Word: koryo
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While Korea's ceramic tradition is as impressive as China's, the smaller country naturally has a more monolithic tradition. The exhibit creates a coherent chronology by dividing the tradition into its four historical periods: the Three Kingdoms Period (57 B.C.A.D. 668), the United Silla Period (668-935), the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392) and the Choson Dynasty...
...subsequent two periods, the Koryo Dynasty and the Choson Dynasty, Korean ceramics start to look like what most Western viewers would expect of Oriental ceramics. The collection of wares on display from these two periods are truly magnificent, and they stand as premier examples of the differing traditions of Korean and Chinese ceramics. In the Koryo Period, Korean potters perfected the technique of celadon glazing. Celsdon wares, glazed in a blue to green glaze, started in China and traveled into Korea. The celadon glazes, which gain their color from iron compounds contained in the glaze, were well suited as glazes...
...that first emerged with the joint North-South agreement of 1972 have long since evaporated. Recent South Korean suggestions of renewed negotiations were, snarled a North Korean radio broadcast last month, "nothing but a dog barking at the moon." Pyongyang currently aims to create a "Democratic Confederal Republic of Koryo." As preconditions to further talks, however, it demands complete U.S. withdrawal from the peninsula and the overthrow of the present South Korean government...
...ceramics, Korea was unsurpassed by her neighbors. During the Koryo dynasty (A.D. 918-1392), even the Chinese praised Korean pottery, marveling that "the secret color of Koryo is the first under heaven." The secret color was celadon, a haunting shade of pale green applied in rich, oily glazes. Breaking from the self-conscious traditions of the Chinese, the Korean potters indulged their own romantic sensibilities, producing elegant, elongated vessels. Some bloomed into flowers and animals-a water dropper took the form of a monkey; a tea dish the shape of a water lily...
Korea in 1392, as in 1965, was a nation violently divided. The Koryo dynasty was challenged by the House of Yi, and civil war was in the air. At this dangerous juncture Jong Mong-ju, a minister loyal to the old dynasty, paid a courtesy call on King Taejo, the father of Yi Bang-won, the leading strategist of the opposition. His host's son, in salutation, took up a harp and sang this sinister and seditious ditty...