Azure Crane Village
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
12
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Cheonghakdong,
Korea Rep.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Once out of the tangle of greater-Busan and lesser-Gimhae, once safely past Masan and off of the major expressways the traffic began to dwindle away, first dwarfed and then lost completely in the soaring green slopes. The vibrant green ripples of the land on the south coast remain for me the highlight of trips down here. My provincial, Chungcheongnam-do eyes are used to unrelenting rice paddies, which at this time of year are a hideous bog.
I knew we were coming to a special place when I peered down into the valleys below us and saw rivers: undammed, unbridged, unpolluted, unstagnated rivers tumbling crisp and white over the stones that collected down there
a tea house and the summer green
. It was odd to see a river without a soccer field or expressway beside it.The farms became smaller and more inventive as we approached our destination. The landscape offered no horizontal surfaces and so crude terraces had been scraped into the slopes. Tiny farm houses hunched stoically over patches of clear ground, surrounded by strips of seedlings. But most of the land lay untouched and summer-green.
Our car climbed and climbed, and we espied Jirisan nestled amidst the other, younger mountains. With the mountain soaring above us and the rivers tumbling below us, it wasn't hard to imagine the road as an incline towards heaven, which is exactly what the Cheonghakdong locals have always had in mind.
The violent twentieth century that has so shaped and defined Korea largely bypassed Cheonghakdong, preserving it as a sanctuary of traditional culture; for a long time the village went without electricity, and was exempt from mandatory military service. During this time the people set about the creation of a paradise-on-earth, where the ancestors of Korea could be venerated and the traditions of the land observed and preserved.
Twenty years ago we couldn't have visited the village at all. But since then a paved road has gone up and electricity has come down to the village. And with these has come tourism. Rather than turn inwards, the people of Cheonghakdong have welcomed their new guests, incorporating them into their vision of paradise.
happy valley
Today Cheonghakdong is still a private place, and one has the sense, wandering around, that you are a privileged guest rather than a paying customer who ought to be entertained. The people of the valley carry on building and maintaining their paradise, carry on observing traditional rituals, but they do so before a fascinated audience. The tranquillity of the site has not been compromised by the arrival of outsiders, instead we disappear through the gates and into the paradise-in-progress, dwarfed by the scale and determination of the endeavour around us.
The landscape of Cheonghakdong looks to be built out of stone, carefully arranged and piled up to create terraces, towers and alleys. But what it is really built of is prayers. Every stone is a prayer, an expressed desire, a yearning for the utopia that is being built here. Every prayer fits closely and balances evenly with the prayers around it, creating a very bizarre, very beautiful labyrinth of faith.
Hanging over the labyrinth are little representations of birds, made by joining a few pieces of wood together. Cheonghakdong means the Azure Crane Village, after the beautiful bird soaring upwards from earth to heaven. These rough wooden cranes are also a form of prayer, an expression of desire for fluidity and movement between heaven and earth
little wooden bird
.Some of the twisting, curving alleyways were blocked off so that work could continue; the forming of new monuments of prayer, and the restoration of the existing ones. Returning visitors to the area find themselves walking completely different paths to last time, discovering new details and corners of the valley. But all paths eventually lead to the second gate, through which all people are shepherded by a guard, that brings them into the inner valley, the centrepiece of this whole vision, the focus of every prayer.
Here at the centre of the centre of the valley is Samseong-gung, the Palace of the Three Sages, the focus of all these prayer, all this yearning and hoping and striving. The three sages venerated in the simple, open shrine are Hwanin, Hwanung and Dangun: Hwanin the lord of Heaven; Hwanung his son, who came to earth and married the bear-woman; Dangun their son, the first king in Korea. By this short genealogy heaven and earth were united, bringing divinity into the mortal world, mixing the blood of God with that of the Korean people.
The valley at the beginning of May, as the summer green bathes everything in beauty and peace, feels very like a path from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven. The veneration of the Gods who came to earth, the sculpting of wooden birds to fly back to the heavens, the spiralling upwards of towers built of prayer, it all contributes to this paradise ideal, the creation of the path between the two worlds.
All this gentle talk of heaven and earth, Gods and kings and mythical, garlic-eating bears rings strangely across the utilitarian Korean landscape
sacred kidney-bean shape
. In the cities and in the countryside the only stairways to heaven are the long elevator shafts in those great barn-like apartment complexes. It seems so strange to hire a car and drive a few hours into the mountains, and to come back talking of faith and devotion and prayer - concepts I have barely encountered since coming to Korea. Whether or not a God chooses to again make his residence on earth, and whether or not he chooses to do so in Korea is all finally irrelevant. The truly inspiring thing about the Cheonghakdong vision is that it doesn't belong only to this valley. The dream of these people doesn't require terraces and towers and palaces; the profundity of the place is encapsulated by the placing of one stone upon another by a person with a head full of desires for a more heavenly earth (or earthly heaven). A perfectly simple act, but one that contains the same serene beauty as all Cheonghakdong.
A stone placed atop another stone; it is the smallest of towers, the most unsteady of ladders, but it reaches all the way from earth to heaven and back again.
