Golden Crowns and Shining Clay

First off, check out the new "Blogs I Read" box on the left, which currently contains Zak's blog Impatient Pudding and Jue's blog Orange Orange. Disregard the fact that I wrote the latest entry on IP - it was a guest blog, I swear. Anyway, give them a read, especially if you like science, web 2.0 culture, or any song with the word "remix" in the title.

The highlight of today was meeting a Korean master potter who makes replicas of pottery produced during the Shilla dynasty, which was around for a thousand years somewhere around 0 B.C. Ancient Koreans were apparently prolific potters in the Chinese tradition, and delicate green Korean celadon vases are still prized today. This guy insists on making pottery the Shilla way without fancy firing techniques or clay additives - it's all just mud, a wheel, and a wood-fired kiln dug into the side of a hill. The mud in this area (Gyeongju city, south of Seoul somewhere) apparently has a high silica content, which when exposed to temperatures above 1000 degrees Celsius naturally melts or activates somehow and gives the finished piece a glossy sheen. This means Shilla-type pottery needs no glaze or varnish, and so the potter was keen on telling us that what he makes is not pottery but actually "clay figurines." I guess the strict definition of "pottery" involves glazes or something. Anyway, we got to watch him work, check out the inside of the kiln he uses, and even make our own pots on little wheels! It's been at least 10 years since I tried to make anything resembling pottery, especially on a wheel, and it was a marvelous experience. Good art (as well as good science, math, etc.) requires singlemindedness, and although what I produced didn't really resemble good art (as much as the potter guy helped me out), the intense clarity with which I saw myself manipulating my hands, the clay, and the tools as well as the speed with which the time flew made me feel like a real artist. A dazed but happy artist, anyway. We left all of our creations there to be fired by Mr. Potter Dude, who will ship them to Ewha after they're done so we can bring them home. With any luck, mine will be sitting on my desk or a shelf next year, hopefully all in one piece.

We also walked around a museum of artifacts from the Shilla dynasty, including beautiful golden crowns worn by some of the 50-odd kings and queens before the unification. Korea, like China, was a bunch of warring kingdoms sometime around 500 A.D. and then became unified under one dynasty, never to be split up again until 1945. The "headband crowns," as they are called, are masterpieces of metalwork and symbolic design. The crowns have vertical "branches" that are supposed to mimic tree branches or antlers, both of which symbolized the king's position as intermediary between heaven and earth. Some of the "branches" have a particular shape that is actually a Chinese character repeatedly stacked on top of itself; this character is "chu," which means "to exit" or "to go out," pointing to the king's widespread influence throughout the kingdom. The goldwork of these crowns is very delicate and precise, with little golden "spangles" attached to the branches and cashew-shaped pieces of jade hanging off of it (pictures to come). Although the material is the same, the style is extremely different from stereotypical Western crowns, which are traditionally heavy, inlaid with large gleaming stones, and don't have anything hanging off of them. Western crowns are meant to be purely visual status symbols, while Shilla crowns engage hearing as well because they jingled. This difference intrigues me. I wonder what Jared Diamond would have to say about it (proximal explanations include: the availability of facetable gemstones and the intimidation factor of jingling).

We also saw an ancient bell that supposedly was only successfully cast once a baby got mixed in with the molten metal and also found out that we have karaoke on our bus. Of course - Korea is nuts about karaoke. It was funny singing Bohemian Rhapsody while watching background montages of forest critters on our bus's plasma TV.

WTF moment of today: our tour guide was telling us about what we were going to have for dinner and described it as "Korean burritos." Then she jumped into an explanation of the history of this food that went something like this: "The story of this food is that sometimes if pretty Korean women are out alone at night, ugly old men might want to take them and so they would rape them with a plastic bag." No preparation for this pronouncement whatsoever. I was traumatized. I think the actual explanation is a little more nuanced, but I'm pretty mystified at this point.