Capital Cities and Tombs of the Ancient Koguryo Kingdom
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
The Capital Cities and Tombs of the Ancient Koguryo Kingdom are three cities and 40 tombs at Huanren in Liaoning and Ji'an in Jilin, in northeast China. Koguryo arose in 37 BCE, and its first capital was Wunu Mountain City at Huanren. The region remained the centre of the kingdom until the capital moved to Pyongyang in 427.
The capital later moved to Guonei City on the plain beside the Yalu River, guarded by Wandu Mountain City in the hills behind it. Wandu was sacked by the Wei army in 244 and by the Murong clan of the Xianbei in 341, and the cities were repaired after each war. In 414 King Jangsu erected a stele to his father, King Gwanggaeto. About 6.39 m of granite carved in Classical Chinese, it records the kingdom's founding legend.
After Koguryo fell in 668 the area was neglected for centuries. Around 1876 Guan Yueshan, a local official and amateur epigrapher, found the Gwanggaeto stele buried under mud and overgrowth. In 1882 the vegetation was burnt off so the text could be read, which damaged the stone's surface. The site was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2004, the same year as the Koguryo tombs in North Korea.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).