The Province

Busan blends history and modernity

City ground zero for events that saw Korea split from China

- JIM SLOTEK

BUSAN, South Korea — “Call me Jeannie,” our tour guide says, “like in the bottle.”

Jeannie, it turns out, is not like the other guides I’ve had on shore excursions during this Princess Cruise around the Japanese islands.

The Japanese politely put history, both recent and ancient, in the most judicious terms (U.S. Admiral Perry’s gunboat demands in 1853 that the Japanese open their ports to foreigners was mentioned in every city I visited, but words like “he convinced us to open our ports,” were invariably used).

South Korean Jeannie, on the other hand, called it as she saw it.

We had barely disembarke­d from the Diamond Princess and were on the road to Busan’s bustling downtown Seomyeon district, before she started in on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

“He is only in his 30s and he walks like a bear!” she says, oddly cheerfully and excitedly. “I think he has diabetes and high blood pressure, and he will be dead soon.”

Of Kim’s then-upcoming meetings with Trump administra­tion officials, she said, “I think I will spend that day hiding in my room.”

(We also got a pretty good recap of the 2017 impeachmen­t of South Korean president Park Geun-hye, a move Jeannie approved of.)

The irony of being reminded of the split personalit­y of the “Two Koreas” is that Busan, besides being one of the most energized, youth-centric cities I’ve seen in Asia, is also near ground zero for the events that created a sort-of-unified Korea in the late seventh century.

Nearly 80 kilometres from Busan, amid mountains and forests, is Gyeongju, a UNESCO World Heritage site where one finds Tumuli Park, home to 20 royal tombs that date back to Korea’s important Silla Dynasty.

In simple terms, the Silla Dynasty was the lineage that managed, for the first time in recorded history, to unite the Korean Peninsula.

Like pretty much everywhere in Asia at some time or another, Korea was effectivel­y another arm/protectora­te/ occupied territory of China. (Korea even continued to use Chinese script until the creation of its own phonetic alphabet, Hangul, in the 15th century. This is the Korean writing we see today.)

The Silla, the eventual liberators of Korea, began as allies of the Chinese Tang Dynasty, defeating the other two kingdoms of the Korean Peninsula, Paekche and Koguryo, with Chinese help.

Then — in a twist straight out of Machiavell­i’s The Prince — the Silla convinced the armies they’d just conquered to join them and expel their erstwhile allies, the Tang. A decade-long war against the Chinese began in 668 that resulted in a Korean victory.

Considerin­g what it commemorat­es, Tumuli Park is a peaceful place, with a Buddhist temple, terrifical­ly restored and recreated buildings, with the tombs buried under brilliantl­y green hills. (Almost a third of South Korea identifies as Christian with about 17 per cent declaring themselves Buddhist — although as Jeannie points out, a lot of South Koreans consider themselves both).

You get a more martial sense of the place at the nearby National Museum, a collection of artifacts, images that include armour and weaponry, royal gold crowns, ancient stone runes and the iconic Divine Bell of King Seongdeok, a bronze behemoth that stands more than three metres high and weighs more than 20,000 kilos. It was completed nearly a century after the Silla-Tang war.

Back to the city, and you move ahead in time to 21st-century traffic and no sense of a country technicall­y still at war with its northern half.

 ?? — JIM SLOTEK ?? The iconic Divine Bell of King Seongdeok is at the National Museum in Gyeongju.
— JIM SLOTEK The iconic Divine Bell of King Seongdeok is at the National Museum in Gyeongju.

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