The Gwanggaeto Stele
Part 2 of 4 – (Re)Discovery
Almost 1400 years after it was raised, the Gwanggaeto stele was rediscovered. But why did it take so long? In short: bad luck.
Located in the Northeastern Chinese province of Jilin, the stele sat in an area of geopolitical neglect. When King Gwanggeato’s kingdom fell, the entire region fell outside of both Chinese and Korean influence. And when the Manchu conquered China in 1644, the instituted something called the ‘closure policy’, which blocked all entry into the vast areas the Manchu controlled, including the stele’s site.
When the policy came to an end in the mid-1800s, there was a swell of migration. As settlers built up the area, they found various bricks and tiles that could be used to build new homes. But these bricks were inscribed, and a few of them even read, “May the mausoleum of the Great King be secure like a mountain and firm like a peak.” These inscriptions came to the attention of Chinese scholars and epigraphers, and inevitably Korean and Japanese ones too.
When the stele was finally found, it was covered in overgrowth, and only a sporadic collection of individual characters could be seen. To uncover the whole inscription, the county magistrate ordered the vegetation to be burnt off. Unfortunately, this damaged the stele’s surface, and made some of the characters completely illegible.