With Chinese tourism falling thanks to a spat between Seoul and Beijing, the island idyll is trumpeting its past as a theatre for a bloody crackdown on communists
K o Wan-soon’s most vivid childhood memory is of her village in flames. It was 1949, she was nine years old, and soldiers barged through her front door and dragged her out of her home along with her mother and younger brother.
Once outside, she saw the neighbouring thatched-roof houses ablaze and heard the crackle of gunfire.
Her brother wailed in fright until a soldier hit him over the head with a club to silence him. In the chaos, she managed to flee, staying low to the ground to avoid
being spotted, crawling on her hands and knees to the mountains on the village’s outskirts.
“I noticed that my hands were sticky from touching the soil,” she recalls. “Then I realised they were covered in blood.”
After Ko fled her village, she spent 40 days in a cave “living like a pig”, as she puts it, without bathing and only eating coarse grains she and other hiding villagers could find on the ground.
Ko’s peaceful rural life was never the same after that, and for the next several years her home – South Korea ’s Jeju Island – remained engulfed in a protracted ideological conflict that remains for some a source of anguish to this day.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, South Korean army troops cracked down violently on what they saw as a dangerous communist insurgency on Jeju, causing anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 deaths.
For years, Ko never spoke of her experiences, both out of a reluctance to confront her painful memories and because speaking out about her island’s tumultuous history could get one branded as a communist or a troublemaker.
Today, her live testimony is part of “Jeju Dark Tours” – organised excursions across the grim sites that dot the island’s landscape like pockmarks. Over the tour’s itinerary, Jeju’s history as a theatre for the bloody ideological battle that has run throughout modern Korean history, climaxing with the 1950-53 Korean war, unfurls in tear-jerking detail.
The tours are aimed at both South Koreans and visitors from abroad, in an effort to shed light on history that is not well known.
Baek Gayoon, the main tour guide, hopes the tours can be part of a national reckoning – a way to come to terms with a painful history in which people lost their lives in incidents that were never thoroughly investigated and are remembered by some as necessary protection
of the country’s political order, but as indiscriminate massacres by others. The political backdrop of the time was discord in Korea over the future of the country, with nationalists resisting planned elections in 1948 out of the belief that instead of operating as a separate state, South Korea should work towards unifying with North Korea.
Jeju, an island off the southern coast with a regional dialect and a spirit of autonomy, was a hotbed of anti-government sentiment.
The spark that lit the flame came on April 3,1948, when hundreds of rebels attacked police and paramilitary installations across the island. The uprising spurred a violent crackdown by the government, and a years-long, island-wide witch hunt for anyone suspected of communist leanings or ties.
Baek argues that this history is still relevant in Asia today. “I see articles about the Rohingya in Myanmar and am reminded that this kind of violence is still going on today,” she says. “It’s important to remember what can happen.”
With a population of around 600,000, Jeju offers a bucolic respite from the greyness and congestion of South Korean cities and has long been a popular honeymoon and holiday destination. Sitting at the island’s centre is Mount Halla, a national park with a broad network of hiking trails.
