Choi Chi-won’s second summons and connecting Korea with China

Kim Myung-hwa
 
The writer is a playwright and director. 
 
 
 
Choi Chi-won (857-908), a Confucian scholar of late Silla (57 B.C.-A.D. 935), was born in Gyeongju. At age 12, he left for early research in Tang China, pushed by his father to move the civil service examination if he was to go overseas. To remain awake, he pricked himself with a needle whereas learning, finally getting into workplace. Throughout the Huang Chao Insurrection, he wrote the “Proclamation to Repress Huang Chao,” incomes acclaim as a author.
 

Korean President Lee Jae Myung, left, chats with Chinese language President Xi Jinping forward of the primary session of the APEC summit on the Gyeongju Hwabaek Worldwide Conference Heart in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang, on Oct. 31. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

 
However he was unable to settle within the turbulence of the Tang court docket and returned to Silla. On that journey, he composed the poem “Crossing the Sea.” Just a few days in the past, Chinese language President Xi Jinping quoted its first line — “With sails raised I got down to sea, an extended wind drives me 10 thousand li” — throughout a state banquet with Korean President Lee Jae Myung. Xi used the identical line 12 years in the past when President Park Geun-hye visited Beijing.
 
Whether or not this displays Chinese language admiration for Choi or a shortage of appropriate classical references in Korea-China relations stays open to interpretation.
 
In line with the Samguk Sagi, the younger Choi returned to Silla hoping to serve his homeland with the data gained in Tang China. However he discovered a rustic in decline. “The world was in chaos, and lots of had been suspicious and unwelcoming, so he was despatched to provincial posts,” it writes. He didn’t obtain excessive workplace, but it could have been this distance from energy that allowed him to provide writings influential in each Korea and China for hundreds of years.
 
 
Choi can be worthwhile in understanding the performing arts, the place information from the Three Kingdoms period are scarce. He described the Hwarang spirit as pungnyudo — the “Approach of Wind and Stream” — recognizing the place of artwork in human life. In his poem “5 Performances of Native Music,” he listed court docket entertainments corresponding to geumhwan (juggling golden balls), woljeon (masked play with satire and humor), daemyeon (masked dance drama), sokdok (group dance with drums) and sanye (lion masks dance). Although many of those seemingly got here by means of China or the West, he referred to as them hyangak (native music), not Tang music, as he valued the transformation of overseas tradition into Silla’s personal.
 
Neither absolutely accepted by Tang nor Silla, Choi nonetheless related each worlds. His spirit — spanning kingdoms and centuries — stays related within the twenty first century. Could that dedication to understanding carry throughout distances, even to the U.S. and China.