hankyoreh

Hikers go up Mt. Seorak during autumn color season. 720

Koreans love mountain climbing. Every weekend, they file their way up the Seoul area’s mountain trails, their eyes on the backside of the person ahead. When the leaves change colors in autumn, the most popular mountains are swarmed with people. Korea National Park Service statistics put the number of visitors to Mt. Seorak alone at over 720,000 during the month of October. Close to 100,000 people visited during the peak weekend of Oct. 17 and 18.

The stereotype holds that most of the climbers are middle-aged and older men. Is that really true? Yes and no. A September survey by Gallup Korea found that over one quarter of adults (28%) go mountain-climbing at least once a month, including 37% of men and 19% of women. Around half of men fifty or older fell into the category, but so did a number of younger people, including 34% of men in their twenties and 21% of women in their thirties.

Mountain climbing is perhaps the single most popular pastime for Koreans. In the three surveys conducted through last year by Gallup Korea since the 2004 introduction of the five-day workweek, it is held down the top spot for favorite pastime. If anything, the rate has only grown.

What is drawing Koreans to mountains in such numbers? Western media that have peered into the Korean climbing craze have been astonished to see the pricey outfits and gear and practices like sitting around drinking makgeolli (Korean rice beer) -- but they have also noticed something else at work. A Sept. 11 article in the Wall Street Journal observed that “[i]n South Korea, there is no more popular way to tackle the stresses of a grueling workweek than to hike one of the country’s many peaks.” Yet it also quoted one source as noting, “Koreans are such competitive people, and it’s hard to turn off the switch when they go hiking.” The result, the article claims, is a hiking culture in which people “scramble up peaks, take group photos, then quickly descend.”

The Washington Post attributed the practice to the country’s mountainous topography and increased wealth and leisure time. The writer of a travel story about a hike of the Baekdu-Daegan trail in the New York times observed that “the mountains are to Koreans as the Wild West is to Americans.” NPR called hiking “part of the Korean national identity” in a story about second- and third-generation Korean-Americans packing the trails around Los Angeles.

While it may not be written into actual DNA, mountain climbing may be deeply inscribed in Koreans’ cultural DNA. Seonbi, or Confucian scholars, regularly recorded their hikes of the country’s top mountains over the 500 years of the Joseon Dynasty.

“The mountain hiking of Joseon-era nobles who saw landscape sightseeing as an important means of studying was different from the hiking and traveling you see today, but it also holds a lot of implications for us,” said Academy of Korean Studies professor Jung Chi-young, who delivered a presentation on “Joseon Seonbi Mountain Hiking Culture” at an anniversary conference for the Gyeongsang National University Center for Mountain Culture Studies on Nov. 6.

Around 600 surviving examples of Joseon-era hiking records survive today. A compilation by Jung titled “Nobles Go Landscape Sightseeing” depicts members of the period’s privileged class being carried up mountains on palanquins carried by monks, with musicians and gisaeng (female entertainers) in tow. The image may seem strange to contemporary readers, but it also shows the roots of contemporary Korean hiking culture. Nobles would prepare for their journeys by carefully reading the records of previous travelers; social activities included sitting in locations with particularly pleasant vistas to write poetry. Pots would be set up in valleys to boil rice to eat with side dishes that had been brought along. Liquor was also essential for enjoyment, emergency rations, and medicinal purposes.

Joseon-era seonbi went to mountains to enjoy the view, but they also made sure to use the experience as a way of understanding the nature of things and disciplining body and mind. Another difference in mountain attitudes then and now can be seen in the number of seonbi with surviving mountain journey records who also mustered armies during the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century. Past hikers did not insist on making their way all the way to top, as with peaks of Birobong on Mt. Keumgang or Baegundae on Mt. Bukhan. It is a hiking legacy that Koreans have since abandoned -- but one that may warrant rediscovery.

Perhaps the hiking mania can be best understood in terms of Koreans’ inextricable relationship with mountains, as with the foundation legend of Dangun, the hiking journals, or religious rituals for mountain spirits. To quote Gyeongsang National University professor Choi Won-seok, “The Korean people have nature in their DNA.”

By Cho Hong-sup, environment correspondent

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