The united Silla kingdom, prosperous and secure at the end of the Silk Road, stands as one of the great periods of creativity and learning in Korean history, a "golden age" of architecture and literature, astronomy and mathematics. Fearsome dragon roof tiles like the one here at the British Museum long continued to be a feature of the roofscape in Kyongju and beyond. And the legacy of the Silla is apparent in Korea even today, as Choe Kwang Shik, Director General of the National Museum of Korea, tells us, via an interpreter:
在朝鲜半岛历史上,位于丝绸之路末端的统一繁荣的新罗王国开辟了一个重要的创新与学习的时代,这也是建筑、文学、天文和数学发展的“黄金时代”。威猛的龙瓦当一直留在庆州的屋桅上,流传至今。今天在韩国仍能看到新罗国留下的遗产。韩国国家博物馆馆长崔光植通过一名翻译告诉我们:
"The cultural aspect of the roof tile still remains in Korean culture...and even if you go to the city of Kyongju now, you can see in the streets that the patterns still remain on the road, for instance. So, in that aspect, the artefact has now become ancient, but it survives through the culture. And, in a sense, I think Koreans feel that it is an entity, as if it's a mother figure. So I think in that sense Silla is one of the most important in Korean history."
我认为韩国人从某种意义上将其看作一种实体,一种母亲的形象。因此可以说新罗仍是韩国历史上最重要的时代之一。
But in spite of surviving street patterns and strong cultural continuities, not everyone in Korea today will read the Silla legacy in the same way, or indeed claim the Silla as their mother culture. Here's Jane Portal again.
尽管这种街道装饰与文化传承至今,但并不是每一个朝鲜半岛居民都对新罗的文化遗产有同样的解读,也不是所有人都认为它是今天朝鲜半岛的母体文化。白珍再次进行解释。