Taebaek Mountains Literature Hall almost here.

Interesting news from the Chosun Ilbo: Boseong county will open a museum dedicated to a famous novel set in the area. Called the Taebaek Mountains Literature Hall, it will open on November 21st and, it is hoped, will attract tourists interesting in learning about the work of art and the historical events that inspired it.

Boseong-gun is holding the opening ceremony on Nov. 21. Ground for the W4.5 billion (US$1=W1,269) project was broken in October 2005. The aim is to turn the Beolgyo area, the main background for “The Taebaek Mountains,” into a tourist attraction and to shed light on the saga’s celebrated author Cho Jung-rae, who hails from the province.

I made a trip to Beolgyo-eup last fall, and turned it into a pair of posts:

* Beolgyo (벌교)

* Beolgyo Walking Tour

The town is noteworthy for the locations associated with the novel, many of which still remain as examples of Occupation-era architecture. It was also the site of many executions during the a period of anti-Communist crackdowns in South Jeolla province between Liberation in 1945 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Robert Koehler has one of the best English-language write-ups about the town; here's an excerpt:

If you’ve got an interest in contemporary Korean history, there’s plenty to see and feel in Beolgyo, a town that is, for all intents and purposes, a product of Japanese colonial policy. The town was developed as a transportation center to ship agricultural goods from the Jeolla provinces to ports like Yeosu. The Japanese also engaged in a number of ambitious but divisive land reclamation products in the area. The Japanese penetration of the region and the colonial projects they pursued intensified class and ideological conflicts in the Beolgyo area that long outlived colonial rule. Jo’s The Taebaek Mountains examines this colonial legacy and the tragic conflicts that ripped South Korean society in the years between Liberation and the end of the Korean War.

Beolgyo’s downtown area is a place only a Japanese colonial administrator could love. Which, in a way, makes it kind of interesting. Like Gunsan, there are a number of old colonial-era buildings maintained as reminders of Korea’s difficult past. The town does get a fair number of visitors who come looking for the different places described in Jo’s book. Many of them, including the old Japanese Financial Collective building, Kim Beom-woo’s home, the Japanese-style Boseong Inn (now called the Namdo Inn), and the Sohwa Bridge, where mass executions took place during the 1948 Yeosu-Suncheon Uprising and, in the novel, rightists and leftists apparently traded turns executing political opponents.

Here's another little one from a Finnish scholar. I'm hoping to compile a little more information over the next week or two as we're nearing the 60th anniversary of the bloody Yosu-Sunchon Incident, or however you prefer to call it. Here are a few pictures from my trip, with others on my flickr page: