Dynastic History|Wolseong, Gyeongju — What the Court Threw in the Moat

Silla's rulers held their palace ground at 月城, Wolseong, a crescent earthwork on the edge of the capital, and cut a moat along its landward side. In 1985 and 1986, excavators working the silt of that ditch lifted out something the court never meant to leave behind: 목간, wooden tablets, the strips Silla clerks wrote on. Some are documents, some are tags that once hung on goods, some are a hand practising characters. None carries a date. They are placed instead by the pottery around them and by the offices they name — one mentions the 典大等, a post created in 565 and renamed in 651 — which sets the group broadly between the late sixth and the early seventh century.

The mud kept them because the moat was where used paperwork ended up. What survives of this court's administration, then, is largely what its clerks discarded: instructions, tallies, the names of people who owed something to someone. The narrative history of the same dynasty comes from the 三國史記, compiled in 1145, and the 三國遺事, from the 1280s — both written centuries afterwards by compilers with arguments of their own. The tablets serve nobody's argument.

Moat sections were investigated from the 1970s. The Gyeongju institute opened trial trenches inside the fortress in December 2014 and began full excavation in March 2015, and the work continues. Wolseong today is a long grassed rampart inside the Gyeongju Historic Areas, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000, with one stretch of the moat restored and holding water.

📸 Cover: the restored moat below the Wolseong rampart — Brian Yap, 2006, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.