[HanCinema's Korea Diaries] "Gongju" May 20th-21st

Long ago Gongju was the capital of the Baekje Kingdom. Well...kind of. They moved the capital around a lot. Gongju's specific claim to power was its very defendable position- a big mountain and an untraversable river. Gongsan Fortress (공산성) is the main physical landmark left over from that period. It's so huge it spills over into mountain parks. You could go hiking and enter the fortress mostly by accident, assuming you're too much of a cheapskate to pay the entrance fee of a measly dollar

Inside the fortress, scenes like this are common. The Baekje flag is all over the place, and a lot of the facility is under constant construction. Also you run into one of those weird face totem things every so often. I've been seeing these things a lot, actually, but to date I have yet to run into any kind of helpful marker that explains what exactly they are. Maybe they were built for the sole purpose of freaking people out? A sort of scareperson, as opposed to a scarecrow.

...Of course, while the creepy statues do not deserve explanation, evidently it is very important to construct educational monuments to nothing. Here is what the site of the Baejke Building looks like in full context.

It's times like this I wonder who decides which landmarks get to have markers. Maybe I'm being picky but it seems like markers are best utilized when it comes to locations that can actually be physically seen. Perhaps this is just reassurance that on this patch of flat grassy land the people of Baekje recognized that something more obviously useful could be constructed.

As usual I'm being perhaps a little more snarky than the situation calls for. Gongsan Fortress is actually pretty well spectator oriented, and the signs have very good visual design. This is the kind of thing that's easy to notice when you're looking at signs all the time. Note the quality of the wood, the nice little straw hat, and the well-designed infographic describing the archery experience fit for a King.

Actual kings had to shoot from farther away but whatever. Back then archery was actually used to kill people. It wasn't just for fun so it's little surprise that people tended to take the practice a lot more seriously.

And of course, like everywhere else in Korea, there are Buddhist buildings. This one is called Yeongeun Temple (영은사). The reason why there's a temple in the middle of a military fortress is because this is where the warrior monks used to hang out, although now it's just an all-purpose temple for worship and the like, same as any of the others, if relatively smaller and in an unusually easy to access location. Funny. You wouldn't normally think "the middle of a military fortress" would be an accessable location. That's tourism for you.

Lastly, every early Saturday afternoon at the fortress there's a Baekje Instrumental Performance (백제기악). I'm not really sure why they call it that, since the main highlight is not the music, but rather masked performers doing an elaborate dance routine and also this vague vaudeville style plot where they talk directly to the audience in between setpieces and get mad at each other for failing to follow instructions. My favorite character of the bunch was the tiger, mainly because the tiger is two people acting in concert. Being the butt of the tiger- now there's a lousy job, since among other things that poor fellow can't see anything.

All of these elements are a part of the show, and that's something which often intrigues me about traditional performances. We in the modern day like to think of ourselves as being brilliant for creating meta-commentary plots, but it's pretty clear that since time memorial (or at least since Baekje) people always knew the basic building blocks of stories, and stuff like masks were just a way of playing pretend with ambiguities. Of course that is not really a tiger, just as the obvious woman part of the love story is not in fact played by a woman- he's the second guy from the right. Even so, given that the whole exercise is imaginary, what difference does it make?

...I'm probably putting too much thought into a silly costume performance. But what can I say? It's different. Even if my main work is analyzing movies and dramas, it's always useful to get a sense of perspective from other forms of entertainment.

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