Chinese art in Korea

I will not be heading for China on my upcoming trip - too much expense and hassle. So I will have to improvise during my stay in South Korea. Fortunately, there is some Chinese art at the National Museum of Korea, which I visited before and will return to. In addition, there is a Chinese-style shrine just outside downtown Seoul's eastern gate, called Dongmyo.

In China, a general named Guan Yu, who died in 219 AD, is often revered as a deity, by both Buddhists and Taoists. Guan served his sworn brother Liu Bei, who led one of the three major factions vying for the control of China at the end of the Han Dynasty. The stories and the heroics of this turbulent era have been told for generations, being written down in historical fiction form in the 14th Century. That novel, titled Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義 in China and 三國志 in Korea), is considered required reading for many East Asians, and is beloved by just about all Korean men.

Dongmyo is a shrine to Guan Yu, the only surviving example among several that once existed in Seoul. In Confucian Korea, Guan Yu worship never really had a tradition, but when Ming China allied with Korea to drive the Japanese out in 1598 (Japan had just been unified into a single militaristic state, and wanted to pass through Korea to invade China, but when Korea refused passage, it started pillaging Korea), it wanted some Guan Yu shrines built on Korean soil, as the spirit of Guan Yu supposedly appeared to help the Chinese soldiers during their battle against Japan. The shrine was built in 1601 with joint Chinese and Korean funding, with the signs written by the Chinese emperor himself. Later, when Ming China collapsed and was replaced by the Manchu Dynasty (who were not Han Chinese, but "barbaric" outsiders), the Korean Confucians started worshipping at Dongmyo, out of their continuing respect for the defunct Ming Dynasty.

As Koreans have become less pro-China and more nationalistic in the past 130 years or so, Dongmyo fell into disrepair and was forgotten, until Chinese tourists started visiting it in the past ten years or so. Currently it's open but under renovation, so I don't know how much I will be able to see. For now, I will share a couple of pre-renovation pictures. I will also add that some left-wing nationalists in South Korea want Dongmyo completely demolished, as it is a reminder of Korea's historic subservient attitude to China (and by extension, to Imperial Japan later and to US Republicans today); South Korea is the only country that I know of, where liberals are more nationalistic than conservatives (elsewhere, usually it's the conservatives who are nationalistic).

Dongmyo's garden. The architecture is a hybrid of Chinese and Korean styles; the structural elements are Chinese, but the color schemes are Korean.

Gold-plated statue of Guan Yu, with two of his four guardians visible to the side.