A History of Korea (10 page)
Read A History of Korea Online
Authors: Professor Kyung Moon Hwang
Tags: #Education & Reference, #History, #Ancient, #Early Civilization, #Asia, #Korea, #World, #Civilization & Culture
The wall paintings of the Kogury
tombs
The relative dearth of written documentation about Koguryis compensated by the wondrously vivid details of the wall paintings found in more than a hundred tombs around the major Kogurysettlements, in particular the Liaodong area and the capitals of Pyongyang and Kungnaesng, on the banks of the upper Yalu River. These extraordinary paintings visually expound upon what the textual evidence hints at: a vigorous, sophisticated, and advanced civilization.
That these paintings exist at all tells us that Kogurywas a highly stratified society with a powerful and wealthy aristocracy, the highest members of whom, along with the royal families, left this world encased in elaborately decorated tombs. The paintings on the tomb walls usually depict the buried person
himself (or herself), accompanied by attendees drawn to smaller size but equally colorful in their dress. Other scenes testify to a ruling order that was not only glamorous but martial in orientation, with depictions of muscled strongmen that celebrate vigor and strength, battle scenes of elaborately clad warriors, and hunting scenes with immaculately dressed warriors on horseback aiming their bows and arrows at leaping deer and tigers. Great skill in archery and horseback riding, indeed, would constitute signal features of Korean military culture thereafter.
The wall paintings also provide a strong indication of how the Kogurypeople, or at least its ruling class, viewed the greater cosmos, and how sophisticatedly the arts and architecture reflected this cosmology. Wondrous spirits abound, including the “four guardian deities” (
sasin
) of ancient East Asian folklore. There are also depictions of human-like figures in flowing robes representing the gods of the earth, moon, sun, and fire. Buddhist paintings tell us that this imported, systematic, and textual religion was making its presence felt in the religious order, likely melding with native folk practices and boasting an understanding of the movement of the heavens, as represented in the star charts painted onto the walls. Art was not limited just to the service of Kogurycosmology, though, as we see in the depictions of musical and dance performances and other scenes of a sophisticated aristocratic sensibility.
Depictions of the daily lives of the people, however, are equally revealing. We are treated to scenes of an ancient form of “ssir
m,” or Korean wrestling, women going about their weaving activities, and people in the fields and marketplaces dressed in polka-dotted clothing. We also get a strong sense of the economic advancement of Kogurycivilization, for amidst the displays of agricultural and handicraft goods are numerous appearances of wagons. Indeed, there is even a depiction of what appears to be a “wagon goddess” wielding an oversized wheel like a magic wand. Based on the lack of such visual
depictions and the general condition of Korean roads thereafter, which were designed for walking—both by humans and horses—wagons seem to have diminished considerably subsequently in Korea’s socioeconomic order until the twentieth century. Indeed, these extraordinary wall paintings suggest that economic technologies might have been just one of many aspects of Korean civilization for which Koguryhad achieved an early peak.
KOGURY
AND KOREAN HISTORY
Until the twentieth century, the Silla unification enjoyed the stamp of legitimacy in the prevailing Korean historical perspective, for each succeeding dynastic order traced its lineage ultimately to this seventh-century event. In the modern era, however, nationalist history gradually deemed the Silla unification more a betrayal of the nation than a resolution of centuries of peninsular balkanization. Silla’s misstep was said to be twofold. First, it turned to the Chinese for solving an internal Korean issue and thereby set a precedent of dependence that would inflict the entirety of Korean history thereafter—a pervasive cultural dependence that robbed the Koreans of their sense of identity, and a military and political dependence that would reappear repeatedly, indeed well into the twentieth century. Second, the Silla-Tang alliance destroyed what many modern nationalists consider the true representative of Korea’s ancient civilization, Kogury. It was Kogurythat appears to have had the most vibrant and advanced political, military, and cultural order, and, perhaps most importantly, Kogurywas the one ancient kingdom that refused to budge in the face of threats to peninsular autonomy. Kogury’s relentless resistance to the Chinese could not have stood in starker contrast to Silla’s behavior of turning to the Chinese to solve a dispute between Korean polities.
