The Marmot’s Hole

Got an Xmas present in my e-mail today: someone was kind enough to point out David Scofield’s latest piece in the Asia Times on the Mural Wars. This issue ties in closely with my post on Koguryo below. Anyway, here’s a sample from the Scofield piece:

SEOUL - The nuclear dispute isn’t the only defining issue involving China, North Korea and South Korea. Culture wars, too, are being waged diplomatically as well as passionately over little-known but breathtakingly lovely tomb murals in Northeast Asia and what these paintings say about more than a thousand years of human development, art and religion.

Except for historians of 6th-century East Asian culture, few people know of the controversial Goguryeo tomb murals tucked away in China’s remote northeast, but North Korea also claims the art and tombs depicting life, death and an afterlife. And, problematically for both Beijing and Pyongyang, they are found on both sides of the China-North Korea border, with implications for the history of the Manchurian region.

South Korea, with the financial resources and academic and political muscle to argue its Korean Peninsula patrimony, has been muted in arguing the case of the Goguryeo murals, its close economic ties with China being a primary reason for its reticence. North Korea, too, diminished in resources but desperately depending on China, has been all but unheard on the issue. China, meanwhile, has mounted a powerful campaign, the Northeast Asian Project, launched in February 2002.

Chinese officials are fond of likening their relationships with North Korea and Vietnam as being as close as “lips and teeth”. Here, the teeth are in evidence, although North and South Korea are offered a rare opportunity to act in concert to assert their historical claims and shared national ancestry.

And when the case for declaring an international cultural site is brought before the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), China is expected to prevail - largely because its rivals have been quiescent about the 1,500-year-old cultural relics.

It’s a great article, and I encourage you to read it on your own.

PS: Click on wall mural pic to see it full-sized.