New Goguryeo museum to offer few authentic artifacts

By Kim Tong-hyung

The government has decided to spend taxpayers’ money on a museum dedicated to the old kingdom of Goguryeo (B.C. 37-A.D. 668). Now it has to figure out what to fill it with.

The museum will be built near Mt. Acha in Gwangjin, Seoul, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced earlier this week, much to the protest of the Gyeonggi Province city of Guri which had bid passionately for it.

Authorities admit that the museum, scheduled to open in 2020, is aimed as a statement against China. The two countries in the past two decades have been debating furiously over the historical dominion of the kingdom that was at the heart of ancient Manchuria.

While China alleges Goguryeo to have been one of its vassal states, the Korean government has stuck to its position that the modern country descended from the kingdom, with the current name derived from it.

China boasts a large collection of historical artifacts from Goguryeo. Korea wants to counter this with a big, cool museum.

But no matter how beautiful the building would look nestled on the slopes of Mt. Acha, it will end up being the equivalent of an Easter egg — pretty on the outside, hollow on the inside.

Korea has yet to see its first significant archeological discovery related to Goguryeo. Mt. Acha’s case for being the the venue was that it is the only place in the country that could be argued as a Goguryeo site. More than 1,500 relics claimed to be of Goguryeo heritage were unearthed around Mt. Acha Fortress in a surprise discovery in 1994.

However, the items lack historical or artistic value to provide a foundation for a museum. And even the Cultural Properties Commission admits that the origin of the Mt. Acha Fortress remains unclear, although school children have learned it was built by the kingdom of Baekje to fend off a Goguryeo invasion.

Perhaps, what’s most telling about the project is that officials picked an art history professor to lead the feasibility study for the museum rather than a scholar well-versed in old texts and artifacts. According to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s (KAIST) website, Kim Jeong-hwa received her degree from the University of Paris IV Sorbonne on “Modern Plastic Art Theory.”

In some ways, Kim was the right pick: It will take immense artistic imagination to fill the halls of the new museum because there won’t be enough artifacts to do so. Even Kim admits to the lack of content.

“The number of Goguryeo artifacts we have is limited but actually larger than people would think. Even if we don’t have enough content, we could exploit the trend of virtual museums and fill the void with technology and interactive images,” Kim said. But just don’t expect special exhibitions.

Korean authorities and historians in past years have maintained a united front against Beijing’s “hegemonic attempts” to declare Goguryeo a Chinese state, a much-publicized campaign that basically opened a bureaucratic career for historian-turned-Culture Minister Choi Kwang-shik.

Some critics point out that the Goguryeo controversy between Korea and China is a doomed result of forced “presentism.”

The concept of nations and nation states are products of the modern age, when feudal hierarchy was replaced with the structures of political solidarity and ideological propaganda. To forcefully present pre-medieval history as part of the shaping of a nation state could be a meaningless attempt to begin with.

For example, the ancient conflict between Athens and Greece can’t be described as a civil war because it happened before modern Greece existed. It has been tremendously hard to persuade this simple logic to the Koreans and Chinese over the sensitive subject that is Goguryeo.

“Goguryeo’s history belongs to Goguryeo itself, not to China or Korea. History can’t be stolen in the first place. Claiming exclusive sovereignty over historical heritage based on the territory of the current is absurd, but you can’t attack that argument when we have our own exclusive sense of national history,” said Ha Won-su, a Chinese history professor from Sungkyunkwan University.