2. The Need for Research on the Cultural Background of Dangjin for Understanding East Asia

The place name "Dangjin (唐津)," meaning the port that leads to Tang China, is among the most distinctively East Asian of all Korean place names. Moreover, Hanjin (漢津)—the old name of Dangjin, meaning the port that leads to Han China—can serve as a key that, by reaching back as far as the Han dynasty, resolves many unsolved questions in the ancient history of Korea and China. That Dangjin drew attention as a port bound for China during the Unified Silla period was because it lay on the shortest route from China to Gyeongju. From the Goryeo period onward, with Gaeseong becoming the center, the Yeseong estuary became the focal point; but throughout Unified Silla the hub of trade and intellectual exchange with China was Dangjin.

The reason the present author pays attention to Dangjin can be explained more clearly from a broader spatiotemporal perspective. First, examining it temporally, the late Baekje–Unified Silla period, when Dangjin drew attention, was a very important era in the time system of the East Asian calendar (曆法). The period in which the Baekje Revival Movement came to an end, taking the Battle of Baekchon River as its starting point, was the eleventh lunar month of 663, which in the solar calendar falls almost exactly on the winter solstice of 663.^[13] This winter solstice of 663 is also the first day of a cycle of the Eastern calendar that returns only once every 1,980 years.^[14] The first day of the Eastern calendar, which applies the sixty-year sexagenary cycle, ought to be the jiazi hour of the jiazi day of the jiazi month of the jiazi year; but because of the principle whereby the Eastern calendar simultaneously applies both the lunar and the solar calendars, the first day in the Eastern calendar becomes the jiazi hour of the jiazi day of the jiazi month of the guihai year, and this very day was the winter solstice of 663. Viewed through the Eastern calendar, the fact that in all of world history Baekje alone fell on this day can be interpreted to mean that Baekje's culture was the culture that led the 1,980-year cycle of world culture, and that Dangjin lay at its center. By coincidence, in China too there was, over some 1,800 years, only a single female emperor—Wu Zetian—and this was moreover the very time when she attempted the female-emperor Fengshan rite.^[15] When astronomical observation records are simulated, it is said that on this day the planets of the solar system were aligned in a single row.

Viewed macroscopically in spatial terms, Dangjin was also a central region of the Korean Peninsula, beyond East Asia. The Naepo region, which includes Dangjin, was described early on by Yi Jung-hwan as the most livable place in Chungnam,^[16] and in the geomancy (pungsu) that regards the peninsula as a whole it was also said to be a place like a mother's embrace within the Korean Peninsula. This resembles the position that the Korean Peninsula occupies on the earth as a whole, so that, in geomantic terms, Dangjin occupies a central position not only in East Asia but in the world.

Dangjin's culture of practical statecraft for the people's welfare became widely known through Hanseo University's Humanities City Project, but the very name Dangjin already embodied the characteristics of this culture. The place-name Dangjin, meaning "the port leading to the Tang dynasty," is already rich in elements of a culture of practical statecraft for the people's welfare. The common characteristic of maritime cultures centered on exchange is, as in the cases of Greece and Japan, a pragmatic culture. Yet since the era of Unified Silla, Dangjin was not a center of maritime commercial culture; the point that distinguishes it from other maritime cultures is that it also incorporates Korea's internal culture, which emphasizes orthodoxy over practicality.^[17] Unlike other maritime cultures, Dangjin was a subdued and enigmatic maritime culture that contracted inward.

Behind the fact that Dangjin's distinctive culture is not well understood lies the still-unresolved and puzzling background of the Battle of Baekchon River, one part of the historical context surrounding Dangjin. It is commonly said that the Battle of Baekchon River determined the history and culture of the three nations of Korea, China, and Japan. Occurring in a region adjacent to Dangjin, the Battle of Baekchon River refers to the largest battle of the Baekje Revival Movement—the only national revival movement in Korean history—which the Baekje remnant people waged over three years against Silla and Tang immediately after Baekje's fall in 660. As suggested by its epithet as an East Asian world war on the scale of the Imjin War, the most elite army and naval forces of all three nations of Korea, China, and Japan clashed on a massive scale at the Battle of Baekchon River. The Battle of Baekchon River is regarded as the battle in which the cultures of Korea, China, and Japan—the three nations that have become the center of today's world economy—first diverged, and much research has been conducted on its course,^[18] while it has also been aired on television several times.^[19] Yet the question of why the Silla–Tang and Baekje–Wa alliances formed in fact remains unresolved. In terms of trauma proper, it is the background and the outcome, rather than the course, that matter, and that outcome too begins with an understanding of the background. If the Battle of Baekchon River was the event that determined East Asia, it can also be said to be the event that can resolve East Asia's trauma. This essay seeks to examine one way of viewing East Asian trauma through Dangjin.