We left the swirl of Jeju City to travel to the south-western corner of Jeju, heading (via a famous tea plantation on the well-trodden tourist circuit) for a bonsai garden (Spirited Garden in one satnav translation, Sprited Garden in another). The garden was set up by a man (in one version a pig farmer, in another a tailor, in a third, the owner of a shirt factory) and built over many years. As soon as we entered, we were given instructions:
We were also given a history of the place (yet another version):
The garden was truly beautiful and contemplative, with hardly any other tourists (unusual for Jeju), allowing us to admire many, many bonsai:
We were fortunate to see someone actually cutting a tree which is such painstaking work:
And the place was full of the traditional figures from Jeju – we are reliably informed that these are hareubang or stone grandfathers and can be found all over Korea (usually at the entrance to fish restaurants):
They usually have cheery expressions and their hands on their tummies. The Rough Guide says that if the right hand is above the left, then they are more scholarly; if the left is above the right, they are more military. Their purpose is mysterious but they used to be at the entrance to villages so it is assumed that they were a means of protection. (One scurrilous interpretation is that they are highly phallic in appearance and therefore are fertility symbols – so lots of miniature versions are sold to women who are finding it hard to fall pregnant. Sounds like good marketing to me!)
They’re still making them: here’s Sue with the biggest one of all (Sue for scale of course). I would take the interpretation below with a pinch of salt, as we did with a lot of the information in the garden:
We then headed off for a much-less visited site of a terrible atrocity which is very much part of Jeju’s hidden past. The Jeju Uprising and Massacre (known as the Jeju 4-3 incident) was a terrible state-backed counterinsurgency campaign lasting from 3 April 1947 (hence 4-3) until 1954. About 25,000-30,000 people were killed or went missing – about ten per cent of the population. The Jeju islanders opposed the division of the Korean Peninsula and the US-backed elections in each of the countries.
The South Korean policy, military forces and right-wing paramilitary groups carried out mass executions and other atrocities. The events were heavily censored and silenced by the South Korean authorities for decades. The museum we visited had been the site of one such atrocity with 134 people killed. When they were finally buried, the police turned up again and again breaking up the gravestones and trying to cover up what had happened.
Shockingly, it was only in 2022 that the government started to issue posthumous declarations of innocence and compensation for victims.
The museum set up on the site was only opened in 2025 and a very nice man explained to us in Korean (via the very useful translation app Papago) what had happened. (I don’t think many Koreans find their way here, let alone foreigners.)
He also explained how hard it had been to get any recognition from the government as to what had happened – and how that fight is still going on. He also told us that the families of those who had been murdered were discriminated against and blacklisted for decades.
Han Kang’s book ‘We do not part’ tells the story of the same series of atrocities in another part of Jeju.
It’s hard to reconcile all this with the countryside around the site which is very fertile as it’s all volcanic, and full of market gardens and great lumps of volcanic rock:
We’re now on the south-west coast and have another room with a view of the sea, though this one oddly has a bathtub in the window … and yes, that is the bed and a fridge. I think a bathtub in the room is a first for us …
