Information AboutGwanggaeto Stele |
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image=| hangul=광개토대왕비 ''also'' 호태왕비| hanja=廣開土大王碑 ''also'' 好太王碑| rr=Gwanggaeto Daewangbi ''also'' Hotae Wangbi| mr=Kwanggaet'o Taewangbi ''also'' Hot'ae Wangbi|}} The Stele of King Gwanggaeto of Goguryeo was erected in 414 by King Jangsu as a memorial to his deceased father. It is one of the major primary sources extant for the history of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms Of Korea , and supplies invaluable historical detail on his reign as well as insights into Goguryeo mythology. It stands near the tomb of Gwanggaeto in what is today the city of Ji'an along the Yalu River in northeast China , which was the capital of Goguryeo at that time. It is carved out of a single mass of Granite , stands nearly 7 meters tall and has a girth of almost 4 meters. The stele has also become a focal point of varying national rivalries in Northeast Asia manifested in the interpretations of the stele's inscription and the place of the kingdom of Goguryeo in modern historical narratives. An exact replica of the Gwanggaeto Stele stands on the grounds of Seoul's National War Museum, a testament to the stele's centrality in the History Of Korea . Rediscovery The stele's location, in Ji'an in the northeastern Chinese province of Jilin , was key to its long neglect. Following the fall of Goguryeo in 668, and to a lesser extant the fall of its successor state Balhae in 926 , the region drifted outside the sway of both Chinese and Korean geopolitics. Afterwards the region came under the control of numerous Manchuria n states, notably the Jurchen and from the 16th century the Manchu . When the Manchu conquered China in 1644 and established their hegemony, they jealously guarded their ancestral homeland in Manchuria, prohibiting movement there by any non-Manchu peoples. This seclusion came to an end at the end of the 19th century, when the region was opened up for Han Chinese emigration. Manchuria thereafter became the coveted prize of vying regional powers, notably Russia and Japan for its rich natural resources and strategic location. The opening up of Manchuria also resulted in the influx of Chinese and Japanese scholars, the latter often supplemented by Japanese spies traveling incognito to espy the region's fortifications and natural layout, prescient of a future of increased international rivalry. In the late 1800s many new arrivals to the region around Ji'an began making use of the many bricks and baked tiles that could be found in the region to build new dwellings. The curious inscriptions on some of these tiles soon reached the ears of Chinese scholars and Epigraphers . Many were found to bear an inscription in ancient Chinese script reading: "May the mausoleum of the Great King be secure like a mountain and firm like a peak." It was around 1875 that an amateur Chinese epigrapher Guan Yueshan, scrounging for more samples of such tiles around Ji'an, discovered the mammoth stone stele of Gwanggaeto obscured under centuries of mud and overgrowth. The clearing away of the stele's face invariably led to the damaging of its engraved text. Almost every inch of the stele's four sides were found be covered with Chinese characters (nearly 1800 in total), each about the size of a grown man's hand. The discovery soon attracted scholars from Japan, Russia, and France. In 1883 a young Japanese officer named Sakō Kageaki traveling in the guise of an itinerant Buddhist monk arrived in Ji'an. Sakō had been ordered from his last post in Beijing to proceed back to Japan via Manchuria and to make detailed observations there of the region's layout. It was while traveling through Liaoning that he apparently heard of the stele's recent discovery and managed to procure an ink rubbing of the stele's face to carry back to his homeland. It was scholars in Japan who were to make the first detailed analysis of the stele's ancient text. However, the authenticity of the rubbed copy by Sako was questioned by a South Korean scholar claiming that Sako intentionaly damaged the stele to match the text with an old Japanese history book which says that Japan had its presence in the Korean peninsula in the 4th century, rather than Korea did so in Japan, which many Koreans believe. This story of damaged stele is widely believed in Korea. As the study continued, there found several rubbed copies made by Chinese people before Sako. Now most Japanese and Chinese scholars reject the damaged stele story based on the study of the stele itself and other previously-made rubbed copies by Chinese people. Debate over an ancient message It soon became clear that the stele was dedicated to king Gwanggaeto of Goguryeo, who reigned 391-413 CE. It also became clear the stele was raised as a grand memorial epitaph to the celebrated monarch, whose empty tomb indeed lay nearby. Though historians and epigraphers still grapple with the interpretation of portions of the text, the inscription's general layout is clear. One face provides a retelling of the foundation legend of Goguryeo. Another provides terms for the maintenance of Gwanggaeto's tomb in perpetuity. It is the rest of the inscription, which provides a synopsis of Gwanggaeto's reign and his numerous martial accomplishments that is rife with the most controversy. Japanese scholars soon became most intrigued over a passage describing the king's military campaigns for the ''sinmyo'' 辛卯 year of 391 (''sinmyo'' being a year designator in the Sexagenary Cycle that characterizes the traditional Sino-oriented East Asian calendar). This most controversial portion of the stele's narrative has come to be known simply as the "sin-myo passage". Japanese scholars were excited by their first translation of the above text, reading in it a confirmation of heretofore unsubstantiated and quasi-legendary claims of a 4th century Japanese presence on the Korean peninsula as first presented in the 8th century Japanese history Nihongi . The sinmyo passage as far as it is definitively legible reads thus (with highly defaced or unreadable characters designated by an X): :而 倭 以 辛 卯 年 來 渡 X 破 百 殘 X X X 羅 以 爲 臣 民 Most Japanese scholars, and most Chinese scholars too, interpreted the passage (brackets designating a "reading into" the text where the character is not legible): :"And in the sinmyo year the Wa (Japanese) came and crossed sea and defeated Baekje , and [Sil la and made them subjects." However, many Korean scholars reject this interpretation of Japan's conquering Baekje and Silla. It is difficult to tell when sentences begin or end because of the absence of punctuation and the neccesity of reading into the text via context. {Link without Title} . However, another interpretation of the passage is that Goguryeo, not Japan, crossed the sea and defeated Baekje or Goguryeo crossed the sea and defeated the Wa. Scholars point out several facts that put in doubt the traditional Japanese interpretation of the sin-myo passage. Firstly, the term Wae at the time the stele was made did not soley refer to people from Japan but could also refer to the people from southern Korean, particularly from the polity became a centralized state. {Link without Title} . Finally, there has been no archaeological evidence uncovered in Korea, such as boats or weapons, of a massive Japanese army. As national pride works in the debate, it is currently almost impossible to have a same historical view in this topic among the Korean and Japanese. And this disagreement affected the project of writing a common history textbook among Korea, Japan and China. Sources
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