Korea’s Gaya Tumuli Join the UNESCO World Heritage List
Seven groups of hilltop burial mounds left by the Gaya confederacy were inscribed on 17 September 2023 as South Korea's 16th World Heritage site.
The Gaya Tumuli, seven groups of burial mounds in the south of the Korean peninsula, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on 17 September 2023, at the session of the World Heritage Committee held in Riyadh. They became South Korea’s 16th World Heritage site.
Gaya was a confederacy of small states that occupied the valley of the Nakdong River and the south coast from the 1st to the 6th century, alongside the larger kingdoms of Silla, Baekje and Goguryeo. It never became a centralised kingdom, and it was absorbed by Silla in 562. Having left few written records, it is known chiefly through its tombs, which is why it has sometimes been called Korea’s forgotten kingdom.
The seven sites are spread across three provinces: Daeseong-dong in Gimhae, Marisan in Haman, Okjeon in Hapcheon, Jisan-dong in Goryeong, Songhak-dong in Goseong, Gyo-dong and Songhyeon-dong in Changnyeong, and Yugok-ri and Durak-ri in Namwon. At each, the rulers and the elite were buried in stone chambers under earthen mounds built along the ridges of hills, so that the tombs form a line of green domes against the sky. Those at Jisan-dong, above the town of Goryeong, number in the hundreds.
The tombs have yielded gold crowns, iron armour and weapons, horse fittings and a distinctive hard grey pottery, evidence of a society enriched by its iron and by trade with China and Japan. UNESCO recognised the sites as testimony to a rare political system in which several polities remained autonomous and dealt with each other as equals, an illustration of the diversity of ancient East Asian civilisations.
The process took a decade, from the tentative list in 2013 to the final decision.
The sites are not on the usual route of foreign visitors to Korea, which runs from Seoul to Gyeongju and Busan. Several are within easy reach of Busan, however: Gimhae, with its national museum devoted to Gaya, adjoins the city, and Goryeong and Haman can be visited in a day. New hotels are arriving in the region, among them the small properties described in OKYTO’s report on three Korean hotels joining Design Hotels.