Reevaluating hwarang images: national scholarship in colonial Korea and its traditional sources

Title:

Reevaluating hwarang images: national scholarship in colonial Korea and its traditional sources

Creator:

Kyoung-hwa

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:512af2e0-fa39-4213-8ad1-189b5bda2aad
uuid:512af2e0-fa39-4213-8ad1-189b5bda2aad

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

Throughout history, various images have been associated with the hwarang. Most authors consider the hwarang to have been an élite military unit composed of handsome young aristocrats of the Silla period, while others contend that the main task of the hwarang was of religious nature, i.e. the spreading of Buddhist beliefs. Then again, some would emphasize the supposed educational function of the hwarang institution, and finally there is speculation that the hwarang might have been a group of wandering homosexual performers. Even though some of these hwarang images seem to be absurd, or at least not justifiable based on the extant sources, all of them have managed to survive and determine our current manifold images of the hwarang. This article aims to closely examine the perception of the hwarang during the colonial period, based on the opinions of the most influential historians of colonial Korea, Sin Ch’ae-ho and Ch’oe Nam-sǒn. In order to fully comprehend their concept of the hwarang, we should begin by scrutinizing Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa, which provided the textual basis for Sin and Ch’oe’s work.

Language:

English

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Source:

Archiv orientální | 2008 Volume:76 | Number:2

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false