Baekdudaegan: Korea's Great Mountain Spine

Your body has a strong spine down the middle. In the same way, if you unfold a map of the Korean Peninsula, one thick line runs from Mt. Baekdu in the north to Mt. Jiri in the south. It stretches a full 1,400 kilometers (km), or about 870 miles. That mountain chain is Baekdudaegan.

The most amazing thing about Baekdudaegan is this: if you walked along its ridgeline from Mt. Baekdu to Mt. Jiri, you would never cross a single river or stream. People in the Joseon era looked at their land through an idea called sanjabunsuryeong (the principle that a mountain ridge divides the waters and forms the border between river systems). Their saying went: 'Mountains divide the water, and water cannot cross mountains.'

Think of rain falling on a ridge. The drops split at the crest and flow into different rivers. In the same way, the mountain chain is never cut by water. It stays whole. Baekdudaegan is a brilliant way of seeing the land as one living thing, with every part connected.

If you went to school in Korea, you may remember memorizing names like the Taebaek, Sobaek, and Charyeong ranges in social studies class. Those names come from a geological system of mountain ranges. It was set up in the early 20th century by a Japanese geologist, Bunjiro Koto, who sorted the mountains by the rock types and structures underground.

Baekdudaegan, by contrast, goes by what you can actually see on the surface: how the ridgelines connect. On a geological map, for example, ranges like the Gwangju and Charyeong ranges are drawn cutting across rivers. The traditional Baekdudaegan, though, follows the ridgeline smoothly, never broken by waterways.

A book called the Sanggyeongpyo, said to have been compiled by the late Joseon geographer Sin Gyeong-jun, lays out the country's 'veins' by this principle: one great trunk (daegan), a jeonggan, and 13 jeongmaek (branch ridges).

To be a bit more precise, Baekdudaegan is not just a hiking trail or a historical idea. It is the most important core ecological corridor for protecting biodiversity on the Korean Peninsula. Many wild animals, such as the endangered Korean goral and the Asiatic black bear, use this mountain chain like a highway to travel north and south.

At the same time, Baekdudaegan was a huge fence that divided the cultures and languages of the people who lived there long ago. High mountain ridges are hard to cross, so dialects, customs, and ways of life naturally split along them, as with Yeongdong and Yeongseo (the east and west sides of the range), or Honam and Yeongnam.

In the end, Baekdudaegan is the skeleton of the land, the source of its clear water, and the most basic ground where the history and culture of the people of the peninsula took root.