SEOUL, June 17 (AJP) - This year I climbed the West Slope on June 11 and the North Slope on June 12. On the 11th, the West Slope was buried in snow. Both the mountain and Cheonji, the Heaven Lake, were submerged in white, with only a dark blue gleam of water showing through. The next day, on the North Slope, the snow had thinned considerably, and the same lake looked like an entirely different place.
The sky over Cheonji wouldn't hold still either. In less than a minute, the clouds would clear and then close back over, again and again. Some people who had been waiting far longer than I had still never got a proper look at the lake before giving up and turning back.
Watching the snow pile up along the ridge on the West Slope, I naturally thought of the name "Baekdu." Baekdu-san literally means "white-headed mountain." The summit stays snow-covered for roughly eight months of the year, and even in the snowless months, pale pumice left over from past volcanic activity covers the peak, so it always looks white from a distance. The name "Baekdu-san" appeared in records sometime after the Balhae period in the seventh century, earlier than most of the famous mountains in the Korean Peninsula, such as Bulham-san. In China, the same mountain is called Changbai Shan, or "Ever-White Mountain," a name translated from the Manchu for "long white mountain" and in use since the Liao and Jin dynasties. Two different languages, looking at the same landscape, arrived at nearly the same name.
For Koreans, Baekdu Mountain is more than just a peak. It's regarded as the starting point of the Baekdudaegan, the mountain range from which all of the Korean Peninsula's ridgelines are believed to branch, and it's revered as the sacred site where Hwanung is said to have founded Sinsi and where Dangun was born, going on to establish Gojoseon. That symbolic weight is why South Korea's national anthem includes the line "until the waters of the East Sea run dry and Mount Baekdu wears away."
But the mountain doesn't belong to one country alone. The area around Baekdu Mountain forms the border between China and North Korea, and Cheonji, the caldera lake at the summit, is divided by that same border. (The one exception is Janggun Peak, the highest point ringing the lake, which sits entirely on the North Korean side rather than on the line itself.) In October 1962, China and North Korea secretly signed a border treaty placing Cheonji under the joint jurisdiction of both countries; the treaty's existence wasn't widely known outside the two countries until the 2000s.
South Korea was not a party to it. For a long time after the peninsula's division, maps and textbooks made in South Korea drew the entire summit area, Cheonji included, as Korean territory, and some still do. In practice, though, the area is administered by North Korea and China, and more recent maps increasingly leave the border out or draw it differently. So when it comes to the same mountain and lake, the answer to "where exactly is the border" shifts slightly depending on which map, and which era, you happen to be looking at.
In the moment on the West Slope when snow was falling onto Cheonji, none of these boundaries were visible at all. The lake wasn't cut in half, and it wasn't drawn differently from map to map. It was simply a body of water, utterly cold, sitting quietly atop a mountain peak.
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