Korea - Its History and Culture

My fellow comparatives:

I am very excited to read this book (one of my sources). It seems like a quick read with three columns per page and somewhat newspaper style. I really think I will enjoy this book because it has so much information about each time period, but relates it all to socio-cultural experience. This helps the information to be less muddy and less difficult to work through. Through some brief descriptive words, I really can picture the Korea of the past.

The book starts out with an introduction that quickly summarizes the book's purpose and information. I love this first paragraph: Korean history is an extraordinary mixture of events and trends. Against the backdrop of a strong cultural uniformity which started to emerge in the 7th century and has continued up to the present day, we find a pattern of rich cultural contrast. Buddhist pagodas stand side by side with Confucian shrines. The delightful delicacy of celadon porcelain and court painting provide a foil to the rough, strong colours, sounds and rhythms of folk painting and music. Sounds lovely! All of the book has this kind of flowery description which will make for a more entertaining and interesting/quick read.

Thank goodness for that!

This first chapter is about the Pre-History of Korea through AD 668. Among the first bits of information I have read through include a basic "caveman" perspective of the first human species on the Korean Peninsula. The use of Shamans -priests- and the belief in all things having a spirit was the first strand of religious beginnings of this area. Then the book describes how the Bronze Age people beat out the Shaman believers and took the country into more of an organized civilization. As like other groups of early people, they started as hunter-gatherers and then got more accustomed to agriculture - which meant staying in one place.

Much of what they learned was from the Chinese culture, adaptations and mixture between these two areas helped Korea to become what it is today. The book describes early political developments as the Korean peninsula became a great area to import and export by ship from. There were four command posts at this time, Lo-lang, Chen-fan, Lin-t'un, and Hsuan-t'u. All of these were Chinese controlled for 400 years. Later after taking back control of these posts, the Koreans formed their own three kingdoms with social ranking systems. From here, there would be many wars to see which kingdom would come out on top!

This book is very detailed (in a general way) and organizes chapters by main themes like Social Structure, Social Order, Administration, Military, Economy, Political Development,  Political Power, Trade. These will help immensely when putting my project together to find the correct information on all of the 5 areas I need to cover. I can't wait to keep reading!!!

Korea; Its History and Culture. Seoul: Korean Overseas Information Service, 1994.

~Jessica