I’ve been delving back into Korean history lately, and I was looking up details online on Korean pagodas that were not in my books. Mireuksa, a famous stone pagoda built by the Baekje kingdom in 602 C.E., has a Wikidpedia entry with this unattributed line:
January of 2009, in the pagoda a gold plate was evacuated. The plate reads in the 40th year of King Mu‘s reign, wife of the king built the temple.
I couldn’t find any English language news stories about this. I did find a picture of it mentioned in a Korean newspaper on Flickr.
And something interesting on Korea Focus.
The Korea Focus bit, I think, is a translation of a Kookmin Ilbo editorial talking about the significance of the Mireuksa excavations. Particularly, the excavations reveal that the pagoda was built by King Mu and his queen–who was the daughter of a Baekje minister.
So what?
Well, one of the great legends of Korea’s oldest surviving historical texts, Samguk Yusa 삼국 육사 (History of the Three Kingdoms), was the story of how the young King Mu (before he was a king or a “Mu”) fell in love with a princess of the rival Silla kingdom. This was during the three kingdoms period, where Baekja, Silla and Goguryeo (and for a brief time the small kingdom of Gaya) were in constant warfare.
It was a Romeo and Juliet story of two people in love from rival families. In order to woo her, he composed a love song about her and spread it among the people–you know, kinda making it the catchy pop song of his day. The song spread to the Silla kingdom. Since the princess was the subject of the song, they banished her, where the young pre-King Mu married her.
So, I’m gathering from this little bit is that the story was just a legend concocted by Buddhist monks and recorded in the Samguk Yusa during the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392).
A little surfing brings up this post by An Acorn in the Dog’s Food, who likely was the source for that Flickr photo. He also links to some English language articles about this and goes into more detail. I wonder why I couldn’t find them on Google.
18/03/2009 at 2:55 am Permalink
ZenKimchi, thanks for bringing this to more people’s attention!
You’re right that I am the person who took the photo of that edition of the Chosun Ilbo. Out of curiosity, did you catch my follow-up post about the discovery? My academy director saved the following day’s paper for me as well, as it had a little more about the bongangi (gold plate) and how it mentions Seongdong having more than one wife — thus raising everyone’s hopes that this other, unidentified, woman might be Seonhwa. I didn’t take any photos from the second article, but I still have the hard copy if you’d like me to get that added online. (Surprisingly, my photo of the first newspaper article has 84 views on Flickr!)
A lot of the English-language sites discussing Mireuksa seem to be about trips to the temple site rather than the recent archaeological discovery; now that it’s a couple of months later I can understand why the news articles are a little harder to find. The Mireuksa artifacts made it in the news again last week, with articles appearing in the online edition of Munhwa, the Chosun, and the Hankooki. However, the general feeling I’m getting from each of them is that researchers are still no closer to being able to link Seonhwa to the tale as told in the Samguk Yusa.
For some amazing photos of a few of the artifacts – apart from the links in my original posts – I would recommend this post by 9suk9suk. (If anyone is interested I can also hook you up with an archaeology article, .pdf format, in Korean, about the bronze bells at Mireuksa, too.)
Joe, have you read Korean Shamanism and Cultural Nationalism by Hyun-key Kim Hogarth? She points out that the myth of Dangun can only be traced as far back as the Samguk Yusa and goes on to suggest that the Dangun myth was started by Ilhyon in the 13th century as a means to create a Korean national identity / nationalist spirit in opposition to the colonizing measures undertaken by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty.
Holy crap, does this mean someone actually read(s) my history-themed posts?
18/03/2009 at 7:23 am Permalink
Thanks for all that info! No need to photograph the other newspaper. Some of what I read for that blog post made it confusing–did it prove Seonghwa existed, or did it prove she didn’t.
History was what first attracted me to Korean culture over ten years ago–even before the food. I’ve recently been getting back into reading the stuff I already have. I haven’t read Korean Shamanism yet. My feeling is that a lot of crap was invented during the early Yi dynasty (14th-15th centuries), when the nation was gaining more of a national consciousness.
19/03/2009 at 10:26 pm Permalink
I enjoyed this post too – I’ve just been lazy about posting a comment. Andre Schmidt’s Korea Between Empires 1895-1919 is a good book which looks at the formation of modern national consciousness in newspapers in the early 1900s. One of the topics is Sin Chae-ho’s use of the Dangun myth to create the “source” of – and a family tree for – the minjok, a term then becoming popular. Fascinating stuff.
19/03/2009 at 10:48 pm Permalink
Sounds like another good one to get my hands on.