A Shilla scholar’s fame beyond a thousand years

In Yangzhou, China on Tuesday, many events were held to commemorate Choi Chi-won (857 - ?), a renowned scholar and government official of the end of the Unified Shilla Kingdom. Yangzhou had “Shillabang,” a residential area which had a large Shilla population during the Chinese Tang Dynasty, and is a place where Choi worked as a government official.

The Choi Chi-won Memorial Hall on Ping San Tang Road in Yangzhou held an exhibition on his historical materials with the title “Memories beyond a thousand years” on Tuesday. The exhibition had some 150 guests including Gyeongju Mayor Choi Yang-sik, Korean Consul-General to Shanghai Gu Sang-chan, Yangzhou Deputy Mayor Dong Yuhai, the Gyeongju Choi clan gathering, the Korea Chamber of Commerce in Yangzhou, and Yangzhou’s cultural bigwigs.

After the exhibition, the Gyeongju Choi clan gathering held Shihyangjae, a regular memorial service for five or more generations of ancestors in the tenth of a lunar calendar, for Choi Chi-won. The clan gathering has held the memorial service each year since the foundation of the Memorial Hall in Oct. 2007. The Hall is the first memorial hall for a foreigner approved by the central Chinese government. Yangzhou University also held the third Go-un (Choi’s pen name) symposium on the same day. Yangzhou City has celebrated the Korea-China friendly exchange day on Oct. 15 every year.

Choi passed the state examination while studying in Tang China and served as a government official in Yangzhou. He became famous with his statement urging for driving out the rebel group called Huang Chao during the Tang Dynasty. During Korean President Park Geun-hye’s visit to China at the end of June, Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed the close relationship between Korea and China by quoting Choi’s poem. Yangzhou is also well known as the hometown of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.