A History of Korea by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang Read Free Book Online

to him by Chang’s surrogates in the Shandong Silla society that the monk wrote the great man a letter of gratitude. To Ennin, Chang was clearly the mastermind and dominant figure behind this intricately and efficiently designed network of merchants, monks, and others who plied back and forth from the Korean peninsula to the eastern coast of China.
    From this base of operations Chang’s agents in turn connected to a vast trading network that stretched all the way to eastern Africa and the Arabian peninsula, merchants from which, it appears, also visited Silla. The items that flowed through these passages in northeast Asia originally reflected the official commerce in tribute goods such as ginseng and silk, but by the time Chang achieved his dominant position based in Ch’nghae Fortress, trade items also included animal products such as horns, falcons, and sealskins, and particularly ceramic goods. In fact, Chang appears to have facilitated significantly the process of not only circulating Chinese ceramics, among the best in the world, but also of applying Chinese ceramics technologies to further develop a native Korean ceramics industry on the southern coast of the peninsula. The prime locations connected with Korean ceramics, including Kangjin and Namhae Island, are usually associated with the subsequent Koryera, but this development might have begun in Chang’s time. Excavations of both ceramic factories and shipwrecks from the era have added to this impression that Korea’s maritime power once served as a stimulus for economic activity in the country. Such a connection between Korea’s seafaring potential and internal development has reached another peak over thepast thirty years in South Korea, with its export-oriented industrial growth and the preeminent position of Korean companies in the global shipbuilding industry.
    Indeed Chang Pogo’s commanding influence over trade in northeast Asia tells us much about Silla’s relationship to the region as a whole, and it stimulates further thinking about the standing of Silla in the longer trajectory of Korean history. In one sense, Chang Pogo’s activities suggest that this period represented a peak in Korea’s capacity to take advantage of its geography at the center of northeast Asia instead of being victimized by these circumstances, as it did repeatedly both before and after Chang. Furthermore, Chang’s story shows that, in this particular era of Korean history at least, trade and commerce could indeed play a dominant role in the country’s economy, enough to allow one particular merchant to use his wealth and power to play political mediator and, indeed, even kingmaker. Both tendencies—Korea’s commercial prominence in northeast Asia and the force of economic activity in the realms of politics, society, and culture—are being pursued by Korean leaders in the early twenty-first century. Since the 1990s a steady stream of Chang-related developments has rekindled interest in, and furthered the mythologizing of, Chang Pogo: the establishment of tourist-oriented memorials and museums in Shandong, site of the temple complex that Chang established; and pop culture products in Korea such as the “God of the Seas” hit television series. These developments, however, also have the potential of contributing further to expansive visions of Korean identity and standing in the context of globalization and regional integration. Chang serves, then, as an embodiment of the dreams of Korean prominence in the region through regional integration. If it could be done before, so the thinking goes, it can be done again, with Koreans in the lead.
    The reconsideration of Korea’s regional position via a creative appropriation of Chang Pogo and his era also accompanies, ironically, a recent downgrading of Unified Silla in Korea’s historical trajectory. A growing perspective in both popular and academic arenas has come to view “Unified Silla” as somewhat of a misnomer, given