To the Diamond Mountains
A Hundred-Year Journey through China and Korea
By (author) Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Publication date:
16 November 2010Length of book:
216 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
238x161mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781442205031
This compelling and engaging book takes readers on a unique journey through China and North and South Korea. Tessa Morris-Suzuki travels from Harbin in the north to Busan in the south, and on to the mysterious Diamond Mountains, which lie at the heart of the Korean Peninsula's crisis. As she follows in the footsteps of a remarkable writer, artist, and feminist who traced the route a century ago—in the year when Korea became a Japanese colony—her saga reveals an unseen face of China and the two Koreas: a world of monks, missionaries, and smugglers; of royal tombs and socialist mausoleums; a world where today's ideological confrontations are infused with myth and memory. Northeast Asia is poised at a moment of profound change as the rise of China is transforming the global order and tensions run high on the Korean Peninsula, the last Cold War divide. Probing the deep past of this region, To the Diamond Mountains offers a new and unexpected perspective on its present and future.
The Diamond Mountains, located primarily in North Korea, are renowned for their beauty and have been an object of interest, even adoration, by sages, poets, spiritualists, and ordinary Koreans for centuries. Currently, the region has been a site of increased tension between North and South Korea, as they had shared administration of a tourist park there. Morris-Suzuki, an Australian professor, recently traveled through northeast China and the two Koreas; she was retracing the route of Emily Kemp, an extraordinary writer, artist, and intrepid adventurer who wrote about her experiences a century ago. Morris-Suzuki, like her predecessor, is a keen observer and a fine writer; she has combined the disciplines of history and travel writing in an absorbing analysis of the past, present, and future of this volatile region. China and South Korea, with their dynamism, seem a world apart from the repressive, static North Korea, but Morris-Suzuki succeeds in putting a human face on the long-suffering people of that pariah state.