KSCPP: Fifty Wonders of Korea

Given that the source of this book is The Korean Spirit and Culture Promotion Project, I suppose I should not be surprised that it is entirely lacking in objectivity. The title itself should serve as a caveat emptor. The the volume is so effusive in its praise that it almost feels like it came out of the DPRK, not the ROK. In spite of this, I found the descriptions of certain Korean achievements not only interesting, but breathtaking. I shall no doubt have more to say as I see them in person, but suffice it to say that the slightly less than glorious wonders from my previous post are not on the list in this book. Rather, such things as the Korean alphabet (a wonder indeed, and one of my reasons in choosing Korea as a destination), and the invention of movable metal type--200 years before Gutenberg--deserve the praise, overboard though it goes.

For, while the Korean are good at nearly everything, they are only the best at one thing: recording information. Even the flagship of the Korean economy, Samsung, is only the best at creating memory chips. Their laptops, including and expecially the one on which I am now writing, are brokeass pieces of horseshit. But I digress. The Korean tradition of record-keeping goes back for millennia, at least as far as the Silla dynasty, but it is three elements from the Choson period (1392-1910) that propel them into the lead. The first, and in my mind most impressive item, is the Sillok, the Royal Annals of the Choson dynasty. Get a load of this: the official historian followed the King around everywhere, and recorded his every word, his every move. For five hundred years. Not only were these records meticulous--a total of 1,893 volumes--but they were completely forthright. The king wasn't even allowed to look at the records; nobody but the historians ever even saw them during the dynasty. They were there purely for the sake of posterity. Think how marvelous such a tool would be in any modern government. Every move that the President or Premier or whatever made recorded, every conversation transcribed. How much better than any ethics committee or judicial review. A veritable panacaea. My admiration for this achievement surpasses my admiration for all the architecture in the world put together.

In conjunction with this work are the Diaries of the Royal Secretariat and the Uigwe. The former is a more public, and more comprehensive version of the Sillok. It was kept by the King's staff, so it was not truly objective, but it covered far more than just the King's activities: weather, the goings-on of other officials, etc. The latter, the Uigwe, was a record of all the ceremonies and ceremonial buildings of the Dynasty, from the number of flute players to the stitching on the ceremonial garb. Every brick was documented, which made the reconstruction of certain iconic buildings destroyed during the various Japanese invasions a simple matter. Taken together, these three chronicles constitute by far the most comprehensive, objective, and congruous historical catalog anywhere in the world. Think of the questions surrounding American history, even as recent as fifty years ago. By way of contrast, there is enough information to keep Korean scholars busy for generations upon generations. It would be mathematically impossible to even read a significant portion of this body of work in a lifetime, let alone give it any sort of scholarly treatment.

If I rave a bit about these achievements, it is only because they play to my personal taste for language and information. While art and music are lovely, no single work or body of work has ever blown my mind the way the existence of these works have, and I haven't even seen them yet. It is a pity for the Japanese that the Korean memory is so powerful, for there are plenty of things which they would rather were forgotten . . .