Pan-Korean Team Finds Site of Border Monument

Korean scholars have confirmed the original site of a monument erected in 1712 to mark the border between Korea and Qing-Dynasty China. A survey of the site on Mt. Baekdu reveals that the "Tomun River" identified on the monument as the border between the two nations is not the Tumen River, as China has argued, but a tributary of the Songari River.

The Koguryo Research Foundation on Wednesday announced the results of a joint investigation with North Korean scholars of period relics in the North conducted last month. "We have confirmed where the stone border monument used to be on the Mt. Baekdu hiking path."

The monument stood on the path leading to the summit of the mountain, behind where there is now an army guard post near a parking lot. At the spot, the team found stones supporting the monument, and next to them a plain gray stone erected by North Korea in 1980. Foundation president Kim Jeong-bae said the evidence dovetailed with contemporary accounts and Chinese-language maps of North Korea that mark a spot four km southeast of the Lake of Heaven as “Mt. Baekdu historic stone marker."

The Mt. Baekdu monument bore the inscription, "Make the borders the Yalu River in the west and the Tomun River in the east, and record this in stone at the watershed." The monument disappeared at the time of the Manchurian Incident of 1931. China has claimed that “Tomun” is another name for the Tumen River.