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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2018
Mount Paektu/Changbai is a massive stratovolcano situated on the current border between North Korea and China, in a region that has historically lain at the edges of competing Eurasian polities. Formed by a past of dramatic eruptions, Mount Paektu/Changbai has long been held as a powerful, sentient entity by those living near it, but the mountain's unique geographical features and distance from political centres rendered it extremely elusive as an object of elite empirical knowledge. This article examines narratives of multiple expeditions to Mount Paektu/Changbai from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in order to understand the role of space in the creation of knowledge about the mountain, and to probe how that knowledge intersected with political goals. Consideration of human experience of the mountain's topography and environment reveals a complex relationship between proximal and distal perceptions of nature. Even as they sought to create rational, ‘universal’ forms of knowledge about the mountain, Asian elites appropriated more localized belief in the mountain's powers, creating a hybrid knowledge that combined science and miracles. As the political context shifted in the late nineteenth century, the positioning of this hybrid knowledge shifted to become an indiginized basis for national resistance. This consideration of Mount Paektu/Changbai highlights the virtues of making space and environment central to the political and cultural history of northeast Asia.
1 Paektusan means ‘White Head/Top Mountain’ in Korean, while ‘Changbaishan’ can be interpreted to mean ‘Long White Mountain’ or ‘Ever-White Mountain’. The suffix san/shan means ‘mountain’ in Korean and Chinese, respectively.
2 On the Millennium Eruption, see Xu, J. et al., ‘Climatic Impact of the Millennium Eruption of Changbaishan Volcano in China: New Insights from High-Precision Radiocarbon Wiggle-Match Dating’. Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 40, no. 1, 16 January 2013, pp. 54–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wei, H., et al., ‘Review of Eruptive Activity at Tianchi Volcano, Changbaishan, Northeast China: Implications for Possible Future Eruptions’. Bulletin of Volcanology, vol. 75, no. 4, 14 March 2013, pp. 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horn, S., ‘Volatile Emissions During the Eruption of Baitoushan Volcano (China/North Korea) c. 969 AD’. Journal of Vulcanology, vol. 61, no. 8, February 2000, pp. 537–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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83 Ibid., p. 240.
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