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Chinese culture has had a tremendous impact in many areas of Korean culture, including arts, written language, religion and government administration, with Koreans molding these Chinese models into distinctly Korean forms.
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Architecture
Korean wooden-frame architecture was introduced from China during the Han dynasty and has continued to the modern era. Other Chinese concepts to influence Korean architecture include yin and yang, the five elements, Chinese geomancy, Taoism and Confucianism.
Chinese cultural influence around the turn of the common era formed the basis for the early Korean architecture in the Three Kingdoms period. This influence is attributed to Lelang Commandery, a Chinese colony in what is now northwestern Korea, which was founded in 109 BCE. Paekche in particular adopted heavy Sinitic influence.
Later, during the Koryŏ period, further artistic and architectural influences from Song and Liao were absorbed in the peninsula. The wooden building style of this period also seems to have been influenced by that of Fujian in southern China.
Music
While a vast majority of Korean musical instruments clearly have some Sinitic ancestry, most of these imported instruments have never been widely used in Korean music, and many are now obsolete. The qin (Korean kŭm), for instance, is almost never played outside of the semi-annual Sacrifice to Confucius (Korean sŏkchŏn). The comparatively popular kayagŭm and kŏmun'go, although they are reputed to have originated in China, have been independent for centuries, and have been modified significantly from the Chinese originals.
The traditional genre of tangak (literally "music of Tang") was imported from China, probably mostly during the Koryŏ period. The aak genre, by contrast, was developed in Korea in the fifteenth century based on Chinese written sources from an earlier period, as the style had already fallen out of fashion in China. Despite Korean claims to aak retaining its "pure" Chinese form it bears marks of alteration after being imported to Korea.
Writing and literature
The majority of literature produced in the Korean peninsula before the twentieth century was written in Classical Chinese; the reason for this is that the indigenous writing system, hangŭl, only developed relatively late (the fifteenth century) and was not widely accepted as a means of writing intellectual discourse until the late nineteenth century.
Extant Korean poetry in Chinese goes back to the Koguryŏ period. Later, under Unified Silla and Koryŏ, poetic and prose compositions continued to closely follow forms originating in China and characteristic of the Six Dynasties period. The Wen Xuan was extremely influential in China during the Tang Dynasty, and the Korean literati of the period followed suit. Tang poetic principles also appear to have influenced poetic composition the peninsula during the Koryŏ period.
Several important poets of the ninth and tenth centuries, including Ch'oe Ch'i-wŏn (born 857) and Ch'oe Sŭng-no (927-989) studied in China.
All scriptural and commentarial writings composed by pre-modern Korean Buddhists were written in literary Chinese (Korean hanmun).
Scholarship
The historian Kim Pu-sik (1075-1151), a Confucian, adopted the historiographic style of Sima Qian in compiling his Samguk Sagi.
Religion and philosophy
To ignore the greater northeast Asian context in discussing Korean Buddhism is to distort Korean Buddhism. Buddhism was introduced to Korea in the fourth century, during the Three Kingdoms period. The Samguk sagi records that Buddhism was first introduced to Koguryŏ around 372 by the monk Sundo/Shundao, who was summoned to the Chinese state of Former Qin by its king Fujian, and that the Indian monk Mālānanda brought Buddhism from the Eastern Jin to Paekche around 384.
All schools of Korean Buddhism have their roots in earlier Chinese innovations, in both doctrine and soteriology. While Korean monks training in China often played a critical part in some of these developments, China's size and its geographical position on the Silk Road (which gave it stronger ties to the older Buddhist traditions of India and Central Asia) allowed it to pioneer the majority of trends in East Asian Buddhism.
The monk Wŏnch'ŭk studied in China under Xuanzang and developed his own interpretation of Yogācāra Buddhism derived from Xuanzang's New Yogācāra. Sŏn Buddhism, a Korean form of Chan Buddhism, began with the seventh century Silla monk Pŏmnang, who studied in China with the Fourth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, Daoxin. Sŏn monks followed Pŏmnang's example studying this new form of Buddhism in China for the next century and a half, and most of the founders of Nine Mountains school of Sŏn traced their lineage to Mazu Daoyi of the Hongzu sect. Two other examples of Korean sects with Chinese roots were Ch'ŏnt'ae, founded by Ŭich'ŏn based on the Chinese Tiantai, and Hwaŏm (Ch. Huayan. Though Ŭich'ŏn only established Ch'ŏnt'ae as a separate school of Korean Buddhism in the eleventh century, Korean Buddhists had been studying Chinese Tiantai as early as the seventh century.
The eleventh-century Korean Tripiṭaka that would later become a reference point for the twentieth-century Japanese Taishō Tripiṭaka were based on the Chinese Buddhist Tripiṭaka completed in the tenth century.
Law and government
Pre-modern Korea's dynastic governmental systems were significantly indebted to China.
Starting in the Three Kingdoms period, Korean government officials were trained with a Chinese-style Confucian examination system. This examination system continued into the Chosŏn period, but unlike in China the examination was only open to members of the aristocratic upper class.
The national flag of South Korea is derived from the Chinese philosophy yin-yang and the Chinese divination text I Ching.