Ten-story Stone Pagoda from Gyeongcheonsa Temple Site

A marble pagoda 13.5 metres high, cut in 1348 for a temple in Gyeonggi Province and carved to look as though it were built of wood. In 1907 it was taken apart and shipped to Japan by Tanaka Mitsuaki, Japan's Minister of Imperial Household Affairs, without authorisation. It was returned in 1918 after an international press campaign run by two foreign journalists working in Korea, the Englishman Ernest T. Bethell and the American Homer Hulbert.

The removal, the campaign and the return are documented in sequence and by named people, which is rare for a colonial-era case this early. The step nobody has published is the one in between: what actually caused the Japanese authorities to send it back is not established in any source reachable here, and this record does not fill the gap.

What came back was a heap of dismantled marble. The pagoda was not reassembled until 1960, was taken down again in the 1990s because acid rain was eating the stone, and was finally set up indoors at the National Museum of Korea in 2005. Its temple is gone and its site lies north of the line that has divided the peninsula since 1953.

What it is, and how many storeys it has

A pagoda of marble, 13.5 metres high, standing on a three-tiered foundation that projects in four directions like a cross. The lowest three storeys repeat that cruciform plan; the seven above are square. Each panel of the tiered base is carved with Buddhas, bodhisattvas, flowers and arabesque ornament.

The upper storeys do something odd and deliberate. They carry railings, hip-and-gabled roofs, eaves and carved courses meant to read as roof tiles: the marble is worked to create the illusion of a wooden building. This is a stone monument imitating the timber architecture of its own period, which makes it a source for Goryeo wooden building as well as an object in its own right.

It has ten storeys. It is very commonly said to have thirteen, because the three-tiered foundation reads as three more levels to anyone counting from a photograph. Getting the count right is not pedantry: the name of the object in Korean and in every catalogue is the ten-storey pagoda, and a source that says thirteen has miscounted rather than described a different thing.

Marble, which is the whole problem

Korean stone-carvers worked in granite. It is the material of the peninsula's pagodas and of most of its sculpture, and it is extremely durable. This pagoda is marble, and marble is why almost everything that has happened to it since 1907 has happened.

Marble takes the fine undercutting that produces those imitation eaves and tiles; granite does not, at least not at this scale of detail. The choice buys the illusion of timber. It also buys a stone that acid attacks, and the rain of a twentieth-century industrial city is acidic.

So the material explains the object's ambition and its fragility together. The damage became serious enough that the Korean authorities took the monument apart again and, in 2005, moved it indoors, which is not a step any of Korea's granite pagodas has required.

1348, and the temple that no longer exists

The inscription on the first storey gives the year: the fourth year of King Chungmok, 1348. Goryeo was then in the last decades of its existence and had spent nearly a century under Mongol Yuan overlordship, with its royal house tied to the Yuan court by marriage and its elite serving in Dadu.

The pagoda stood at Gyeongcheonsa, a temple at the foot of Mount Buso in Gwangdeok-myeon, Gaepung County, Gyeonggi Province. The temple is recorded as lost. Gaepung lies in the northern part of the old Gyeonggi Province, on the far side of the line that has divided Korea since 1953, which means that the findspot of a South Korean National Treasure is not accessible from the country that holds it.

That is worth sitting with, because it changes the meaning of the 1918 return. The pagoda was returned to Korea, and Korea was then one country under Japanese rule. It was never returned to its site, and since 1953 it could not be.

The removal of 1907

In 1907, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Tanaka Mitsuaki, Japan's Minister of Imperial Household Affairs, had the pagoda dismantled and smuggled to Japan. It was done without authorisation.

The year matters. 1907 is the year the Japanese Resident-General forced the abdication of Emperor Gojong, disbanded the Korean army and reduced the Korean state to a formality. Formal annexation followed in 1910. A senior Japanese court official removing a Korean national monument in 1907 was operating in a country whose government could not stop him and whose sovereignty was three years from being extinguished.

It should be said plainly what the transport of this object involved. A 13.5-metre marble structure of ten storeys on a cruciform base cannot be carried away; it must be taken apart, block by block, catalogued or not, moved to a port and shipped. That is not an opportunistic theft. It is a project with a budget, and it was carried out by the office that administered the Japanese imperial household.

Two journalists, and a return whose mechanism nobody has published

What is documented is publicity. Two western journalists working in Korea, Ernest T. Bethell, an Englishman, and Homer Hulbert, an American missionary and journalist, launched an international press campaign denouncing the removal as theft. The sources used here name the two men and do not name the papers they wrote for, so this record does not either.

Both are substantial figures in the history of the Korean independence movement in their own right, and both operated against a colonial administration that regarded them as a serious nuisance. Their weapon was that they were not Korean subjects and could not simply be silenced by the Resident-General's censorship of the Korean press.

In 1918 the pagoda was returned to Korea. That is a restitution which predates the 1970 UNESCO Convention by fifty-two years and predates almost every framework restitution arguments now use, and there was no law to invoke.

What is not documented is the mechanism of the return itself: whether it followed an administrative decision, a ministerial ruling, or an informal accommodation, and what part the campaign played in it. The sources consulted place the campaign and the return in sequence and do not join them. Bethell died in 1909, two years after the removal and nine before the return, so a picture of continuous pressure by the same two men across the whole period cannot be right. The honest statement is that a press campaign was run, that the pagoda came back, and that nobody consulted here has published the step between.

Forty-two years in pieces

The pagoda came back in 1918 and was placed on the grounds of Gyeongbokgung Palace. It was not put up. The colonial authorities intended to install it at their own museum; the Korean independence movement broke out shortly afterwards - the March First Movement of 1919 - and the plan was shelved.

It stayed down for four decades. The reassembly was finally carried out in 1960 under Lim Cheon, a museum researcher and architect, at Gyeongbokgung.

A record that says returned in 1918 and stops there has told about a fifth of the story. For forty-two years the object existed as a stack of numbered marble on palace ground, through a colonial period, a liberation, a partition and a war. The restitution of 1918 restored possession. It did not restore the monument, and nothing in the campaign that won it obliged anyone to.

Taken down a second time, by the weather

Standing in the open in central Seoul, the marble was attacked by acid rain. The surface that carries the Buddhas, the bodhisattvas and the imitation roof tiles is precisely the part a dissolving stone loses first.

The pagoda was dismantled again for conservation, and in 2005 the restored monument was moved indoors, to the new National Museum of Korea at Yongsan, where it stands inside one of the main halls. It is the only way this object can now survive, and it is the second time in a century that it has been taken to pieces and put back together.

Two dismantlings, then: one by a foreign official in 1907 and one by its own conservators in the 1990s. One was a theft and the other a rescue, and both required every joint to be opened and every block handled, so the pagoda standing in Yongsan is a modern assembly whichever way the history is read. There is no published figure in the sources consulted for how much of the original jointing and surface survives the two campaigns, and that is a real gap in the record of a National Treasure.

The other marble pagoda in Seoul

About 120 years after this pagoda was made, the Joseon royal court commissioned a closely similar one for Wongaksa Temple. It was built in 1467, it is marble, it is twelve metres high, it has ten storeys, it stands in what is now Tapgol Park in central Seoul, and it is National Treasure of Korea No. 2. Since 1999 it has been enclosed in glass to protect it, for the same reason this one was moved indoors.

Two marble ten-storey pagodas, both National Treasures, both in Seoul, one modelled on the other and separated by 119 years and 1.5 metres of height. They are confused constantly, in photograph captions above all, and the confusion runs in both directions.

The distinguishing marks are easy once known. This pagoda stands indoors, in a museum hall, unglazed, on a cruciform base. The Wongaksa pagoda stands outdoors, in a park, inside a glass case. Any photograph showing a pagoda behind glass in the open air is the Wongaksa pagoda and is not this object.

What it is worth, and why the question does not arise

There is no sale, no auction record, no valuation and no insurance figure in the public domain. The pagoda has been Korean state property since its return and has carried the highest national designation since 20 December 1962. It cannot be sold and never has been.

The only transaction in its history was not a sale either. In 1907 it changed hands by removal, and no consideration passed to anybody in Korea. The most useful financial statement that can be made about the object is a negative one: it establishes that a monument of this rank has no market and therefore no price, and that the entire commercial apparatus of provenance - hammer, premium, estimate, underbidder - is inapplicable to it. What it has instead is a chain of custody, and that chain is unusually complete.