Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  Seon Master Daehang

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  KING MURYONG’S TOMB

  For the first several centuries AD, three Korean dynasties competed for power – Koguryo, Paekche and Shilla. King Muryong, or Muryongwang, ascended the throne of the Paekche Kingdom, which had its capital in Kongju, after his father was assassinated in the year 501. The building of King Muryong’s tomb began twenty years later while he was still alive. Quite the memento mori. Constructed of black bricks with lotus-flower designs, it was given a vaulted chamber with niches for oil lamps, and a low, narrow entrance to be guarded by a stone animal figure. It was built inside the slope of a hill, after the tombs of Liang China.

  The Paekche Kingdom built good relations with Japan, with Paekche architects exporting their temple-building skills to the neighbouring country. Muryongwang ruled the Paekche Kingdom for twenty-three years, and was laid in the tomb three years after his death. His coffin was made from three-hundred-year-old pine trees imported from Japan. His wife died a year later, and she eventually joined her husband, and the entrance to the tomb was closed up with bricks. The Paekche capital, which had been at Kongju for only fifty years, was transferred elsewhere, and Kongju’s brief spell of importance was over.

  The express bus terminal was modern, enormous and splendid, but when I asked the girl behind the ticket counter in my best Korean if there was a bus, bosu, to Kongju, she smiled in embarrassment, giggled, said something to her colleague, and tried her best to ignore me. Because I didn’t go away, she finally did summon assistance, in the form of a young man who spoke English and explained I was in the Honam Terminal, and but should be in the Kyongbu Terminal. Such was the Seoul-style humiliation of the beginning of my first trip into the country.

  The other bus station was attached to this one but accessed via a complex route of escalators and arcades, and the kind young man took me there so I wouldn’t get lost. Other men volunteered help as soon as they saw me with backpack and guidebook, even though they often didn’t know much more than I did. Possibly offering assistance was simply the done thing, even if you didn’t have a clue. Saving face and all that. I finally spotted a ‘Foreigners’ ticket office, where I discovered I’d been mixing up my Kongju with my Keongju, or maybe my Kungju. Those pesky names.

  The bus to Kongju left on time, barely half-full, which was pleasant – the joys of travelling off-peak, the sheer luxury of a long bus journey and the space and quiet to read a book while glancing up at the landscape passing by, the start of an adventure. Eventually we escaped the thick of the city and were on the highway surrounded by open country with forest-covered mountains in the distance, though occasionally the landscape was still scattered with faceless, numbered apartment towers. I slept for a while and woke to another world of farmland, fields and greenhouses. In flat rice paddies, blue sky was reflected in the water between the rows of bright green shoots. A lone figure in baggy clothes and wide-brimmed straw hat stood knee-deep in water. White long-billed egrets or herons picked at the crops. Shallow rivers wound through valleys.

  We stopped for people to stretch, or squat down and smoke and spit, and some of the older passengers stared at me. When we boarded again, a friendly, curious old man in a brightly patterned Hawaiian-style shirt sitting behind me asked where I was going, and did I live in Kongju? No, I told him, and, grateful for the interest, explained as well as I could about staying in Seoul. He thanked me politely, then turned back to his friends and spent the rest of the journey telling an interminable yarn, the most emotional parts punctuated by a throaty khkhh sound that sounded like radio interference.

  We arrived at Kongju, which according to the very informative ticket was 131.8 kilometres from Seoul, at 7 p.m. Declining the services of an insistent taxi driver, I shouldered my backpack and wandered off to get my bearings by finding the river. And there it was, immense and spectacular, with rippling currents, stretching off into the hills. I walked down to the banks, where people were jogging. The sun was setting and there were plentiful midges and dragonflies. The wide expanse of water crashed thunderously over the weir.

  I walked back up to the bridge and sauntered across in the direction of town. Stopping to take photos, I saw an old man with a friendly face and an amputated hand limping slowly in my direction, with the help of a rather spotty younger man. The old man greeted me and asked where I was from, and then said, ‘Beautiful’, which I decided must surely refer to where I was from, and not me, despite the way he seemed to look at me when he said it.

  ‘Why Kongju?’ he asked. I pointed to the view, the sun setting behind a distant mountain, the vast, gleaming, pale river flowing towards it, hoping this illustrated my reasons for being here well enough. ‘Kumgang,’ he noted, the name of the river, and then pointed upriver: ‘Puyo – eighty kilometres.’ I nodded. He then ventured, ‘Puyo – forty kilometres,’ as if I had challenged this outrageous claim of eighty kilometres. Or maybe he was just talking about another place that sounded like Puyo, and I couldn’t hear the difference.

  He asked where I was eating and sleeping. Vaguely suspicious of the expression on his face – sweet old men being not always what they seem to be – I smiled, feigned incomprehension, apologised and said goodbye. The old man continued his arduous walk, but then his young companion with the bad skin came back. I thought perhaps he wanted to explain something about the old man.

  ‘God is love,’ he said. ‘Jesus Christ? God is love.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ he added, smiled and walked on.

  The sun had sunk below the hills, and in the fading light I watched a lone silhouetted figure bent over the mudflats, maybe fishing.

  Walking into town, I realised that, unlike in Seoul, here I presented a figure of amusing novelty. My mere presence in Kongju elicited a few surprised smiles, which I liked. The street signs for some reason were in the Roman alphabet, so it was easy enough to find my way about. Women zipped around town on mopeds. The air was noticeably fresher here. When I opened the door of a pleasant-looking yogwan, a couple were sitting on the floor eating dinner. They agreed to let me have a comfortable, spotless room with private bath and western bed for 20,000 won. I deposited my bag in the room then rushed out again.

  My first trip alone felt good. I’d already met people. Not much of a city gal, I wanted to get outdoors, start stretching my limbs and feeling the sun on my skin. I also needed to learn something. My brain had started turning to mush in sometimes soul-less Seoul. Just to show he was happy for me to travel on my own, Gav had treated me to a fantastic lunch at the Hyatt of seafood salad and tiramisu before I set of. What a man. I managed to find a telephone attached to a ‘Coffee and Can’ vending machine on the main street and send him my love before he headed to work.

  After wandering around the small town centre I found a place to sit and write my first impressions of beyond the city limits of Seoul. The ‘ye olde’ lanterns outside the restaurant and the traditional wooden booths inside belied what was actually a merrily buzzing young people’s bar, where they served ice-cold hof with a sizzling sweetcorn snack and squeezy-bottle mayonnaise. I spent an hour there and then walked some more, but by ten o’clock Kongju seemed to be closing down for the night. The only people around were shopkeepers cleaning up or wearily eating supper, and I heard frogs croaking down by the canal. There were a few upstairs lounges, but they looked unpromising, and I made my way towards the yogwan and my book, not really unhappy that I wasn’t, for once, staying up until two or three in the morning.

  Then, across the road I noticed a neon sign – ‘Lee Ga Salon’ – with a few people milling beneath it. Since I wasn’t yet the slightest bit tired I looked inside the doorway that led down stairs, assuming it was a bar where I might meet some locals. On closer inspection it looked more like a health club. All I could see was a smart counter and doors off down a corridor. I was turning back to cross the street when a plumpish young man smoking a cigarette invited me to come back inside and see the �
��house’. What was I doing...? There was only one way to find out.

  Nervously I followed him to the bottom of the stairs, where someone came out from behind the reception desk and guided us down a bare hallway. He opened a numbered door – yikes! – onto a small dark room, where couches curved around a table laden with food and bottles. Annyung haseyo! A young couple and a young woman, probably my new friend’s girlfriend, greeted me and one of them poured me a shot of brandy as I sat down. Glancing around, I noticed a large television on the wall by the door: on the screen, oiled-up girls wrestled in leather bikinis. Eek, what? But then I saw the microphones and the song book. I was in nothing more sinister than a ‘singing room’ or norae bang, a private Korean karaoke room.

  These were hugely popular, I knew, but I’d never seen one. I have never been able to hold a note, as my poor music teachers would attest, and although it doesn’t stop me singing to myself when walking down the street, karaoke has never appealed. Besides, the couples in this room were very young, and though they were clearly impressed their friend had found a foreigner outside, I was spoiling their fun. They were on their best behaviour for me. We stumbled through some belaboured small talk in English and Korean until I finished the brandy, thanked them and left. My host gave me his business card – he worked in a photo studio – and said he would drive me around Kongju tomorrow if I called.

  I’d done much better meeting people here than on a typical night in Seoul, even if it had been a bit surprising. When I got back to the yogwan, the owners were sleeping on the floor, she with her head on a soft pillow, he with a hard rectangular block, and I had to wake them to get my key. Aromatic coils burned in the hallways to keep the little flies at bay. I was pleased to go to sleep early for a change. There was much I wanted to see the next day.

  In 1971, more than fourteen centuries after the death of Paekche King Muryong, while drainage work was carried out on a burial hill just outside Kongju, someone discovered King Muryong’s tomb. Unlike the other mausolems on the hill, which had been mostly looted during invasions, this one was untouched and absolutely intact. Inside were two lacquered wooden coffins with bronze handles and almost three thousand burial objects, many of them pieces of jewellery. A tablet in the entrance to the tomb gave the details of the king and queen who inhabited it and the exact date when King Muryong ‘bought’ this plot from the God of Land. From this one discovery, experts had been able to date all excavated objects surviving from the Paekche Dynasty. It was this tomb that had drawn me to Kongju.

  I made my way up to the archaeological park with some difficulty. It was very hot and humid, as usual, and the flying bugs were annoying. I’d already spent the morning wandering around the town’s old fortress, and it was a fair walk out of town to the park’s entrance, so I was bright red in the face by the time I arrived. The young woman at the information desk was extremely welcoming, however, and asked me to come back and see her on my way out as she wanted some help with her ‘English composition’.

  On a green hillside, I found the replica of King Muryong’s tomb, vivid and spooky. Photographs showed the archaeological find as it was when they first entered the tomb. The objects found inside the vault included the king’s heavy gold and jade earrings and hairpins, and gold diadems with each arm like a blossoming branch; ornamental shoes; a bronze mirror with a swallow-tail; bowls and coins, spoons and chopsticks; a glass figurine and beads; and a wooden head-rest with phoenix ornamentation and wooden foot-rests decorated with trees. And there was the stone tablet, with the epitaph ‘The Great General of Pacifying the East’ inscribed in Chinese characters, because this was before the days of the Korean alphabet.

  I walked farther up the hill to find the doorways to the actual tombs, but all of course were closed and roped off. Some had cables leading in, and I remembered reading that they had to keep the temperature and humidity regulated to stop further decay, which is why they had created a replica for visitors. Apparently the paintings of tomb number 6 – of a blue dragon, a white tiger, a black turtle and snake, and a red phoenix – were being discoloured by exposure to the air. Captivated by the story and the atmosphere of the place, so deeply tied to the early history of Korea, I was tantalised by what hid behind those unguarded doors. But there was nothing to be done, so I walked up the hill to see more of the park and enjoy the trees and peaceful grassy slopes.

  When, half an hour later, I followed the path back down to the mounds, some of the doors were open, and a man with a truck was working on the cables. I had no idea which was the entrance to King Muryong’s tomb, but I hovered, wondering if I could possibly sneak a look around the man as he worked. Eventually he motioned me over to the entranceway into the hillside. Had he read my mind? He gestured to me to follow him carefully.

  We crept along a damp stone tunnel into the hill itself, knelt down in the dust to crawl through a tiny entranceway, and – holding my breath – I stood up inside King Muryong’s tomb. In the light from the workman’s torch I could make out the bluish-black brick walls all around me, the same ones that had kept King Muryong and his wife and belongings safe from marauding Japanese and Chinese and other plunderers for so many centuries. There were the niches for lamps but other than that, it was empty. Why the man had chosen to invite me inside, I didn’t know – but with this small gesture I felt my relationship with Korea had changed. An act of kindness, an intimate brush with Korea’s ancient history. It was an almost spiritual moment.

  As I wandered down the hill in a kind of daze, three cleaning ladies in colourful baggy clothes, with brightly coloured sun visors strapped around their foreheads, stopped their work and shouted, ‘Annyung haseyo!’ A tiny woman came up and gave me to understand I had a nice face. ‘Kamsamnida,’ I said and smiled. She asked how old I was and seemed surprised by my answer of sam-ship, or thirty, presumably because I was dressed like a scruffy teenager in shorts and a black vest and trainers, not at all lady-like. She told me she was fifty-nine. I hadn’t yet figured out why it was important to exchange ages, so I wasn’t really sure what to say. She asked was I honja, alone? Yes, honja. We all smiled at one another and waved goodbye.

  I returned to the information desk at the entrance. The young woman who’d asked me to come back now sat me down and fetched coffee, telling me in English some interesting information about the site and the treasures. Apparently the niches in the walls had held six white porcelain bowls, now in the museum, which were older than even the first examples of Chinese white glazed porcelain. Then she brought out some papers – she was making up a sign for visitors, and wanted some help with the English. She was very sweet and we laughed as we tried to figure out what it was exactly she wanted to say. And so it was I helped her figure out how best to write that, to protect the ancient site, the original tomb of King Muryong was permanently closed to visitors. While the new replica was being built, visitors were invited to watch the video in the information centre. I casually, guiltily brushed some dust off my knees.

  After, still elated, I walked back into town to the market that backed onto the canal. Washing hung out to dry from wooden and corrugated-iron shacks leaning over the water, dilapidated but seedily picturesque, so unlike the modern look of Seoul. The market itself was a wonderful maze, with whole stalls of different noodles and ginseng, fish packed in boxes with coils burning sweet smoke to keep the flies of, hot twisted doughnuts fresh from the pan. The alleys were covered with tarpaulins and finely woven nets to keep out sun and rain. A frail old woman was smoking a cigarette through a bamboo pipe. Noticing pretty, aproned women carrying trays filled with bowls of soup and stews on their heads, I remembered I hadn’t eaten. From a tiny eatery a well-dressed woman in her fifties holding a fan beckoned me to join her.

  Conversation was more or less limited to place names, places she’d visited that I knew: San Fran-cis-co! Nia-ga-ra! But she ordered food for me and showed me how to eat it. We got large bowls filled with steamed rice and barley, mixed with chopped cucumber and hot red sauce. From
an assortment of bowls we added steamed greens, beansprouts, chopped carrot, and mild kimchi made with something like spinach. We mixed in a soupy sauce and ate it with a spoon, accompanied by cold tea. Delicious. On my way back out of the market, I couldn’t resist buying some freshly made twisted doughnuts for later.

  Grinning schoolkids leaned out of bus windows to shout hello in English as I emerged at last onto the street. There had been a few Seoul-style blank stares and sniffs in Kongju, but this had been a wonderful adventure. And I still had another couple of days before I was due back in Seoul for the weekend.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  THE PATH TO BUDDHA

  Buddhism, founded by Prince Siddhartha Gautama in what is now Nepal around five centuries BC, first made its way to Korea from China in the fourth century AD. Encouraged by the Koguryo Kingdom, one of those early Three Kingdoms, it had a profound impact. A distinctive Korean Buddhism developed, and then was passed on to Japan. In 533 the king of Paekche (Muryong’s successor) sent a statue of Buddha to Japan and recommended Buddhism as the basis for a happy life, and Paekche architects built temples in Japan.

  The teachings of the enlightened one stress self-knowledge, self-discipline and loving kindness as the way to perfect peace. Buddhism thrived in Korea, deeply affecting thought and culture. It was the state religion throughout the next dynasty, Koryo – the dynasty that gave us our name for Korea, meaning ‘high mountains and sparkling waters’, and which lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth century, the equivalent of Europe’s Middle Ages. Buddhist monks held high positions as advisors to the monarch.

  But after the Koryo Dynasty was overthrown, the new Choson Dynasty, based in Seoul, gradually began a regime of reform. Although in its early days there were fervent Buddhists such as King Sejong, Confucian doctrine became the moral foundation of the Choson Dynasty. In an effort to rid the country of Buddhist influence, Confucians drove monks and their temples into the hills, barring religious leaders from interfering in state affairs. Buddhism survived in isolated mountain places, however, endured, and today is thriving again.