Ajumma's Journal: French invasion

The French did it. The Germans did it. The Brits did it. In fact, anyone who was in the position to do so, probably has done so in the past. For that matter, museum curators probably would still do it if they could get away with it.

What am I talking about? Robbing a nation of its national treasures. Since I was on the subject of Hwaseong and uigwe a few postings back, I wanted to follow up with the knotty problem of recovering national treasures from the looters. There are many Korean treasures sitting in the vaults of museums or private collectors in Japan, the USA and Europe as a result of invasions, looting, smuggling and illegal purchases.

These figures were quoted in the JoongAng Daily: "According to the Cultural Heritage Administration in Korea, 107,857 pieces of Korean cultural properties were scattered throughout 18 countries as of the end of last year. Of these, more than 61,000 - by far the most - were in Japan, followed by about 27,000 in the United States and almost 4,000 in China. Only about 7,500 of the looted pieces have been returned to date."

An example of the beautiful banchado, illustrations in uigwe

Frustrated with the government's foot-dragging or tip-toeing around the issue, some civic groups from Korea have taken their own initiative to recover some of these artefacts. For instance, a group calling themselves Cultural Action have submitted their own appeal to the French government to return 296 uigwe from the Joseon Dynasty. About 30 of them were specially produced for the royal family and so they are even more valuable as unique texts with no other copies of them.

The library in Ganghwado which the Joseon kings thought could provide adequate protection for the royal uigwe. How wrong they were.

The uigwe intended for the eyes of the Joseon kings were made of superior-quality materials and had illustrations not found in ordinary uigwe. Unfortunately they were stolen from Oegyujanggak, the library built by King Jeongjo when the French military overran Ganghwa-do in 1866.

The French soldiers had burnt most of the library and its contents but were impressed enough by the beauty of these Joseon protocol records meant for the kings to carry them back to France. Then less than 30 years ago, Park Byeong-seo, a Korean working at the French museum stumbled upon them among Chinese artefacts and since then, the Koreans have been crusading to recover these documents.

Join the queue, my friends.

The Greeks have been trying for ages to recover the Elgin Marbles ( did you know that "elginism" is the term given to the act of cultural vandalism?) ; the treasures of various Chinese dynasties are as widely scattered as Chinatowns over the face of the earth and the Egyptians have their own wish list of things they'd like to get back from various museums around the world.

I'm not suggesting that members of the Cultural Action give up their quest but I would humbly submit that their energy could be more constructively spent getting electronic copies of the uigwe in France, translating them into various languages for people around the world to appreciate and learn from the insights gathered from the minds of those who lived in the past. I know there are already digital copies put up on the Internet but I wonder when those who can't read the traditional Chinese script can benefit from this project.