The rate of development is even more astounding than Korea and I speak of both from direct experience.
“Standard Oil – later Esso (S.O.), and known today as Exxon.”
Strictly speaking, Standard was broken up into several “baby Standards” — similar to what happened to AT&T in the 1980s — of which Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey) was just one.