Bburi Park

This weekend was a travel weekend.  Chris had a seminar to do in Daejeon, and while he was off teaching people how to publish their own e-books, I went to Bburi Park.  Bburi means "root", and in this case it was referring, somewhat poetically, to families.  There are only about 300 surnames in all of Korea and many of those are disappearing (though Lee, Kim and Park are still going quite strong!)  This park is devoted to summarizing the history of several of the more populous clans.  Each one gets its own stone statue with its history carved into a plaque.

Some of the statues are more... um... "interesting" than others...

The history on the plaques was usually along the lines of "And then Issachar begat Tola, and Tola begat Rephaiah..."  In other words, somewhat dry, and the kind of thing I'm not really going to bother working through without a serious sense of religious duty.  Here's the beginning of the story of the Lee family from Cheongju:

An on-site genealogical museum displays the record books of several families and not much else.  

Most of them were illustrated:

In addition, there's an exhibit devoted to multiculturalism.  Now, I have to say, this is a nice gesture.  Korea's having a hard time trying to break out of the 단일 (ethnically homogenous) society under which they've always lived.  Consider that only a hundred years ago this was known as the hermit kingdom.  Still, they have a ways to go.  The whole exhibit was somewhat clumsily put together, starting with the misspelling of the name of one of the women whose story is told:

(That should be Ploenchit.  Fallenits isn't even that close.)  

And then, of course, the poor English in the displays such as this one which invites people to "stare at" the foreign women living here.  No, guys, I think that's been done enough.  

(The Korean should have been translated as "peek into" or "get a sense of".)

This chart shows the number of families and individuals with each surname.  It's pretty much exactly the same as the one on Wikipedia, so I don't know who copied who, but there was definitely some peeking over shoulders.

That says that out of a population of about fifty million Koreans, ten million are surnamed Kim.  

The museum and park were not that interesting, I suppose, but I still felt like it was a worthwhile visit.  It was interesting to see the idea of the park - imagine trying to set up something like that in America or Canada.  You'd have to devote a pretty substantial area of one of the prairie provinces in order to fit in all the names.  I also enjoyed seeing the reactions of the Koreans, for whom all this had a lot more meaning.  The elderly were there remembering their history and teaching it to their grandchildren, and it was nice to see that.