Toilet Museum in South Korea makes great tourist attraction! Zim Matrix660

ILSAN, South Korea (AP) _ Decades ago, a trip to the toilet could be an adventure in South Korea. Clutching candles, people stumbled to outhouses in the gloom. Kids fretted about surly spirits said to dwell in their fetid confines.

Now tall apartment buildings with flush toilets and other modern amenities sprout across South Korea. Pell-mell urbanization has banished the privies of old, which linger in rural areas.

The traditional toilets reflect the poor, agricultural society that Korea once was, and their absence tells how much the southern half of the peninsula has evolved since the 1950-53 Korean War. A new museum relates their lore and symbolism.

The Goyang Exhibition Hall for Sanitation explores the history of toilets, from the stone receptacles of Roman times to the chamber pots of the Middle Ages to Japan's high-tech waste disposal gadgets of today.

Korea was never a pioneer in bathroom innovation, but its primitive models in the museum in Ilsan, just north of Seoul, elicit vivid anecdotes from older tourists.

``When I was young, I could never go to the toilet without my mum, and we always used to take a candle or matches because we couldn't see a thing,'' said Choi Won-hee, 64.

The museum, sponsored by the local government, displays a model of a wooden outhouse as well as a ``ji-gae'' _ a back frame for transporting goods that is shaped like the letter A. A Korean farmer would hoist buckets of waste on a ji-gae and dump them in the fields as fertilizer.

A film clip shows pigs on the resort island of Jeju and tells how farmers used to let them wallow in the muck beneath the outhouse hole and gulp excrement as it dropped.

Hundreds of years ago, during the Chosun dynasty, some people ingested children's urine or excrement to treat fevers and other ailments. The custom persisted well into the last century.

The museum also displays ``yogangs,'' or chamber pots. Centuries ago, their color defined social rank: commoners' pots were dark brown, those of the nobility were pale grayish green.

Some yogangs were designed for women traveling long distances in a sedan chair. Cotton wool and paper in the bowl muffled awkward sounds.

Kim Soo-ah, a 24-year-old student, used a yogang when she visited her grandmother's house as a child. She didn't think anything of it at the time, but now she recoils.

``When I go on school trips to the countryside, it's so scary and uncomfortable to use the old toilets,'' Kim said.

Flush toilets first appeared in Korea during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule, mostly in banks and hotels.

After the Korean War, the flush toilet proliferated partly because of the presence of a large U.S. military force. But it wasn't until 1962 that a flush toilet appeared in an ordinary South Korean home, the museum says.

The museum notes modern toilets do have drawbacks: the increased use of water and added pollution.

The dlrs 700,000 (920 million won) museum, which is below ground beside a park lake, opened in July and admission is free. Some students have visited on school outings, but it appears to have special meaning for the elderly.

A generation ago, the spiritual world held sway. If a child fell through an outhouse hole into the filth beneath, people put out rice cakes to appease traditional gods.

Ill-tempered ghosts were also believed to inhabit toilets, and some people cleared their throats before entering to give the spirits time to take flight.