Remembering Park Chan Wook's JSA on the 60th Anniversary of the Korean War

Park Chan Wook's 2000 movie, Joint Security Area, was the first film I saw,  that drove home the tragedy of a divided country. The video clip here features the last scene of the movie and its significance will be lost on those who haven't seen the film. But the combination of the camera work, and the director's great choice of music for the soundtrack ( a Russian folk melody, named "The Rush Light" or "Those Who Are Forgotten" was used for this scene) create a memorable movie moment.

A few years later,  I was able to visit one of the spots near the DMZ on a group tour. The image of  a barbed wire fence with hand-written messages tied to it remains a poignant memory.  I'm assuming the messages expressed wishes to meet long-parted relatives or the desire for reunification. The possibility of a united Korea seems even more remote these days and I'm indulging in a little despondency and wistfulness by replaying my favourite moments from Park's film.

sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Security_Area_(film)
http://www.koreanfilm.org/kfilm00.html#jsa

Happy Belated Birthday, Admiral Yi

Admiral Yi Sun-sin  would've been amused to see these elementary students mark the 465th anniversary of his birth by making their own versions of his turtle ships which helped to defeat the Japanese navy a few centuries ago. As a young boy, he may have built his own model boats and set them afloat down some stream in his hometown. Is there one among these adolescents who would be inspired to follow in the footsteps of Admiral Yi? Could one of them design in the future an invincible ship to avert the sad loss of lives at sea?

                                            (Yonhap News)
source:
http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/news/news_photo_detail.htm?No=14777

Pillaged National Treasure - A Lost Cause?

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.

 Kim Mun-sik and Shin Byung-joo's book, published in 2005 by Dolbegae, analyzes uigwe.

sources:

http://www.france24.com/en/20100407-cairo-archaeology-meeting-recover-national-treasures-nefertiti-rosetta-stone

http://www.elginism.com/definition/

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2917210

http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=762951
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/01/148_15229.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uigwe
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/archives_of_asian_art/v058/58.yi.html
http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/CU/CU_EN_8_4_5_5.jsp
http://www.museum-security.org/?p=3705
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2898272
http://www.koreabrand.net/en/now/now_view.do?CATE_CD=0028&SEQ=533
http://www.eapubc.net/books/?mode=recommendation&id=96&PHPSESSID=90fe67ad982a835f22c9e0dfdeef2110
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/Korea_Report0708.doc
http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2004/06/hwasong-fortress-in-suwon.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Campaign_against_Korea,_1866
http://www.hwasong.henny-savenije.pe.kr/

Janganmun at Hwaseong, Past and Present

Exterior view of Jangan-mun, the North Gate of Hwaseong

Many thanks to Henny Savenjie for giving me the green light to reproduce the first and second pictures here. They  came from a book  but he wasn't able as yet to find the publication details. To see bigger pictures in more detail, please click here.

Imagine, if you please, King Jeongjo making his grand entrance through Jangan-mun into Hwaseong from Hanyang.

According to one source, the word "jangan" means a capital, illustrating King Jeongjo’s intention to make Hwaseong a major city. But I'm puzzled - my very limited knowledge of Chinese suggests to me another translation -"Chang" meaning Long and  "An" meaning Peace, so could it be read as the Gate of Lasting Peace? Those who are familiar with Hanja, Chinese and Korean, please enlighten me.

I like this photo of Jangan-mun taken in the early 1910s. With its two-storeyed pavilion, Jangan-mun is the biggest of all the main gates in Hwaseong and is even larger than the unfortunate Sungnyemun ( Namdaemun ) in Seoul which was burnt a few years ago.

From another source, "water could be poured through five holes called oseongji on the upper side of ongseong (jar fortress- a semicircular outer gate) in case enemies tried to burn the gate." Remarkably this gate is the original one which survived many conflicts through the ages.

If you have the inclination and patience, you could check out this website with a blueprint and instructions  for constructing your own paper model of Jangan-mun. Good luck to you!

sources:
http://www.hwasong.henny-savenije.pe.kr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2009-01-24_-_Portrait_of_King_Jeongjo_in_Unhangak.JPG
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hwaseong.Fortress-Janganmun.03.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Janganmun_of_Hwaseong_Fortress_in_early_1910s.jpg
http://shfes-eng.suwon.ne.kr/html/sub3_2_225.asp
http://cp.c-ij.com/en/contents/3152/hwaseong/index.html
http://english.visitseoul.net/visit2007en/activities/dattoursuggestions/dattoursuggestions.jsp?cid=38&sid=1911

http://magazine.seoulselection.com/index.php/articles/60-travel/211-hwaseong-fortress
http://www.knto.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=264391&nearBy=tran

Reconstructing Hwaseong With Uigwe

Learnt a new Korean word and got sidetracked. Meant to write more about Hwaseong but when I heard about Uigwe, started to read up on them and learnt a few more interesting things along the way. It was a paragraph written by Professor Han Young-woo which started the ball rolling:

“In 1997, when UNESCO added Suwon’s Hwaseong Fortress to its World Heritage list, it was not only Hwaseong’s architecture that impressed the evaluation committee members. The Hwaseong Fortress, built at the end of the 18th century to fulfil the dream of King Jeongjo (1776 – 1800), is of course a beautiful and valuable cultural asset; however, the 1500-page Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe, a detailed account of the construction process, amazed the evaluators even more. This is because Russia’s St.Petersburg and the US capital of Washington, D.C., also developed at the end of the 18th century, do not have such detailed construction records.”

Uigwe is the term given to written and illustrated records of royal protocols first produced when the Joseon Dynasty was founded in 1392. The work of compiling the records was maintained up to the end of the dynasty in 1910. Professor Han concludes: “….those who have seen uigwe can only seriously reflect upon how greatly we fail to appreciate the Joseon Dynasty’s level of governance and culture of recordkeeping, and just how superficial today’s recordkeeping culture really is. We need to acknowledge that the secret to the Joseon Dynasty’s lengthy existence of 518 years was  undoubtedly related to its incomparable recordkeeping.”

Each time the royal house of Joseon had a marriage banquet, funeral, national ceremony or rites for the military or the envoys, a Dogam (都監), an ad hoc committee would be formed to direct the event. After the major ceremony was over, the Dogam became a Uigwecheong to put together all the relevant information regarding the event so that future Dogams could refer to the manual as a model to ensure continuity of important rites. “These records were written exclusively in Chinese characters, but combined both literary Chinese and the unique Korean writing system called idu, in which Chinese characters were borrowed to record the sound or meaning of Korean words.”

To appreciate the value of the uigwe, consider the example of Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe, the Archives of the Construction of Hwasong Fortress which is now stored in Kyujangha ( the Cultural Library of Seoul National University). It provides details about the process of construction of Hwaseong such as:

• the elevation plans of the fortress
•  explanations of the dimensions of the building
• illustrations of different machines used in the construction
•  materials and costs to build the machines as well as the fortress itself
•  the locations of the tiles and bricks produced and their costs
• a record of the building materials which were left over
•  daily records of wages paid to the construction workers AND
• a list of ALL the artisans involved, from stonemasons to plasterers to roofers including their names, addresses and days they each worked.

No wonder then that these records played a vital part when a reconstruction project of Hwaseong Fortress was undertaken in the last century.

Sources:

http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=762951
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/01/148_15229.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uigwe
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/archives_of_asian_art/v058/58.yi.html
http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/CU/CU_EN_8_4_5_5.jsp
http://www.museum-security.org/?p=3705
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2898272 map of K treasures held by other countries
http://www.koreabrand.net/en/now/now_view.do?CATE_CD=0028&SEQ=533
http://www.eapubc.net/books/?mode=recommendation&id=96&PHPSESSID=90fe67ad982a835f22c9e0dfdeef2110
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/Korea_Report0708.doc
http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2004/06/hwasong-fortress-in-suwon.html
http://www.hwasong.henny-savenije.pe.kr/

Connecting the Dots - Hwaseong, Painter of the Wind and Cheongyecheon

Jeongjo was a child when he begged his grandfather in vain to spare his own father’s life. He was dragged away from the terrible scene when his father, Prince Sado was pressed by King Yeongjo, to enter the infamous rice chest where he died some days later. Palace rumours of Sado plotting parricide had grown too strong for Yeongjo to overlook his spoilt and troubled son’s record of murdering palace slaves and others outside the palace. The king felt compelled to punish or get rid of his own son in this bizarre way as executing him directly would have made the monarch a criminal and compromised his right to rule. One wonders why he didn’t ask the Crown Prince to swallow poison for a swifter and more certain end. Instead, when poor Sado failed to strangle himself before his frustrated parent, the former was locked in the rice box and left to rot and expire in the summer heat.

Hwaseong - a loyal son's tribute to a wretched father

The incident left a deep impression on Jeongjo who grew up resenting the unjust treatment of his father whose mental illness had never been acknowledged by the grandfather. So when he became the 22nd king of the Joseon Dynasty in 1777, he was determined to restore honour to Prince Sado by moving the latter’s tomb to Suwon to a site deemed as the most ideal burial site in terms of geomancy and constructing Hwaseong Fortress there to commemorate and to give Sado the posthumous title of King Jangjo. According to Henny Savenjie, the project was also “an attempt to balance the power between various political partisans and to test the potential of a new center of national spirit, in short, an attempt to build satellite cities scattered along the outskirts of the capital Seoul. Jeongjo died before he could carry out any plan to relocate the capital.

TV drama series loosely based on the lives of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok

against a background of Joseon palace intrigue.

I wasn’t really connecting the dots until most recently when I realised that Jeongjo was the king who appointed Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok to paint a portrait of his late father in the drama series, Painter of the Wind. Granted a lot of licence may have been taken with the real details of history, but the episode in which the artists reconstruct the image of Sado like a literal jigsaw puzzle, was fascinating to watch. Then again, I realised that I had also paused during my walk along Cheonggyecheon (stream) in Seoul to admire a mural near the Samil Building. It turns out the grand procession depicted in the mural was King Jeongjo’s 8-day journey to Suwon to perform rites to honour his father. The real Kim Hong-do may well have been one of the many palace artists who painted the original illustration. When I first saw the mural, I hadn’t any clue who the king was and what the whole procession meant. But now that names like Jeongjo, Sado or Jangjo and Kim Hong-do aren’t merely names, I’d like to go back to Seoul to pay closer attention to the Cheongyecheon mural.

As you stroll along Cheongyecheon, look for the mural reproduction  of King Jeongjo's visit to his father's tomb.

Sources:

http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=762951

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/01/148_15229.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uigwe

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/archives_of_asian_art/v058/58.yi.html

http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/CU/CU_EN_8_4_5_5.jsp

http://www.museum-security.org/?p=3705

http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2898272 map of K treasures held by other countries

http://www.koreabrand.net/en/now/now_view.do?CATE_CD=0028&SEQ=533

http://www.eapubc.net/books/?mode=recommendation&id=96&PHPSESSID=90fe67ad982a835f22c9e0dfdeef2110

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/Korea_Report0708.doc

http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2004/06/hwasong-fortress-in-suwon.html

http://www.hwasong.henny-savenije.pe.kr/

http://www.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=264204

http://www.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/CU/CU_EN_8_5_1_54.jsp

http://asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=897541

What Would Shakespeare Have Made Of Yongjo And Sado?

Bruce Cuming's book devotes more pages to King Yongjo, the monarch with the longest reign in the Joseon Dynasty than to King Sejong. Perhaps he wanted to highlight this particular individual to illustrate the Korean perception of "the ideal Confucian prince" but I suspect he also couldn't resist the high drama of his tragic relationship with his son and heir, Prince Sado who, unfortunately, embodied all the worst of the Korean royal system.

It has all the elements of tragedy - the sharp contrast and conflict  between a serious-minded and stern king who strove to be the best ruler possible at odds with a  spoilt son whose neurosis soon turned into schizophrenia; the son's wastrel ways degenerating into the habits of a serial killer; the mother who failed to make her husband acknowledge the son's mental illness - King Yongjo simply saw Sado as an unfilial son and so the desperate mother even once suggested  that the king sentence the son to death for all his crimes against court physicians, eunuchs, kisaengs and even Buddhist nuns. The poor woman was so burdened with guilt for even contemplating the possibility of encouraging the death of her own flesh and blood that she soon succumbed to illness and died.

As Cumings put it," To execute the son for his crimes would tarnish the royal family, and simply to kill him would be a crime." Apparently Yongjo had told Sajo: " If I die, our three -hundred -year dynastic line would end. If you die, the dynasty can be preserved. It would be better if you died." Sado failed to strangle himself in front of his father and "by early evening the king was tired of pleading: ' Aren't you ever going to kill yourself?' " So the solution seemed to be to persuade/ compel Sado to enter a large rice chest and to leave him there to die under a hot July sun thirteen days later.

These and other intriguing details such as Sado's attempts to delay his daily meetings with his father by changing his clothes continually and his inclination to sleep in a coffin-like box ( a sinister foreshadowing of his grim end), were noted by Sado's wife, who was betrothed to him at the tender age of ten and subsequently recorded by Lady Hong in her "Memoirs of a Korean Queen" ( translated and edited by Choe-wall Yang-hi, London, KPI, 1985).

Apparently this fascinating episode has been made into at least two mini-dramas. One of them is the rather clumsily-titled: Eight Days The Mystery Of Jeongjo's Assassination. Has anyone seen it?

Source:
Korea's Place in the Sun- A Modern History by Bruce Cumings ( W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1997).

Happy Sam-il to Koreans!

Found these pictures - photos and paintings related to the Sam-il Movement, the Declaration of Independence which started on the 1st of March, 1919. Has ROK made any movie on this important page in its history? Would be interesting to see it done from the woman's point of view -whether it would be the wife, mother or daughter of one of the thirty-three nationalists who signed this declaration to oppose the Japanese annexation of Korea or one of the women seen here in the public demonstrations which, tragically led to bloody reprisals by the Japanese.

Would like to do some research into the subject but am strapped for time these days so this short posting will have to serve as a reminder to me to dig deeper into this tumultuous time in the history of Korea.

sources:
http://www.tparents.org/Library/Religion/Cta/Korea-J/jp-hist1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement
http://theseoulite.com/?p=2143
http://blog.cripchick.com/archives/1433