World Heritage Site

I guess few people outside of the Koreas often think about the Korean War (1950-1953). Still, it was a very bloody struggle with 3 million casualties, it saw a confrontation between China and the USA during the Cold War and its repercussions (such as the continuation of the Kim dynasty in the DPRK) are felt until today. To refresh my knowledge, I listened to two recent episodes of the podcast ‘Empire’ during my flight to South Korea, which dealt with the Korean War and the period leading up to it. 

As only one of two cities in the South never captured by the communist insurgents, Busan was the de facto capital of South Korea during the war period. It also hosted 500,000 refugees from the rest of the country, more than its regular inhabitants. The TWHS ‘Sites of the Busan Wartime Capital’ aims to illustrate that particular period in the city’s history via 9 component sites. I visited 3 of those.

I started at the Busan Citizens Park, which was a horse race track during the Japanese occupation of Korea and later the US Army Camp Hialeah. It was used by the US Army until 2006, but the grounds have since been returned to the City of Busan which transformed it into a public park. I strolled around it in the early evening, accompanied by joggers and people walking their dogs. A few signs and odd constructions give away its former use. There are guardposts and various forms of housing, including the remarkable Quonset Huts (photo 1) – prefab huts that were quick to construct but more durable than tents in the Korean climate. 

Close to the Toseong metro station are two further components, which I visited the next day. The Temporary Presidential Residence (now also known as the Provisional Capital Memorial Hall) was the residence of Syngman Rhee, at the time the president of South Korea. It is an interesting building that mixes Western and Japanese elements. You can walk through its rooms freely, and they have 2 videos of 7 minutes each (also in English) on show which give more context to the situation in Busan during the Korean War. For me, it helped make the period come alive (as if the war itself wasn’t bad enough, the city also was hit by a terrible fire in 1953 which led to even more casualties and more homeless people).

Not too far away lies the Ami-dong Tombstone Village. It takes a steep uphill walk, if you’re not keen on that there are also local buses. Ami-dong is one of the areas where the war refugees flocked to when the refugee camps in town were full. During the Japanese occupation, the area held a hillside cemetery, but the refugees transformed it into housing. What you’ll encounter nowadays is like a ‘favela’, with narrow passageways, lots of stairs and colourful tiny houses (but much safer to walk around in than in its Brazilian counterparts). People still live there. There are some signposts to notable buildings, but it’s such a maze that I didn’t find them all. The reuse of tombstones as spolia isn’t very visible. 

Overall, the selection of components has a somewhat similar approach to that of the Nelson Mandela Legacy Sites – together the parts form a narrative about that period in history. However, the Busan Wartime Capital is not proposed as a Site of Memory (which would be criterion vi), but as a criterion iii site (‘testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization’ - like Ayutthaya, and also the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region). This is odd, certainly taking into account that one of the components is the UN Memorial Cemetery. It might be an effort to avert opposition by China, Russia and the DPRK against the inscription of a site connected to a recent conflict that they view differently from the South Koreans. So for most of the components, the focus lies on construction techniques and urban planning (pragmatic ways of quick construction). Inscription chances seem quite low to me, but still, these are important places in South Korea’s history and I found it worthwhile to learn about them.