A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [125]
This roof tile comes from Korea around the year 700, when the newly unified state was enjoying great prosperity. It is a moment in Korea’s history that is now read differently by north and south, but it is still central to any modern definition of Korean identity.
By 700, Korea was already a rich, urbanized country, a major trade player at the end of the famous Silk Road. But this object isn’t made of precious silk; it’s cheap clay – but clay that tells us a great deal about Korea’s ‘golden age’.
One of the fascinating things about this period is that on both edges of the Eurasian landmass similar political developments were under way. Tribes and little kingdoms were coalescing into larger units that would eventually become some of the nation states that we know today: England and Denmark on one side, Japan and Korea on the other. For all these countries, these were the critical centuries.
Lying between north-east China and Japan, the Korean peninsula was, like England at the same date, fragmented into competing kingdoms. In 668 the southernmost kingdom, Silla, with the backing of Tang Dynasty China – then, as now, the regional superpower – conquered its neighbours and imposed its rule from the far south to somewhere well north of what is now Pyongyang. It never controlled the far north (the border with modern China), but for the next 300 years the unified Silla kingdom ruled most of what is now Korea from its imperial capital in the south, Kyongju, a city splendidly adorned with grand new buildings. The ceramic roof tile in the British Museum comes from one of those new buildings, in this case a temple, and it tells us a great deal about the achievements and apprehensions of the young Silla state around the year 700.
The tile is about the size of a large old-fashioned roof slate – just under 30 centimetres by 30 (12 inches by 12) – and it’s made of heavy cream-coloured clay. The top and the sides are edged with a roughly decorated border, and in the middle is a fearsome face looking straight out, with a squashed nose, bulging eyes, small horns and abundant whiskers. It looks like a cross between a Chinese dragon and a Pekinese dog. The tile is very similar to ones made in Tang China at the same time, but this is emphatically not a Chinese object. Unlike the broad grin of a Chinese dragon, the mouth here is small and aggressive – and the modelling of the tile has a rough vigour that is very un-Chinese.
It looks a bit like an oriental gargoyle – and that is pretty well what it was. It would have had a similar position to a gargoyle, high up on a temple or a grand house. The features of the face are quite rough, and it’s obvious that it has been made by pushing the wet clay into a fairly simple mould. This is clearly a mass-produced object, but that is why it’s so interesting; this is just one of tens of thousands of tiles designed to cover roofs that would once have been thatched but in prosperous Silla were now tiled with objects like this.
The Korean specialist Dr Jane Portal explains why the Silla wanted to build such a grand capital as Kyongju, and why they needed so many new houses:
The city of Kyongju was based on the Chinese capital Chang’an, which was at the time the biggest city in the world, and Kyongju developed hugely once Silla had unified most of the Korean peninsula. A lot of the aristocrats from the kingdoms which were defeated by Silla had to come and live in Kyongju, and they had magnificent houses with tiled roofs. This was a new thing, to have tiled roofs, so this tile would have been a sort of status symbol.
Tiles were sought after not only because they were expensive to make but, above all, because they didn’t catch fire like traditional thatch; burning thatch was the greatest physical threat