TRADITIONAL CULTURE IN KOREA
Koreans have produced memorable works in all forms: music, art, literature. Traditional classic music is similar to that of Japan and China, with an emphasis on strings. Music from Korea’s shamanist traditions relies more on drumming and rhythm. Traditional painting has strong Chinese and calligraphic influences. Korean celadon — a kind of greenish colored ceramics — is world famous. The most well known sculpture and architecture is linked Buddhism. Culture now — as it was in the past two of three centuries — is centered primarily in Seoul. Pyongyang in North Korea has a history and artistic traditions that go back further than Seoul but both cities were razed in the Korean War (1950-53) and not much old stuff remains there except in museums.
Donald N. Clark wrote in “Culture and Customs of Korea”: “Korea's artistic tradition reaches back before recorded history to the people who inhabited northeast Asia... These people were part of a mosaic of tribal civilizations that settled in the area, and the things they made have been found in many parts of northeastern China, Siberia, and even Japan. The desire to decorate things and express an aesthetic appreciation even in prehistoric times can be seen in the simple designs cut into the clay of pottery items that lay buried for thousands of years until being discovered by archaeologists in modern times. The people who are descended from those early artisans today enjoy a vibrant artistic life. [Source: “Culture and Customs of Korea” by Donald N. Clark, Greenwood Press, 2000]
Koreans have practiced the arts, especially painting, sculpture, various handicrafts, and music, since prehistoric times. The walls of tombs of the Koguryo Kingdom (37 B.C- A.D. 668) display multicolor paintings of birds, animals, and human figures that influenced art found in similar tombs in Japan. There are many unique Korean arts, including folk paintings (min'hwa ); Koryo and Yi dynasty celadons are well known. Because of their fame, many Korean potters were taken back to Japan during the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s. The influence of the Western arts, especially drama, motion pictures, music, and dances, has been pronounced. |
Since the establishment of the Han Chinese colonies in the northern Korean Peninsula 2,000 years ago, Koreans have been under the cultural influence of China. According to the “Encyclopedia of World Cultures”: “Over the centuries, Chinese art as well as Buddhism and Confucianism have influenced Korean arts: bronze images of Buddha, stone carvings, stone pagodas, and temples are influenced by Buddhism; poetry, calligraphy, and landscape paintings are influenced by Confucianism. [Source: Choong Soon Kim, “Encyclopedia of World Cultures Volume 5: East / Southeast Asia:” edited by Paul Hockings, 1993]
Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy Helsinki wrote: “In the Korean performing arts, as well as in culture in general, one can clearly recognise distinctive layers. It is now generally agreed that the oldest layer is formed by shamanism, which is believed to have originally been connected to the so-called Northern Shamanistic Belt, extending from the Korean peninsula to Central Asia, Siberia and further to Northern Scandinavia. The shamanistic tradition, which has now practically disappeared from most of the above-mentioned regions, is still very strong in Korea, although it has from time to time been overlooked. During the process of re-evaluating the Korean identity during the Japanese occupation in the mid-20th century the importance of shamanism was, however, again acknowledged. [Source: Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen, Asian Traditional Theater and Dance website, Theatre Academy Helsinki]
“Shamanism has been mainly the belief system and cultural expression of the ordinary people, while Chinese culture, with its Confucian rites and institutions, has been dominant at the court level. Korea has thus been able to preserve forms of court music and dance that are clearly related to old Chinese court traditions. In China these traditions had effectively been wiped out on during the early Communist regime. The modern, partly Westernised layer of culture in Korea entered Korea, during the Japanese occupation, through Japan, where many of the Korean intellectuals and artists studied. Later influences, understandably, arrived in South Korea directly from the United States and other Western countries, while North Korea was influenced by Communist China and the Soviet Union.
Korean Cultural Expression
An important part of the Korean identity has been the Korean language, which linguists generally agree belongs to the Altaic language family of Inner Asia. There is no doubt that the indigenous language was deeply affected by the country's long contact with China. Not only did its written form rely on Chinese characters until the fifteenth century, but about half of its vocabulary was of Chinese origin. Nevertheless, the language is very different from Chinese in its lexicon, phonology, and grammar. Although at one time the ruling classes were set apart from the rest of the population by their knowledge of Chinese characters and their ability to use Chinese in its written form, since the unification of the peninsula by the Silla Dynasty all Koreans have shared the same spoken language. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw, Library of Congress, 1990 *]
Koreans, like the other East Asian peoples, have a highly developed aesthetic sense and over the centuries have created a great number of paintings, sculptures, and handicrafts of extraordinary beauty. The development of a Korean alphabet (today known as han'gul), in the fifteenth century gave rise to a vernacular, or popular, literature.
Despite the fact that Korea would undergo numerous reforms, palace coups, and two dynastic changes after the Silla period, many of the political and social systems and practices instituted during the Silla Dynasty persisted until the nineteenth century. Their Chinese inspiration, of course, had much to do with the durability of these systems. One lasting principle was that of centralized rule. From the time of the Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla states of the Three Kingdoms period, royal houses always governed their domains directly, without granting autonomous powers to local administrators. The effectiveness of the central government varied from dynasty to dynasty and from period to period, but the principle of centralization — involving a system of provinces, districts, towns, and villages — was never modified.
Korean Shamanism, The Origins of Indigenous Culture?
Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen of the Theatre Academy Helsinki wrote: “Korean shamanism covers magic-religious rituals, both communal and private ones. In these rituals the focus is on both the shaman’s (mudang) individual experience as well as on the shaman’s hereditary abilities to contact the spirit world, inhabited by various shamanistic gods. With its history of some five thousand years, shamanism is the oldest belief system in Korea. The Koreans agree that their shamanistic tradition stems from Central Asia and is connected with the above-mentioned Northern Shamanistic Belt, connecting Korea with Central Asia, Siberia and northern Scandinavia. [Source: Dr. Jukka O. Miettinen, Asian Traditional Theater and Dance website, Theatre Academy Helsinki]
Although during certain periods shamanism has been regarded as a form of “low” folk culture, it has never completely disappeared in Korea. After the re-evaluation of Korean cultural identity in the mid-20th century, it was agreed that shamanism formed the earliest stratum of Korean culture. Nowadays shamanistic rituals are still part of everyday life, both in agrarian and more urban surroundings. The construction works of modern skyscrapers, for example, are inaugurated with shamanistic rituals, while several of the “classical” music and dance traditions clearly reveal their origins in shamanism. Furthermore, many contemporary artists come from old shaman families.
The main duty of most shaman :is simply to take care of the shamanistic gut rituals. Shaman families have often given their offspring training in music, dance or other forms of art. So even today many important artists come from shaman families. Nowadays most of the shamans are women, while the musicians accompanying them are men.”
The nuclear of Korean shamanism is the gut ceremony. It can be a private, individual ceremony, which, for example, is aimed at curing a disease, ensuring longevity or paving the way to the after-world. This kind of ceremony can also be addressed to a deceased person. A gut ceremony can also be a grandiose, communal happening. A village gut may, for example, aim to ensure a good harvest, or luck for the fishermen, or to cure an epidemic illness. Serious, ritualistic sections are combined with more entertaining dance and music numbers.
The audience also participates in the ceremony. The shaman often addresses her comments directly to the audience, which, every now and then, takes part in the dancing and singing. In principle a Korean shamanistic ritual is divided into 12 sections. Most of the rituals share, more or less, the same structure and functions. However, there are many regional variants of the gut ritual. They are usually named after the village or the region in which they are practised.
One example of the communal ceremonies is the Namhaean Pyolsin-gut, a village gut ceremony from the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula. In its larger version it takes a week to perform, while a shorter version lasts three days. The primus motor of the ceremony is a shaman, taemo or a “big shaman”. She is accompanied by a small orchestra, which includes an oboe, a flute, drums, and a gong. The musicians also usually come from shaman families. The numerous sections of the long ceremony aim, for example, to pacify deities of the road, to inform the village tutelary deities about the ceremony, to welcome the sun, to purify the ritual space, to pray for a good harvest, to ask for good fishing, to request safe waters for the fishermen, to pray for one’s ancestors’ well-being, to pacify the dead, and to pray to Buddhist guardian deities for peace.
Chinese Influence on Korean Culture
That the Korean kingdoms were strongly affected by Chinese civilization and its institutions was not surprising. Not only were the Chinese far more numerous and often more powerful militarily than the Koreans, but they also had a more advanced technology and culture. Chinese supremacy in these realms was acknowledged not only by the Koreans, who were militarily inferior, but by those who were powerful enough to conquer China, such as the Kitan Liao, who ruled parts of northern China, Manchuria, and Mongolia between 907 and 1127; the Mongols who ruled China from 1279 to 1368; the Jurchen tribes, who later seized northern Manchuria; and the Manchus, who ruled China between 1644 and 1911. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw, Library of Congress, 1990 *]
The adoption of Chinese culture was more than simply an expression of submission to China, it also was the indispensable condition of being civilized in the East Asian context. This situation continued until the inroads of Western civilization substantially altered the political and cultural map of Asia in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The adoption of Chinese culture and institutions by the Korean kingdoms, however, did not obliterate the identity of the Korean people. Koguryo had risen against the Chinese conquerors, and Silla had stubbornly resisted Chinese attempts to turn it into a colony. While Silla and subsequent dynasties were obliged to pay tribute to the various Chinese, Mongol, and Jurchen dynasties, and although Korea was subjected to direct overlordship by the Mongols for a century, the Korean kingdoms were able to survive as independent entities, enabling their citizens to maintain an identity as a separate people.
Paekche Culture
Paekche (18 B.C. – A.D. 660) is regarded by most scholars as the most refined of the Three Kingdoms in the Three Kingdoms period ((57 B.C. – A.D. 668). Aileen Kawagoe wrote: Of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, Paekche was known for its culture of possessing the greatest artistic refinement and sophistication. Jar-coffins were still used in some areas in the south, some concentrated in square or keyhole-shaped mounds usually thought to be unique to Kofun Japan. There were horizontal chamber tombs as well as stepped pyramid chamber tombs, some where gold earrings and gold crown ornaments with the same sort of giltwork found in Japanese burial mounds have been found. [Source: Aileen Kawagoe, Heritage of Japan website, heritageofjapan.wordpress.com |||]
According some historians and linguists, Paekche was predominantly Japonic-speaking until it was conquered by proto-Koreans from further north. There are many Japonic topographical names in Paekche areas. Paekche artists adopted many Chinese influences and synthesized them into a unique artistic tradition. Buddhist themes are extremely strong in Paekche artwork. The beatific Paekche smile is found on many Buddhist sculptures. Taoist influences are also widespread.
The tomb of King Muryeong (501–523) is modeled after a Chinese brick tombs and contains many funerary objects of the Paekche tradition, such as the gold crown ornaments, gold belts, and gold earrings. Delicate lotus designs of the roof-tiles, intricate brick patterns, curves of the pottery style, and flowing and elegant epitaph writing characterize Paekche culture. A splendid gilt-bronze incense burner excavated from an ancient Buddhist temple site at Neungsan-ri, Buyeo County, exemplifies Paekche art.
Silla Culture
King Kyong-ae, the last Silla king, used to host drinking parties around a miniature watercourse made of stones arranged in the shape of an abalone shell. Cups of wine were floated to guests who had to compose poems before the cups reach them. If they failed to make a composition they were required to drink all the wine in their cups. The king enjoyed playing this game so much that he failed to raise an army in August 927 to head off attack by Koryo forces who eventually brought an end to both his reign and the Silla dynasty.
Although at one time the ruling classes were set apart from the rest of the population by their knowledge of Chinese characters and their ability to use Chinese in its written form, since the unification of the peninsula by the Silla Dynasty all Koreans have shared the same spoken language. Koreans, like the other East Asian peoples, have a highly developed aesthetic sense and over the centuries have created a great number of paintings, sculptures, and handicrafts of extraordinary beauty. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw, Library of Congress, 1990]
Despite the fact that Korea would undergo numerous reforms, palace coups, and two dynastic changes after the Silla period, many of the political and social systems and practices instituted during the Silla Dynasty persisted until the nineteenth century. Their Chinese inspiration, of course, had much to do with the durability of these systems. One lasting principle was that of centralized rule. From the time of the Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla states of the Three Kingdoms period, royal houses always governed their domains directly, without granting autonomous powers to local administrators. The effectiveness of the central government varied from dynasty to dynasty and from period to period, but the principle of centralization — involving a system of provinces, districts, towns, and villages — was never modified.
Korean scholars were writing poetry in the traditional manner of Classical Chinese at least by the 4th century ce. A national academy was established shortly after the founding of the Unified Silla dynasty (668–935), and, from the time of the institution of civil service examinations in the mid-10th century until their abolition in 1894, every educated Korean read the Confucian Classics and Chinese histories and literature. The Korean upper classes were therefore bilingual in a special sense: they spoke Korean but wrote in Chinese.
By the 7th century a system, called idu, had been devised that allowed Koreans to make rough transliterations of Chinese texts. Eventually, certain Chinese characters were used for their phonetic value to represent Korean particles of speech and inflectional endings. A more extended system of transcription, called hyangch’al, followed shortly thereafter, in which entire sentences in Korean could be written in Chinese. In another system, kugyol, abridged versions of Chinese characters were used to denote grammatical elements and were inserted into texts during transcription. Extant literary works indicate, however, that before the 20th century much of Korean literature was written in Chinese rather than in Korean, even after the invention of Hangul.
Chosun Culture
Donald N. Clark wrote in “Culture and Customs of Korea”: The long and peaceful reigns of kings Yongjo (r. 1724—76) and Chongjo (r. 1776-1800) were a time of artistic and literary creativity. The Chinese-style landscape and portrait paintings that were prized by the yangban were supplemented by a new, commoner-style "genre" painting showing ordinary people engaged in daily life. These genre paintings today are some of the most descriptive documents about Korea in the 1700s. The era also brought advances in literature written in han 'gul script.” [Source: “Culture and Customs of Korea” by Donald N. Clark, Greenwood Press, 2000]
During much of the Chosun period the hangul alphabet was little used. “Korean writers, most of them yangban, had actually scorned the alphabet as too easy and too limiting, and they had continued to write in the much more difficult Chinese characters that were so hard for ordinary people to learn. It took many years and a great deal of money to learn to write Chinese well. Few people who were not yangban-class men could afford this kind of education.
“Accordingly, the few who could write Chinese were able to use literacy and their writing ability as a social barrier, protecting their privileged position while denying basic communications skills to the less fortunate. In the eighteenth century, however, the educated women who belonged to the royal family, along with other cultured women of the yangban class, began to write their own literature, not in Chinese but in the Korean han 'gul alphabet. Their works were diaries, memoirs, and stories about palace life, written in the Korean language and far more expressive of the emotions and conflicts that were so authentically part of daily life. Certain commoners also learned han'gul well enough to write stories and novels. These works survive as commentaries on the conditions and injustices of life in the yangbandominated Chosun kingdom, and by the nineteenth century, ban gul had become a tool for non-yangban to communicate and even organize rebellions against their rulers.
“Within the yangban class, too, there were spontaneous impulses to reform. The Chinese founder of neo-Confucianism, Chu Hsi (1130-1200), had taught that truth could be found through a better understanding of reality— "the investigation of things," as he called it. Certain Korean yangban were dissatisfied with the stuffy customs of their own class and they sought new ways of thinking about reality. They organized a school of thought all their own, called Silhak ("practical learning"), which became interested in Western scientific ideas that were being studied by the Chinese in Peking.
Sirhak (Practical Learning) Movement
The Confucian literati were particularly reinvigorated by an intellectual movement advocating that philosophy be geared to solving real problems of the society. Known as the Sirhak (Practical Learning) Movement, it spawned people like Yu Hyngwn (1622-73), from a small farming village, who poured over the classics seeking reform solutions to social problems. He developed a thorough, detailed critique of nearly all the institutional aspects of Chosun politics and society, and a set of concrete reforms to invigorate it. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada, Library of Congress, 1993]
Chng Yag-yong (1762-1836) was thought to be the greatest of the Sirhak scholars, producing several books that offered his views on administration, justice, and the structure of politics. Still others like Yi Su-kwang (1563-1628) traveled to China and returned with the new Western learning then spreading in Beijing, while Yi Ik (1681-1763) wrote a treatise entitled Record of Concern for the Underprivileged.
A new vernacular fiction also developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of it taking the form of social criticism. The best known is The Tale of Ch'unhyang, which argues for the common human qualities of lowborn, commoners, and yangban alike. Often rendered as a play, it has been a favorite in both North Korea and South Korea. An older poetic form called sijo, which consists of short stanzas, became another vehicle for free expression of distaste for the castelike inequities of Korean society. Meanwhile, Pak Chi-wn journeyed to Beijing in 1780 and authored Jehol Diary, which compared Korean social conditions unfavorably with his observations of China.
Ideas brought to China by Jesuit missionaries on things like astronomy, mathematics, natural sciences, philosophy and the Christian religion made their way to Korea. Clark wrote: “The "practical learning" scholars advocated realistic answers to the problems facing Korea, suggesting applications of Western science and technology. They also went far toward adopting the Jesuits' understanding of the spiritual dimension and even founded their own branch of the Catholic religion in Seoul, which turned out to be the beginnings of Korean Christianity.”
Korean Culture During the Japanese Colonial Period (1910-45)
During the period of Japanese domination (1910-45), the colonial regime attempted to force Koreans to adopt the Japanese language and culture. Neither the long and pervasive Chinese influence nor the more coercive and short-lived Japanese attempts to make Koreans loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, however, succeeded in eradicating their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic distinctiveness. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada, Library of Congress, 1993]
Japan built bureaucracies in Korea, all of them centralized and all of them big by colonial standards. Unlike the relatively small British colonial cadre in India, there were 700,000 Japanese in Korea by the 1940s, and the majority of colonizers worked in government service. For the first time in history, Korea had a national police, responsive to the center and possessing its own communications and transportation facilities. The huge Japanese Oriental Development Company organized and funded industrial and agricultural projects, and came to own more than 20 percent of Korea's arable land; it employed an army of officials who fanned out through the countryside to supervise agricultural production. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada, Library of Congress, 1993]
Seoul got its first electricity, running water and modern hospital in 1908, thanks to the Japanese. It was one of the first cities in Asia to have trolley cars, a water system, telephones, and telegraphs. In 1910, the Japanese made Seoul the capital of colonial Korea and changed its name to Keijo. Much of the old city was razed, partly in attempt to obliterate Korean culture, and all but 10 of the 200 buildings that made up the Chosun Dynasty's Kyongbok Place were destroyed. In 1926, the Japanese built the governor's palace between the Chosun throne and the gate of the city, breaking the city’s feng shui line of power on which the city was founded.
Japanese Attempts to Eradicate Korean Culture
From the late 1930s until 1945, the colonial government pursued a policy of assimilation whose primary goal was to force the Koreans to speak Japanese and to consider themselves Japanese subjects. In 1937 the Japanese governor general ordered that all instruction in Korean schools be in Japanese and that students not be allowed to speak Korean either inside or outside of school. During the war years Korean-language newspapers and magazines were shut down. Belief in the divinity of the Japanese emperor was encouraged, and Shinto shrines were built throughout the country. Had Japanese rule not ended in 1945, the fate of indigenous Korean language, culture, and religious practices would have been extremely uncertain. [Source: Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw, Library of Congress, 1990]
Under Japanese rule, Koreans were not allowed to speak their language, sing traditional songs or wear traditional clothes. Korean temples and shrines were destroyed, Korean history was banned from schools and Koreans were forced to worship at Japanese Shinto shrines and revere the Japanese emperor. During the Japanese occupation few children finished grade school. Instead they were forced to do things like take part in fly-killing competitions with the students who killed the most flies winning a prize.
In school, Korean children were forced to take Japanese names and study the Japanese language and they were severely punished whenever they uttered a word of Korean. Recalling those days Korean President Kim Dae Jung said, we "were forced to bow ritually to the picture of the Japanese emperor each day. If we were caught so much as muttering Korean, we were punished, sometimes severely."
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons.
Text Sources: South Korean government websites, Korea Tourism Organization, Cultural Heritage Administration, Republic of Korea, UNESCO, Wikipedia, Library of Congress, CIA World Factbook, World Bank, Lonely Planet guides, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, “Culture and Customs of Korea” by Donald N. Clark, Chunghee Sarah Soh in “Countries and Their Cultures”, “Columbia Encyclopedia”, Korea Times, Korea Herald, The Hankyoreh, JoongAng Daily, Radio Free Asia, Bloomberg, Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, AFP, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Yomiuri Shimbun and various books and other publications.
Updated in July 2021