400-Year Anniversary Of A Famous Ancestor

The Sunday after my company rafting trip, my grandfather took me to Paju for a 400-year anniversary memorial of a famous ancestor of mine.  To be honest, I don't really know who he is or what he did; I can't remember his name, nor do I actually know how famous this guy is.  I think he was a teacher, but given my incredibly limited knowledge of Korean history that is about all I know.


The grave on the top of the hill is where the memorial took place

When we got there, the people in charge of the event were still busy setting everything up.  Since I was one of the youngest people there, they specifically sought me out to help -- e.g. to carry heavy stuff up and down the hill pictured above.  It looks small, but it was incredibly steep and it didn't have any stairs either!  Add morning dew, hot Korean summers, and the fact that my foot was swollen and throbbing from my basketball injury (during the company retreat), and it was brutal to have to carry mats and all the food offerings up to the top of the hill.

There is a lot of preparation that goes into these things.  I think they spent a couple hundred thousand dollars to restore and landscape the place for today, and there were at least a 100 people who showed up.  This is not including the time spent by some of the older women who come down here at the crack of dawn to specially prepare the food for offering.

The memorial was pretty cool to watch since I had never been to one of these things before.  However, everything was conducted in Hanja -- the checklist for the food offerings used was written in Hanja, the ceremony itself was in mostly Hanja, and even a memorial song was sung in Hanja -- therefore, I had no idea what was going on or what they were saying.  There were other people around me taking pictures though, so I figured it was OK for me to take some pictures and some videos throughout the ceremony.

Sign-in sheet with Hanja (Chinese characters)


Food offerings: All of it real (And yes, the raw chicken in the middle is real too...)
The sticks with the attached tissue paper on top of the chicken are incense sticks.


Various old people


Grandpa in the middle


Part of the ceremony

Towards the end of the clip everyone got down to do a deep bow but I wasn't able to capture the entire thing  because I felt awkward and rude to be the only one standing there taking a video of everyone else.


Memorial song, sung entirely with Hanja characters only

Even if you know Korean well it is entirely possible to be unable to understand what they are singing since the lyrics were all in Hanja.

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After lunch, my grandpa and my uncle showed me around Paju, which is a city right next to North Korea.  We went to the Korean War and Unification Museum where I had the chance to see North Korea with my own eyes, but I didn't see the DMZ.  According to my grandpa, "the difference between North Korea and South Korea is that North Korea doesn't have any trees," which was true -- the North Korean hills looked really bare compared to the hills that were on our side.


North Korea on the other side


Military outpost and a double fence to its left

After the museum, we visited the origin of my entire clan in Papyeong (apparently there really is a place called that).  There was an obelisk as well as a couple of plaques that had descriptions of the place, but nothing too exciting or spectacular.

Family origin

Tomb of Yoon Gwan, a famous general

After seeing the obelisk of my family origin, we could have just turned around to go home, but my grandpa wanted to make an hour-long detour to General Yoon Gwan's tomb who lived 900 years ago.  However, by this time I was caffeine deprived and tired from being up since morning so I was too cranky and and annoyed to really care about it.  Besides, like I said before I have no sense Korea's history before WWI, so I couldn't relate to how awesome his achievements were; they didn't feel particularly relevant to me, even if he is somehow distantly related to me.

However, while writing this post I found this news article that I found hilarious and informative on a 300-year feud between the Yoon clan and the Shim clan over this grave site.  It also talks about Korean people's superstitions about grave sites, some of which are pretty ridiculous.  Overall, it just goes to show you how stubborn and bull-headed Koreans can sometimes be.

Additional Pictures

-Emoinacloset