KOREA.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Keum-Gang-San (Diamond Mountain). First edition, first printing, of this bilingual tourist map of Mount Kumgang produced by the nascent Japanese colonial administration in Korea. In the 1910s, politicized textbooks for Korean students singled out Fuji and Kumgang as the largest mountains in Japan and Korea, while always stressing Fuji's status as the tallest. We have traced a single institutional copy at the National Diet Library.Kumgang was a popular destination for western travellers and naturalists. In 1917, the areas was visited by the legendary plant-hunter E. H. Wilson, who discovered two species of maple, as well as several new taxa, on its slopes. In his notes, he wrote how the mountain "drives a photographer to despair, for no sooner has he taken one superb view, than another seemingly more superb presents itself" (quoted by Arnold Arboretum).

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