I set foot in East Asia for the first time in September 1979. A young and wholly inexperienced diplomat, I had been in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) for scarcely nine months before being posted to Seoul, initially to learn Korean before taking up a position in the British embassy as the junior political officer. It was a posting for which I was singularly unprepared. Although I had travelled in remote areas of the world as a student, to travel even for weeks at a time with friends of a similar cultural background and speaking the same language was no preparation for the impact of being suddenly confronted by an alien language and script, very different food and even different implements with which to eat it. And the individualistic self-confidence, even arrogance, of a young westerner came quickly into conflict with the collective and hierarchical nature of Asian society. Nor did I go without reservations. Not only did South Korea seem to me in my ignorance to be something of a backwater as a diplomatic posting, but the country was also under the authoritarian rule of Park Chung Hee, who had governed since seizing power in a military coup in 1961, and concerns about repression and human rights abuses were widespread.
Not that this seemed to worry the government in London unduly. South Korea was one of the four Asian āeconomic tigers,ā along with Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, all of them growing at a seemingly breakneck pace, and the principal objective of the embassy was to help British exporters win business, not to persuade the Korean government to treat its citizens properly. As one of my predecessors in the embassy explained to a British journalist: āWeāre a commercial embassy actually. South Korea is a land of golden opportunities for the British businessman.ā He went on to complain about the British press focussing on ādepressing aspects like the mass arrests,ā or torture and the suppression of human rights, worried that such reports would discourage businessmen.1 But my reservations were soon balanced, if not overcome, by the excitement I quickly felt at the sheer pace of change that embraced not just Seoul and South Korea but almost all East Asia. This was to be a recurring theme throughout my career.
Physically, Seoul could hardly be considered an attractive city. Extensive damage in the Korean war combined with widespread poverty in the 1950s, followed by rapid economic growth since the early 1960s, had bequeathed a legacy of gimcrack buildings best described as āshoebox vernacular,ā although a surprising number of traditional one-storey buildings with their distinctive tiled roofs remained, even in central parts of the city. The country was still very isolated and largely inward-looking. The few westerners were almost invariably assumed to be Americans, either military or missionaries.
This isolation was in part historic, in part a consequence of the post 2nd World War settlement in East Asia. Neither North nor South Korea were then members of the United Nations. Reflecting the Cold War divide, only three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Councilāthe USA, United Kingdom and Franceārecognised South Korea. Not even all the members of the then nine-strong European Economic Community (EEC) had diplomatic relations with South Korea, and fewer than fifty countries had embassies in Seoul.2 Most of these were modest presences in downtown office blocks or houses adapted to meet diplomatic requirements. Only a handful of countries had a more substantial presence.
As befitted the main security guarantor, which at the time had more than 30,000 troops in the country, the largest embassy was that of the USA, which occupied a large but functional office block, built with aid money in the early 1960s, and just across the road from the main government building, then a large Japanese era complex, since demolished. In a sign of the uneasy relationship with the former colonial occupier, the Japanese embassy was close to the American one but tucked away down a side street, behind a high wall and in a decidedly utilitarian building.
Taiwan and Korea were then close allies, the strength of the relationship apparent in the large Taiwanese embassy (formally that of the Republic of China). This was a grand building, albeit of fading elegance, a combination of western and neo-classical Chinese architecture, which occupied an enormous compound in a prime part of the city, close to the city hall.
Only two other embassies were of any note. Reflecting the United Kingdomās imperial past, the British embassy compound occupied another prime location in the centre of the city, adjacent to a former royal palace. At that time there was still a gate in the wall between the two compounds, a legacy of the turbulent era when the embassy first opened, and the king wanted an escape route to a safe refuge in case he should be attacked. The ambassadorās residence was one of the oldest and most imposing western style buildings in the city. Only later did I learn that it was of a generic design originating with the British Indian government and adapted for use in consulates in China. At one time, near-identical buildings could be seen in many of the treaty ports along the Chinese coast, and the design is still apparent today in the former British consulate in Tamsui in Taiwan, now a museum.
Like its British counterpart, the French embassy occupied a sizeable compound close to the city centre. But its buildings were much newer. Designed by a Korean student of Le Corbusier, these bore all the hallmarks and shortcomings of the maestroās designs, a large concrete flying saucer-like rooftop swimming pool being reportedly unusable as the building could not support the additional weight of water therein. At the time, the only direct flights between Korea and Europe were to and from Paris. Due to the Cold War, these went via Anchorage in Alaska rather than across the then Soviet Union; in 1978 one of them strayed badly off course and was forced to land by Soviet fighter aircraft near Murmansk, the pilot managing to do so on a frozen lake.
The British empire was almost a thing of the past, with the government in London around this time persuading most of the remaining colonies in the South Pacific into a sometimes reluctant independence, but residual trappings remained and being a British diplomat, even a very junior one, brought a degree of status. In part this was culturalāin East Asia generally, civil servants are regarded with greater respect and deference than are most of their European counterpartsāand in part historic, not least due to recollection and appreciation of the UKās contribution to the United Nations forces fighting in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. This brought with it, on paper at least, a vestigial commitment to the defence of Korea through a continuing contribution to the UN Honour Guard. Most of the time the degree of obligation this might or might not incur was diplomatically not raised, although one incautious colleague was rash enough to tell a visiting journalist āIf thereās a showdown itās up to the South Koreans and Americans. Can you see us sending in a division?ā3 Although this contribution was minimal, never more than one platoon at a time, it was served by a regular RAF VC10 flight every other month. From a personal point of view this presence brought the benefit of regular supplies of familiar foods, ordered from the NAAFI4 in Hong Kong, and regular and speedy mail contact with home via the British Forces Post Office service.
About the time that I arrived in Korea, Robert Shaplen, the New Yorkerās Far Eastern correspondent for most of 1960s and 1970s, published a book based on his experience in Asia going back to the Leyte landings by US Forces in 1944. In his introduction, Shaplen compared the welcome US forces received in the Philippines then with the looks of contempt and hatred on the faces of locals as he fled Saigon on its fall to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. āWhat had happened over those thirty-odd yearsā¦ to cause love to turn to hate?ā he asked.5 He went on to describe a period of upheaval and change, of violence and unrest in Asia. But he concluded on an optimistic note: China and the US had normalised relations, China and Japan had drawn closer and he thought China seemed determined to pursue a moderate and modernising course.
In September 1979 and indeed in the years afterwards, it seemed hard to reconcile this optimism with events on the ground. January 1979 had seen the downfall of the Shah of Iran and the founding of the Islamic Republic, followed a month later by the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, while the year-end would see the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Cold War was at its height, not least in East Asia. Seoul had the atmosphere of a city under threat: a huge US Army base dominated the centre of the city (it is still there today but smaller, while the growth of the city over the subsequent forty years makes its modern presence far less apparent) and a nightly curfew was in place, supplemented by monthly air raid drills.
A couple of days after my arrival I watched from the window of my high-rise hotel as a convoy of tanks rolled along the cityās main thoroughfare during the curfew. To my young and cynical mind these were tools to oppress the population but the threat they were a reaction to was real: in 1968 a North Korean commando squad had got within a few hundred metres of the presidential Blue House and in 1974 the presidentās wife was killed at the National Theatre in an assassination attempt on her husband. Barely more than a month after my own arrival the president himself, Park Chung Hee, was assassinated, not by a North Korean infiltrator but by the head of his own intelligence service.
This heralded the onset of a decade of turmoil for much of East Asia, culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in June 1989. In Korea, Parkās assassination was followed by a military coup less than two months later, then the Gwangju massacre of May 1980, in which at least 165 civilians, probably more, were brutally killed by paratroopers sent in to quell the protests, and the murder of several members of the government by a North Korean bomb in Rangoon (Yangon) in 1983. The Rangoon bomb came barely a month after a Korean airliner had been shot down after straying into Soviet Union airspace, with the death of all 269 people on board. Four years later another 115 people were killed when North Korean agents detonated a bomb aboard another Korean Air flight.
At the time, a Chinese general used to sit with North Korean counterparts across the table from American, South Korean and British representatives in Military Armistice Commission talks at Panmunjom in the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ). In the spring of 1983, a Chinese civilian airliner on an internal flight was hijacked and forced to land at a small military airstrip near Seoul. The subsequent negotiations over the return to China of plane and passengers was the first substantive contact between the governments of the Peopleās Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of Korea (RoK), which until then refused to recognise one another.
My first posting to Seoul ended in 1984; two years later and back in London I was on the Indo-China desk as it was then called in the FCO, dealing not only with the fallout from the end of the Vietnam war, in the form of the exodus of āboat-people,ā but also with the ongoing fighting in Cambodia. An almost un-noticed sideshow of this was the simmering conflict between...