ANNAPOLIS, Md.—In response to requests from a South Korean cultural delegation that visited Annapolis earlier this year, the Naval Academy has agreed to temporarily return a Korean flag captured during an 1871 battle.
Naval Academy officials confirmed Wednesday that the flag will be returned, at first, for two years after representatives from South Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration visit next week to examine it.
“It will mean a great deal to Koreans when they see this flag come back,” Thomas Duvernay, a professor of English and Korean history at Handong Global University in Pohang, South Korea, said in a telephone interview with The (Baltimore) Sun. “This flag is like Old Glory or the Liberty Bell.”
The giant banner is expected to reach Seoul on Oct. 19, he said, and three days later it will be unveiled at a news conference, then displayed in the city’s National Palace Museum.
Longtime advocates for the move, including Duvernay, were pleased Wednesday and were hopeful that the lease would become permanent.
A movement seeking the flag’s return recently sprang up in Korea. People there viewed the band of soldiers, peasants and “tiger hunters” who were routed by Marines more than a century ago as heroes similar to those who fought and died at the Alamo, Duvernay said.
Historians believe the 1871 skirmish arose from a misunderstanding while U.S. officials sought to open what was then Corea to trade.
Five American ships went to Corea and began exploring the country’s coasts after a brief meeting with a low-level delegation. When American ships reached Kanghwa Island west of Seoul, they were fired upon from several forts and returned fire.
Commanders waited in vain for an apology and launched an amphibious assault and destroyed a Korean citadel.
Despite being overpowered by Marines, the Koreans fought fiercely. They threw rocks and dirt when they were unable to reload their muskets. They lost 350 men, compared with three Americans, although the incident did prompt U.S. forces to leave the country a short time later.
The flag is a yellow and blue banner that opens to about 15 square feet. It has always been stored at the Naval Academy because of an 1849 executive order signed by President James K. Polk that states that “all flags, standards, and colors” seized by the Navy in wartime should be sent to Annapolis “for preservation and display.”
Displaying a Chinese character that stands for “commanding general,” it was the standard of Gen. Uh Je-yeon, who died in the battle. It was displayed for nearly a century in the academy’s halls after a preservation job in 1913. Now it is folded in a glass display case at the Naval Academy museum.
Officials from South Korea’s state-run cultural agency visited the academy in April after Sen. Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, proposed that the flag be used as a bartering tool to secure the return of the USS Pueblo, which North Korea’s military captured in 1968 after officials said it drifted into territorial waters. The spy ship is the only Navy vessel seized in more than a century and today is a tourist attraction in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
A spokesman for Allard called the return “a positive development.”
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Information from: The (Baltimore) Sun,
