By Kang Hyun-kyung
It took South Korea 18 years to get royal texts returned from France, the first batch of which arrived Thursday, after the two countries started negotiations.
The old publications were looted by French troops in 1866 after an attack on a Korean island.
No binding international rules governing the return of cultural assets to their country of origin exist, and this was a major stumbling block in the negotiations.
Nearly 140,000 Korean cultural artifacts are now held by museums or individuals in some 20 countries. Japan has 65,331 items, the United States 37,972, and Germany 10,770, with others held by museums in Russia, France and China among others.
A Seoul official told reporters on condition of anonymity that getting the cultural properties back was a demanding job because it is hard to prove how nations came to acquire them.
“It is not clear if the items were stolen or purchased when the museums or individuals obtained them. Therefore it is difficult for the government to ask for their return as we don’t know how they got them,” he said.
Despite the difficulties, the official said South Korea will increase its efforts to have its cultural properties returned home.
Seoul’s campaign is likely to gain momentum with the return of the royal texts.
In the early 1990s Seoul National University requested the ministry of foreign affairs and trade to hold talks with France to retrieve the royal texts.
Korea saw the first positive sign in 1993.
Then French President Francois Mitterrand initially agreed to return the cultural assets to Korea during a summit with President Kim Young-sam.
But, it was an uphill battle for the officials of the two countries to reach a deal due to big differences on the issue.
In France, curators, officials of the culture ministry and those involved in the museum industry were discontent with the plan to send the royal texts back to Korea.
Naturally, the negotiations became lackluster as the differences between the two countries ran deep. The deal was handed over to private entities.
After holding several rounds of talks, the private negotiators proposed that the two sides exchange what they have in their museums to their counterpart. In other words, Korea gives what it has in its museums to get the royal texts back from France.
The proposal was unacceptable from the government’s standpoint, and officials took over the negotiations.
Asking for anonymity, an official, who is familiar with the landmark deal, told reporters that several people contributed to the royal texts heading back to Seoul.
“France was unwilling to return them. The French government’s hands were tied as the royal texts were owned by a museum there,” he said.
A diplomatic breakthrough came last year. President Lee Myung-bak and his French counterpart Nicholas Sarkozy signed a deal to return the publications to Korea on lease during a summit on the sidelines of the G20 summit held in Seoul. The two sides agreed to renew the contract every five years.