To the Diamond Mountains

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. She is the winner of the 2013 Fukuoka Prize. To watch the author's video about making the book, click here.

The Diamond Mountains, located primarily in North Korea, are renowned for their beauty and have been an object of interest, even adoration, by sages, poets, spiritualists, and ordinary Koreans for centuries. Currently, the region has been a site of increased tension between North and South Korea, as they had shared administration of a tourist park there. Morris-Suzuki, an Australian professor, recently traveled through northeast China and the two Koreas; she was retracing the route of Emily Kemp, an extraordinary writer, artist, and intrepid adventurer who wrote about her experiences a century ago. Morris-Suzuki, like her predecessor, is a keen observer and a fine writer; she has combined the disciplines of history and travel writing in an absorbing analysis of the past, present, and future of this volatile region. China and South Korea, with their dynamism, seem a world apart from the repressive, static North Korea, but Morris-Suzuki succeeds in putting a human face on the long-suffering people of that pariah state.

• Prologue: May Day on the Yalu RiverChapter 1: On the Move: To Harbin and HulanChapter 2: Manchurian Ghosts: Changchun and ShenyangChapter 3: Of Sacred Mountains: Liaoyang and the Thousand PeaksChapter 4: Borderlands: From Shanyang to DandongChapter 5: Across the Bridge: To Sinuiju and beyondChapter 6: Diversion: On TimeChapter 7: The New Jerusalem: PyongyangChapter 8: Both Sides Now: Kaesong, Dorasan, and the Line in BetweenChapter 9: In the Palace of the Murdered Queen: SeoulChapter 10: Islands in the Bay: To BusanChapter 11: The Road to the Mountains: South from WonsanChapter 12: Traveling Hopefully