Give us our Goguryeo back.

On a recent blog post of another blogger someone made the claim that China stole part Korean. To substantiate their argument they posted this map.

The blind righteousness is amazing. On that very same Wiki page is a image showing the original size of Goguryeo, but this is conveniently ignored. (This is not just a Korean thing. There is a lot of it in South Africa and other countries, but I don’t live there, I live in Korea, so this is what I am exposed to most of the time.)

Koreans usually prefer to remember their history in a way where Korea held more territory than the Two Koreas do today. Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms, held territories well in to the area of today’s China. No point disputing that. What I do find funny is that some Koreas believe that this land should still be Korean territory and that China stole it from Korea.

At the War Memorial in Seoul there is a map showing how the Three Kingdoms grew to hold the territories that would later become Korea. Because it show how the kingdoms grew, it necessarily shows Goguryeo as an earlier, smaller kingdom.

And here is where the blindness creeps in. Koreans prefer to just ignore that Goguryeo had to battle and conquer the lands that they held. Conquer, invade and take. They forget that, among others, Goguryeo had to take the territory from kingdoms that would eventually form China. Somehow they view the territory that the Chinese kingdoms took back as rightfully Korean. In truth, “Korea” stole if from “China” and then lost it again.

I write “Korea” and “China” in quotations because these two countries did not exist there 1500 years ago. I might even say that Korea is not allowed to claim any of Goguryeo history, as it is Silla who eventually conquered the other kingdoms, thus forming what we know today as Korea. This means that “Korea" is actually the country who invaded Goguryeo while “China” merely fought back losing some territory in one place and gaining some in another. Therefore it is Korea owes Goguryeo the territory that it stole from them.

There is, of course, the argument that “Korea” rightfully won that territory in battle, but then Korea will also have to accept that it rightfully lost it again in battle and therefore it is forfeited to China. If not, then maybe it is time to give back all that territory that was “stolen” from Baekjae, Ye, Dongye Lelang and Byeonhan.