[KS] A temple query

Wed Aug 13 03:31:37 EDT 2014

Okay ... here we go:
All three photos are from 1911, not from 1925 or 1926, as stated by 
that Korean blogger (or KBS ?). The photos are in the first edition of 
Norbert Weber's _Im Lande der Morgenstille_ [In the land of the morning 
calm] (1915), and it is also in the later 1923 edition (see my note 
below the three images), which I have not at hand now. You may check 
the Korean translation (of the "de-politicized" 1923 edition), if you 
are in Korea right now, or if you have that book with you. MAYBE the 
translators commented on the images there?

Color plate between pages 96 and 97: 
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How VERY careless these blogs work with historical information is also 
seen in the below Korean blog:
http://blog.daum.net/jjuba52/13793608
The COPVER image you see there is the one of the second, 1923 edition. 
And if you scroll down that page you see that the last images is the 
one posted here as first. **And** the caption then reads that this is 
an photo taken at Weber's 2nd Korea visit in 1925. Someone obviously 
does not have a clue there what a "2nd edition" of a book means. The 
actual main difference between the two editions is that Germany lost 
World War I in between -- and Weber could thus not anymore propagate 
his colonialist ambitions (of which he saw his missionaries to be an 
integral and important part of), and thus the very last chapter that is 
all about the tasks of the missionaries as power brokers for the Kaiser 
and his colonial empire, is simply cut. ... It sure does not mean that 
all the photos are now replaced with 1925 photos.

The interior color image above is placed within a chapter on 
Christianity in Korea -- there is no indication where that is. The 
group photo MIGHT be close to the gold mine, as I stated in my last 
message ... but after looking through the entire book again (sorry!), I 
am not anymore sure if indeed the photo relates to the visit of a 
smaller Buddhist monastery that Weber describes next to the photo, or 
if he just took "any" photo taken anywhere that would fit the topic. 
The third one, the birds-eye-view, is in a sub-chapter where they 
travel at the east coast of northern Korea towards Chinamp'o Harbor 
(Namp'o). The photo could or could not relate to that, hard to say for 
me. In any case do the three photos NOT seem to belong to the same 
place.

As I pointed out, Weber was basically just a tourist to Korea, and he 
mostly wanted to create a "nice book" that would advertise himself (see 
the large-scale photo of himself as the frontispiece at above blog 
posting) and his orders importance for colonial politics. (He also 
traveled around in Germany, did slide lectures, and advertised the 
Benedictian order's importance for the Reich and German industry .... 
following the book's title page is a dedication in unusual large print 
to Baron (Theodor) von Cramer-Klett, the boss of M.A.N., and one of his 
big industry sponsors. So, anyway, other than someone like Andreas 
Eckardt, about who he jokes in the book to be uselessly scholastic (as 
Eckardt, of course, would be a competitor when it came to presenting 
Korean culture), Weber was not knowlegble about things Korean, could 
neither read Chinese characters nor communicate with Koreans. While in 
Korea he was completely dependent on the input of Pater Joseph Wilhelm 
and other Korea missionaries like Andreas Eckardt. (By the way, you may 
want to check Eckardt's art history of Korea book, that interior photo 
may well be in there as well, in that case with a description ... do 
not have this with me now, sorry.) What I am trying to say is that for 
Weber, as a self-declared "ethnologist" he mostly saw cultural 
"objects" as "generic" pieces of work, not as unique art works, and 
thus he had little interest in documenting detailed geographic or other 
information, and would also hardly have been able to do so. He is far 
better at documenting "folk life" -- say, for example, names and uses 
of various hat forms or cloth Koreans would wear. That kind of 
information is what colonial sciences were up to in any case, both in 
Asia and in Africa. The idea of art as art (other than maybe for Japan) 
-- in the 1910s -- was still something still new then. In  way that had 
been a step backwards from the EARLY missionaries who went to China in 
the 16th and 17th centuries. We really should understand that between 
the mid-1880s and 1920 just everything about non-Western culture always 
circled around colonialism, and such descriptions follow those 
"templates."

One more note:

Thanks to Dr. Insoo Cho!
Those plates in the just published book by the National Museum are 
absolutely terrific!!! 
Many thanks for the information about the publication and the link. 
Some of these plates are in colonial period government publications, 
but most are not.

In my last mail I said that the only place that the two Weber photos 
(of exterior and interior) could possibly be Yuj?m-sa, if that is in 
the K?mgang-san area. However, after looking further into this, that 
can also be ruled out -- see photo below, and see the various exterior 
photos of Yuj?m-sa in the book by the National Museum. The wonderful 
interior photos in that new book also exclude the possibility that the 
'altar' is from Changan-sa.  

A K?mgang-san location can thus be ruled out for both the interior and 
the exterior photo.

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Best wishes,
Frank

--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com