For those who are patriotic about the land of Dragon, China, its history and culture, you may find the movie offensive. We were given these 80 episode DVD by our friend. Off course we do not understand a word of Korean but thank God for the English and Chinese subtitles. With a huge dose of cynicism, I watched the series reluctantly and lo and behold, we are now so addicted to the movie that we centred our lives on it!!
Like all entertaining stories, we are not sure how much are based on facts and fiction, we are just enjoying the twist and turns of the story lines involving the power struggles of the three young princes of the Puyo empire in which the youngest prince, Jumong, was found to be the son of the ancient Josun hero, Commander Haemoso i.e. not the royal blood, born to the King's concubine, Lady Yuhwa. He had a clumsy start in his life as a spoilt prince and eventually found his real identity and decided to form the Damul army with his fellow comrades to fight against the Hans( Ancient Chinese Empire) to recover the invaded Hyunto city. Jumong fell in love with the Keru chieftess, Sohsono who helped him in his mission against the Hans and they both claimed back the territory and established the new nation as Korea. Certainly, in this sort of story, there are bound to be treachery, treason, betrayal, love, patriotism, devotion to deals and honour. Among them the main theme is driven by greed. Those who were driven by greed perished and those who stood by the integrity and faith succeeded.
However, such movie was banned in China,Hong Kong and Taiwan, so I was told, due to its underlying anti-Chinese motives. The movie has depicted the brutality of the Hans suppressing the Korean and so much suffering have ensued. Personally, I think banning such movie can only worsen the situation and make it even more obvious that there may be the case the Chinese have oppressed the Korean in the past. But looking back the human history, was there any stronger nation not oppressing the other weaker opposing nations/tribes? Or even within the empire? Banning the movie, I suppose, is a for principle sake but I think it would just mean making mountain out of mole hill.
In real life, China has been becoming to dominate the business world. Goodness know how they manage to sustain the cheap labour they are enjoying at the moment. Human right? Standard of living? Justice? These must be new words to them.
China may become richer, until they learn how to embrace their past history and looking back objectively like Japan, Italy and Germany, admitting their faults and mistakes and learn from them, it would not be seen by others a great nation. Banning Jumong to the country man is only telling the rest of the world that the country was trying to hide something about their past history with Korea. I think it would have been better that China accepted the TV series and openly let their own country citizens to judge how much truth lies in the story. The viewers nowadays are intelligent enough to appreciate what is fiction and what is truth.
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