The Roots of East Asia Lie on the Korean Peninsula

Science and Invention in East Asia

Charles Higham described how these people farmed rice and how their living area extended from here to the mouth of the Yangtze, and Wilhelm Solheim argued that their agricultural culture had been part of daily life since before the great thaw (12,000–7,000 years ago). In his book The Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (1985), Peter Bellwood says that these people beat tree bark into fiber, wove it into clothing, and made paper, and that they hunted with blowguns, blowing poison darts through lengths of bamboo to strike animals.

The theories published in the past by European historians that Babylonian culture influenced Chinese culture were put forward without knowledge of Chinese history. In Early China 37, published by Cambridge University in 2014, the authors cite the records of the Chinese historian Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, yet explain that the cultures of China, Babylonia, and Greece belong to roughly the same period. Now, as Chinese history is actively studied, it will become known that Babylonia and Greece were influenced by Chinese culture. Around 4000–3000 BC, as copper and bronze were produced over charcoal and coal fires in East Asia, metal culture began, bringing revolutionary change to human history. As tools made of wood or stone and vessels of fired clay were replaced by metal products, every aspect of life changed. Soon after, cast iron was produced, and with bronze and iron, cave sculpture began in India in South Asia; it seems metal culture and the art of sculpture were then carried to Mesopotamia and on to the Mediterranean.

Steel production in East Asia began in 400 BC, and it seems it became known in Europe around the fourteenth century, after the Mongol invasions. Among East Asian military weapons, the bow was made by laminating wood and animal bone, and the crossbow — a bow mounted and fixed on a wooden stock fitted with a metal trigger — was used in East Asia for a long time, and then seems to have become known in Rome from the Han dynasty, along with the meaning of the three-legged crow as a symbol of the sun. East Asian nomads used leather stirrups on their saddles from early on and later metal ones, but in the rest of the world these became known only recently. The horse-drawn chariot came out of the ox-drawn wooden-wheeled cart as bronze axles came to bear high-speed rotation; together with the various iron fittings furnished to the chariot, it was used as military equipment in East Asia, and then seems to have become known in Persia and been carried to the Mediterranean.

A seismograph made in AD 130 in the Han dynasty is displayed in the Beijing museum, together with sundials, water clocks, astronomical instruments, and various metal musical instruments. The seismograph was decorated on the outside of the vessel, in the four directions, with four dragons and four frogs; when an earthquake was detected, a ball dropped from a dragon's mouth, and the pendulum inside the vessel tilted toward the direction from which the earthquake came.

In the course of producing metal, East Asians discovered combustible and explosive substances, made gunpowder (black powder) early on, packed it into bamboo, and invented the bomb. They packed it into light tubes and tied them to arrows to make rockets, a powerful weapon that flew long distances and set fires as it exploded. In the Goryeo period, soldiers in Manchuria around 1288 made bronze cannons for the first time and fired cannonballs, and they made weapons with gunpowder inside the cannonball so that it exploded on arrival. They made weapons that fired arrows in rapid succession, and in the Ming dynasty there was even a weapon that fired 100 gunpowder-laden arrows at once.

They sent signals from mountain peaks and watchtowers by raising black smoke, white smoke, and smoke of other colors, and Sunzi's Art of War, covering all of military operations, has become a textbook for the military activities of modern great powers. The new inventions and weapons of East Asia gave the Huns and Mongols the ability, when they set out to invade the world, to conquer it swiftly and without hindrance. Most of East Asia's inventions and technologies were carried to Europe after the sixteenth century, together with the compass and maritime technology, printing, medicine, and textile technology, and only then did the modern history of the world begin.

The seven-story iron pagoda, 87 feet tall, built in Shandong Province 1,000 years ago, is a symbol of East Asia's iron-making culture, and a bronze bell weighing 46 tons has Buddhist scripture engraved on its surface in 227,000 Chinese characters. East Asia's metal culture is well known to the world through the mass-produced bronze ritual vessels of the Shang dynasty (1554–1045 BC), and at the same time there was the state of Shu ( ) between Gojoseon on the Korean Peninsula and the Shang. It seems that when the Shang and Shu were invaded by the Zhou (1122–221 BC), the Shu people migrated to the Chengdu area of Sichuan Province in inland China, rich in salt and underground resources.

Salt is a necessity of life, a seasoning that helps the human digestive system digest grain. Heavy and precious, it was treasured like gold. That people began extracting oil, gas, coal, and salt from underground in Sichuan Province, located between the Central Plain and the Kunlun Mountains, and began making various products from them, was the beginning of today's petroleum industry. Salt mines begun more than 2,200 years ago are still in operation. Huge bamboo structures extracted oil, gas, and minerals from thousands of feet underground and made products from them. Gas and oil were supplied through connected lengths of bamboo.

Religious culture and industrial civilization followed the social order, and astronomy and philosophy developed on the basis of Taoism and Confucian learning. The dualism of yin and yang and the thought of the Five Elements were applied in later ages to science, philosophy, and all the arts. The Sanxingdui culture excavated in 1986 — with its gold-leaf objects and bronze sculptures, huge gilded bronze masks, the tree of life, a style that honors birds, an expression emphasizing the eyes of the face, winged dragons, and countless jade objects — showed the possibility that the culture of the Chengdu area in Central Asia was linked from East Asia through Central Asia to India, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean coast.

The Sanxingdui site, which astonished the world when it was excavated in 1986, was in the Chengdu area of Sichuan Province, and its huge bronze masks and statues and its bronze sculptures of trees and birds fully contained features linking East Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean cultures. (Photos below.) These people dug half-moon hills (mounds) and embankments to gather water and control floods; the yin-yang and Five Elements thought seen in Goguryeo culture appears among them, and their faces have eyes whose outer corners turn upward and high cheekbones. The four-legged dragon, too, is on the east side of the tree, and nine birds symbolize the south, showing the meaning of water and sunlight. Some masks have protruding eyes, and the eyes of the four-legged dragon with outspread wings also project far forward — a characteristic feature — so we could see commonalities with the Egyptian emphasis on the eyes, the custom of covering corpses with masks, and various artistic expressions. We can imagine that in their customs they trained birds to catch fish, a custom that can be seen in Japan and in Guilin, China.

The road from the Korean Peninsula through Beijing, Xi'an, and Chengdu to Tibet was the passage by which the human genetic group M174 connected the Korean Peninsula and Tibet, and the shortcut linking eastern India and East Asia. The road from eastern India along the Ganges and the Indus to the Gandhara region and Mesopotamia, and at last to the Mediterranean, was the inland route of the seafaring peoples that linked East Asia and the Mediterranean, the oldest such route in the world. Down through the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties, the groups who used this route were warriors called Sogdians, and they received the patronage of the royal families of the countries they passed through. The oxen, horses, and camels they used for transport wore wooden or iron bells to make them ring, the same in shape as the moktak [wooden temple block] of a Buddhist temple. In the Tang dynasty, 4,000 foreign envoys from all over the world visited Chang'an (Xi'an), many of them stayed on in China, and their tombs were excavated in 1999.

The Place of the Korean Peninsula in East Asia

Koreans were the seafaring people who arrived first in the world at the temperate zone of the Earth, with its four seasons. The discipline of changing one's way of life with the changing seasons, and the mobile life and habits that adapted to the passage of time, were more enterprising and more capable of development than the tropical way of life, so our people developed industry and formed social organization early on. Because the Korean Peninsula was the gateway through which the seafaring people penetrated the plains of Northeast Asia, the dolmens, embankments, and earthen mounds remaining on the peninsula, and the Neolithic sites excavated so far, are truly important materials of world history. The Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age cultures of the cultured people of the Korean Peninsula are a more developed form carrying on the wood culture, pottery culture, and stone culture that once flourished in Southeast Asia and are now seldom seen; and the religious custom on the peninsula of quarrying large stones far away and moving them to raise dolmens developed further, until large stone tombs flourished between the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. Joined with the celestial religion of yin-yang and the Five Elements, this came to raise primitive pyramids. The earthen-mound culture that built with earth developed into the pyramid culture that built with stone.

The thousand or so pyramid remains scattered across the Jilin Province region of Manchuria and the Xi'an plain suggest the possibility that a long evolutionary process took place here before the Tomb of the General or the mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin. Among the pharaohs of Egypt are figures with Asian features, and the looks of those royal families show the beauty that appears when the blood of foreign peoples mixes; and there are many four-syllable names, like Eulji Mundeok and Yeon Gaesomun. That the cultural relics of Egypt appear to be an utterly separate cultural phenomenon, unprecedented and unrepeated in the society of Black Africa, makes one wonder whether their roots lie in East Asia; considering the historical possibilities of the thirty thousand years of prehistory in East Asia between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, the task for future research is deep and far-reaching.

If we examine the relationship between the location of the Korean Peninsula and the history of China's founding, the names Dongyi or Xianbei appear frequently in the records of its founding. In Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian there is the founding myth of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, and it explains that Emperor Shun was a descendant of the Yellow Emperor Xuanyuan, and the Yellow Emperor Xuanyuan a descendant of the bear. These were Dongyi. Throughout Chinese history, the east coast of China, Manchuria, the Korean Peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago were regarded as part of the Korean Peninsula and called Dongyi. The east coast of China includes the whole region along the coastline beginning in Liaodong, Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei, and Henan and running south to Vietnam. These regions, together with the Neolithic culture of the Korean Peninsula, are the stronghold of East Asian culture. This region was the living area of the Dongyi, and before our Three Kingdoms period it was a region ruled by the Baekje people of the Korean Peninsula, which is why Chinese history calls it the region of the eastern foreigners. The culture and civilization of East Asia began in the Neolithic period in the living area of the Dongyi, centered on the Korean Peninsula. In the Zhou dynasty, as the original Han Chinese of Central Asia and eastern India migrated in, they began to live mixed together, and it seems records in Chinese characters began from this time. In these regions there are still many people with the features of the Korean Peninsula's people, and especially in the north there are many who speak the Korean language.

According to recently published historical reports, even the Han dynasty was founded by people of Liao. The Samguk Yusa [Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms] was written by the Buddhist monk Iryeon in the Goryeo period, far later than China's Records of the Grand Historian, but we can see that its founding myth — explaining that Dangun Wanggeom was a descendant of Hwanung and Hwanung a descendant of the bear — is connected with the Dongyi part of China's founding myths. Among the underground resources of this region, coal supplied the high heat needed for iron smelting, so bronze and iron production began here early, before anywhere else in the world. The iron tools of daily life and military weapons that began at the same time as the Bronze Age culture of the Shang brought revolutionary change to human history and were the tools by which the nomads of East Asia were able to rule the world. The Neolithic people of the Korean Peninsula grew into nomads in Manchuria, became a horse-riding people, developed iron weapons, unified the Chinese mainland in the times of the Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin, invaded the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, and conquered Rome in Europe.

Later, in the eleventh century, the Jin and the Mongols were their descendants; allied together, they conquered the world and founded a great world empire uniting Asia and Europe, and until the thirteenth century present-day Beijing, located in East Asia, was the capital of the world.

The Republic of Korea within East Asian Culture and Civilization

Let us observe the history of world religion beginning in East Asia. The folk religion of primitive times grew into nature religion, and the custom of burying the bodies of family members grew into ancestral religion. The nature religion of East Asia, including celestial thought, developed through the religious rites of yin-yang and the Five Elements into Confucian learning, in the Taoist form preserved in the Goguryeo tombs; India's Hinduism is also a branch of nature religion. The ancestral religion of East Asia, along with the growth of clan society and the state system, developed into Confucianism, which established the morality of the family and society. As city-states and feudal states were integrated and grew into an imperial system, around the time imperial religions began, Buddhism began 2,600 years ago in the Ganges basin of eastern India.

For 600 years thereafter, kings of the Greek city-states in Europe came to China and India, became Buddhist monks, and learned the religion, learning, and arts of Southeast Asia, and from that time the Persian culture of Southwest Asia and the Greek culture of Europe began. When the Magi from the East, bringing the philosophy of East Asia and the Buddhism of India, followed the stars and arrived in Jerusalem, Jesus was at last born. Over the next 600 years, Catholicism, formed by joining with the Old Testament of Judaism, spread into eastern Europe, and Islam, based on the Old Testament, began. As another 600 years passed, Catholicism in eastern Europe stagnated, and Genghis Khan of the Mongols from East Asia conquered Europe and woke the Europeans from their sleep in the Dark Ages. Western Europeans learned East Asian culture and civilization, printing technology developed, they gained knowledge, and the Renaissance arose; in the sixteenth century, as humanism rebelled against imperialism, Protestantism began with Martin Luther's Reformation.

The navigators of western Europe learned the navigation charts of the Ming dynasty and explored the oceans, and western Europe's worldwide invasions began. From Britain, called the British Empire on which the sun never sets, Protestantism, including John Wesley's Methodism and John Calvin's Presbyterianism, was carried to America, and western Europeans pushed out the East Asian natives who had lived there for more than twenty thousand years and founded Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The United States, which rose to prominence in World War I and won victory in World War II, inherited the Christianity of western Europe with its overwhelming economic and political power, and while it deployed democracy and capitalism across the world, it collided with the Islamic empires that spread Islam as state policy — this is today's reality. The dragon, symbol of water and life, which began in East Asia together with Taoism, appeared in all the world's religions until Protestantism with its power and fearsome face, so that it can be seen even in the ancient religious buildings of Africa and Central America — proof that East Asian culture, with its 60,000 years of history, spread to every continent of the world. The form and face of the dragon, the symbolic creature of the east shown in the Four Guardian Deities of Goguryeo, can be seen anywhere in ancient culture, and the oldest record left by the Sumerians, the oldest of the cultured peoples of Southwest Asia, is also a record about the dragon.

The seafaring skill of the East Asians who settled at the mouths of rivers was advanced for ten thousand years, so they dominated the world until AD 1400. They invented the iron compass and crossed the Pacific. They used the direction of the winds, which change with the seasons, and the flow of ocean currents, and because the ancients had the ability to fast and hibernate in winter, they could make ocean voyages beyond our imagination. A wooden ship made of laminated planks in the Xia dynasty, 4,000 years ago, is kept in the Quanzhou Museum in Fujian Province. It has been found through excavation that the log boat Egypt's Tutankhamun rode 3,300 years ago was in use 7,000 years ago at many sites near Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province at the mouth of the Yangtze. When the maritime state of Shang was conquered by the nomadic state of Zhou 3,050 years ago, 250,000 nobles and seafarers fled into exile to various lands of the Pacific. Survivors among them crossed the Pacific and arrived in South America, and the Olmec culture began, which is why the Aztec and Maya cultures have much in common with Shang culture. 2,210 years ago, the First Emperor of Qin sent three thousand pharmacists and navigators out to sea to bring back the herb of immortality. The Shang people and the First Emperor's pharmacists must have settled in our country as well.

2,024 years ago, ships loaded with Chinese silk traveled back and forth along India's sea lanes to Greece on the Mediterranean. That such activity took place on the Korean Peninsula even before the maritime states of Baekje and Wa existed there is shown by the fact that the numeral notation of our oracle-bone script is almost identical to that of the Maya culture of the Americas. The Dongyi of the Korean Peninsula occupied and ruled the whole east coast of China (the Yellow Sea), founding many of China's states, and this legacy lasted into the time of Baekje. In the reign of King Dongseong of Baekje, Baekje pushed the Northern Wei, which had been founded by fellow Dongyi, out of the present-day Datong region and made it move across the Yellow River to Luoyang. The Yungang Grottoes at Datong have much in common with Baekje culture, and the Longmen Grottoes at Luoyang, completed from the Northern Wei through the Sui and Tang, have much in common with the culture of our Unified Silla. The activities of Jang Bogo in the Silla period, and the feats of Yi Sun-sin, the Joseon naval commander of Jeolla, may be seen as the tradition of Baekje maritime culture. The Buddhist culture of the Ganges basin in eastern India was linked to the Korean Peninsula and the Yellow River basin along coastal sea lanes, and Heo Hwang-ok, who grew up in Ayodhya in the Ganges basin, came by sea to the Korean Peninsula, met King Kim Suro of Garak, and became his queen. Before the states of Baekje, Wa, Silla, and Goguryeo were founded on the Korean Peninsula, there were maritime states we do not know, and
we can only imagine a history of tens of thousands of years.

As the economic standing of the East Asian nations rises, it is only right that world history, too, should give weight to Eastern history and build a fair view of the world. Let us confirm that Goguryeo culture is the history of our people, correct the error that makes it seem the source of the world's learning began with the Greek philosophers, set aside the Western view of history that puts forward the Indo-Aryans, and prove that world history began in East Asia. East Asia, the most advanced region in the distribution of humankind, repeated a regular life adapted to the changes of the four seasons for 60,000 years, and so order took hold in its life; at the place where maritime and inland activity fused, the point where farmers and nomads contended, the Neolithic people of the Korean Peninsula, on a geographical foundation that included Manchuria and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, were the protagonists of human culture and civilization and its founding nation. It is the providence of the Earth's history, and the present reality is that we long for this to be revealed as truth.