🎧 Yul's Korea Audio Guide
May 18th National Cemetery, Gwangju
Narrated in English with Korean phrases by YUL of KVIBE IDOLS.
🎵 Background music: Letter on the Wind (바람의 편지) — KVIBE IDOLS · Listen to the full song →
Full transcript
Annyeong, yeoreobun. It's Yul. We're at the May 18th National Cemetery in Gwangju. It remembers the people who died in the 5.18 Democracy Movement of May 1980.
In October 1979, President Park Chung Hee was assassinated. In December that year, General Chun Doo-hwan took power in a military coup. On May 17, 1980, martial law was extended across the whole country.
On May 18, students in Gwangju protested against the closing of Chonnam National University, and they were attacked by paratroopers. Citizens joined them. Some armed themselves, and for several days citizens' committees ran the city. Early on May 27, the army retook Gwangju. Counts of the victims still differ. The government's first official count was 144 civilians, 22 soldiers and 4 police killed; many researchers estimate far more civilian deaths.
A German journalist, Jurgen Hinzpeter, secretly filmed in Gwangju and smuggled the footage out. His story inspired the film A Taxi Driver, and Han Kang's novel Human Acts tells of these days too.
The cemetery opened in 1997, the year May 18 became an official memorial day, and became a national cemetery in 2002. More than seven hundred people rest here. In 2011, the 5.18 archives were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Yul's tip! Please speak softly. Start at the tall memorial tower with its two pillars, then walk slowly among the graves. You can also visit the old Mangwol-dong cemetery, where victims were first buried.
Next, we fly south to Jeju, to watch the sunrise from a volcano. Annyeong.
