Royal Asiatic Society Trip: Yeoju Part 1: Queen Min's Birthplace

The morning of the Royal Asiatic Society trip to Yeoju commenced, thankfully, with us actually finding the correct post office this time (although we did get there forty-five minutes early, just to be safe). We got on the tour bus and arrived a bit over an hour later at our first stop, the birthplace of Queen Min/Empress Myeongsong, queen of Korea at the end of the 19th century and wife of King Kojong, Korea's last king (she received the title of empress posthumously, when King Kojong declared the Daehan Empire).



Traditional Korean architecture is quite attractive, but because most palaces and old residences are displayed without furnishings, it's very difficult to visualize what any of the spaces are used for. Queen Min's birthplace featured little mannequin scenes that helped us picture these mostly-identical open rooms as actual living spaces. For instance, here is a woman doing... well, something. With sticks. Laundry, perhaps?


Okay, so it's not a total success. But it was still a help.

This picture is more helpful: it is a kitchen. But what you don't know is that it's also the heating system:


If somebody asked me for one area where Korea just vastly outclasses the West, I'd say, without even thinking about it, heating. We blogged about our tribulations turning on our ondol floor heating system, but I have to say, once it gets going, that is one sweet, sweet system that I only appreciate more now that I'm back home with forced-air heating. Ondol is under-floor heating. In our modern apartment, it uses hot water pipes, like a radiator that runs under the floor instead of against the wall. In older homes, it meant having a fire dug in under a house to heat the air beneath the floors. In both cases, it beats the heck out of Western contemporary alternatives: in medieval times, the fireplace against the wall that heated about nine square feet of castle, and in modern times, forced-air heating and its uneven room heating from vent placement or blockage, dirty vents and filters, and dried-out air.

To return to the kitchen picture, the engineering of ondol niftily double-uses an existing appliance. In our apartment, we have no furnace - our hot-water heater heats the ondol pipes as well as, say, the shower and the sink. In this picture, the double-duty appliance is the oven. The air heated up to cook in the kitchen is not wasted up a chimney or just to the kitchen ceiling; it is channeled into those under-floor vents to heat up the house. Toasty!

Another highlight of Queen Min's Birthplace was the stellar objective history.

Queen Min was, as I mentioned, queen of Korea in the late nineteenth century. Politically savvy and unusually influential, she played Korea's neighbors against each other to preserve Korean sovereignty. Ultimately, Queen Min was assassinated by a Japanese squad. Or, according to the signpost outside Queen Min's birthplace, she was "murdered by the atrocious Japanese."

Let's give this sign the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a mistranslation of "atrociously murdered." I could accept this. Murder is never particularly nice, and they made things extra tacky by killing her in a section of the palace reserved for women and burning the body.

But I'm not sure how to get out of this one:

From the filmstrip in the Queen Min museum, with a teacher and students:

Female student: "The Japanese are so evil! Why would they want to kill such a nice person?"

This is what we call, in the biz, a "teachable moment." The teacher could respond with, "All Japanese people are not evil," or some other lesson against generalization. But she does not.

And then:

Teacher: And after they killed Queen Min, they burned the body.
Female student: Teacher! Those bastards!

I can't explain that. I really can't.

Bonus: Those voices are recorded in clear American/Canadian English. Clearly, whoever voice-acted that dialogue spoke English. Did it not occur to them to point out that this is a very odd thing for a student to say?

edit by Nana: Oh, yeah. I wrote this one. Justin put up the pictures so it shows up as him.