Paldalmun and a Tale of Two Taeguks
I mentioned the Hwaseong Culture Festival at the start of last month but didn't write anything about the subject after that. I did make it to the second day of the festival, though a mix-up on the bus meant that I ended up at a mountain outside of town rather than attending the event that I had most wanted to see.
On my return to the subway station at the end of the evening I was able to take a decent photo of Paldalmun (팔달문), the southern gate to the old city walls of Suwon. According to Wikimapia the name means "open roads in every direction" and was wide enough to allow the king's procession to enter the city accompanied by horses and sedans. It took a fair bit of waiting to get a shot without cars in the foreground, but this is what I ended up with:
The gate is listed in Korea as Treasure No. 402 and is part of the Hwaseong Fortress structure that was registered as a UNESCO Cultural Heritage Site in Dec. 1997. One thing that I found rather interesting about Paldalmun is the series of 'yin and yang' shapes near the middle of the wooden structure. Those circular shapes are known as taeguk in Korean (태극) and taijitu in Chinese (太極圖) with historical origins in Daoism. If Wikipedia is to be trusted the shape was introduced by the Ming Dynasty scholar Lai Zhide, who built on the work of Zhou Dunyi -- author of the Taiji Tushuo ("Explanations of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate") which "fused Confucian ethics and concepts from the Yijing (The Book of Changes) with Daoist naturalism". East Asian Syncreticism at work once again.
While researching a different subject on the internet I came across a statement somewhere that claimed one good way to tell if a 'yin-yang' symbol was from China or Korea was to look at the coloration: those from China employ a black & white color scheme while Korean examples make use of red & blue - or red, blue, and yellow in the case of the sam-taegeuk (三太極). Both the taeguk and taijitu articles cited above briefly mention this difference in color, though it would be nice to find a more authoritative source to confirm this assertion. If true this makes me very curious -- Hwaseong Fortress was built in 1794-1796, which should be late enough within Korea's history to use the indigenous taeguk design rather than the black and white taijitu. A guard outpost along the northern edge of the city walls also features a taijitu; meanwhile, the entrance to Haenggung Palace (contained within Hwaseong Fortress) is marked with a trio of taeguk designs. The palace was built in 1789 and expanded between 1794-1796 so I do wonder what factors went into choosing one form over the other.
While there may be an underlying philosophical reason behind the differing representations, perhaps part of the reason is that using the 'Chinese' style on the outer walls hints at the Joseon Dynasty's "little brother" relationship with China and expecting military aid in times of distress. Haenggung Palace, as the residence of the king, would more naturally use an indigenous symbol highlighting the unique place of the Joseon monarch(s) within the greater framework of relations with China. Or that's one unsupported theory, anyway.
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