Curator & Collector

Sungnyemun (aka Namdaemun) Gate a few years ago, before its recent destruction

Humans seem to have the knack for destroying their cultural heritage and patrimony for the most base and selfish reasons. One thinks, for example, of the priceless Buddhist statues in Afganistan that the Taliban blew up some years ago. Earlier today we blogged about the violent theft of art from a museum in Switzerland’s Zurich. This evening’s post comes from Seoul, South Korea, where the first “National Treasure” to be listed–Sungnyemun Gate–has been torched into ruins by an old man angry with the government over a land settlement. The following picture, taken from the China Daily, shows the flames that destroyed the wood of the six-hundred year-old structure:

I lived in Seoul for two and a half years, and I, like pretty much everyone else in that city, appreciated the grand old gate sitting in the midst of a modern traffic circle. The first picture above was taken a few years ago with my first digital camera–an old, and not very good, webcam.Today, photographs of the destruction are all over the internet, but few can cover the Korean scene photographically better than Robert Koehler. For his own pre-fire pictures, see here. For his post with news pictures of the aftermath of the destroyed gate, see here.