Tree-Ear, a scavenger in a Korean village from the 12th century, has entered into a contract with a master potter in the village, the one he admires the most. He entered into this contract after he broke a beautiful piece of pottery and felt guilty for ruining the work, despite the fact that the potter would have let him go. Tree-Ear, who greatly admires the art of making pottery, had hoped that Min, the potter, would teach him how to make the same masterful creations, but his first day of indentured work proves that Min has some very different tasks in mind for the boy.
For this chapter, I chose to do some research on celadon, to better understand how it fit historically into Korean and Chinese market systems. It appears that, true to the novel, Korean celadon was prized in Imperial China as much as Chinese celadon. The techniques really were different enough to justify specifying where the pottery comes from. It turns out that a specific province of Korea was famous for inventing a technique that was not known in China, and therefore made these pieces of pottery highly valuable to Chinese royals. There is more information on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website . I also researched Korean expressions of respect, which were slightly discussed in this chapter and throughout the book, and many of those mentioned are still in practice to this day. For example, bowing is still a common form of respect, though shaking hands has also become more popular with the proliferation of Western culture. Eye contact between an inferior and superior is consi...
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