Ssireum Wrestling

On the Korean Peninsula there are two separate governments, and when it comes to taking a piece of their culture to the world, each side has long prepared its own application.

Yet once, both sides put their names on the same heritage application.

What made them nod to each other was not a mountain, a river or a golden statue. It was a strip of cloth tied around a wrestler's waist.

To understand that, you first have to step down into the sand pit.

The sand pit can be anywhere. An empty yard behind a house. A patch of soft ground beside a market. A corner of a schoolyard when classes let out. All it needs is sand soft enough to fall on without getting hurt, and room enough for two people to move around. The game played on that patch of sand is called ssirum, or ssireum, depending on which side is writing it.

The strip of cloth has a name of its own, satba. It is long. It wraps once around the waist, then loops down around one thigh, making a sturdy handle that sits close against the body. Each wrestler wears one, and that handle is not for decoration. It is there for the other person to grab.

A bout usually opens in a position that a child remembers after seeing it once. The two wrestlers kneel on the sand, face to face, so close they can hear each other breathe. Then each slips a hand in to grip the other's cloth, one hand at the waist, one at the thigh. When both have a firm hold, they slowly rise together. From that moment on, their hands do not leave the cloth.

Two people lean into each other, each holding the other's cloth handle, both bracing their feet in the shifting sand. Each wants to bring the other down to the ground first. But let go, and it is no longer ssirum.

So this is not a game of punches. Nobody hits anybody. The wrestlers use their bodies, their arms and their legs, and above all the strip of cloth in their hands, to bring the opponent down onto the sand.

What decides the bout is balance. Who stands steadier. Who turns the hips at the better moment. Who stays calm enough to feel which way the other is tipping, then borrows that very momentum. When two people hold each other this tightly, every move one makes passes straight to the other. It is just like two children holding hands while standing on a seesaw.

Ssirum is not only for athletes. People wrestle during a rest break from a day's work in the fields. They wrestle on market days, and they wrestle most joyfully of all on traditional holidays. Children learn from the grown-ups at home, older ones learn at school, and each village holds its own contest every year.

The prize for the champion is the detail that makes everyone who hears it laugh with delight. The winner of the adult contest receives a bull. A real bull, with four legs and horns, not a gold-plated cup. He is also given a title, Jangsa. Then he climbs onto the bull's back and rides it once around the village for everyone to see.

The bull is not a prize picked at random for fun. In a land that lives from its fields, a bull is the strength that works the fields, a whole season's harvest and the biggest store of wealth in the house. The bull stands for a plentiful harvest. Giving it to the winner is the village saying something very clearly: this is how highly we think of you.

The game is much older than its simple look suggests. On the walls of the ancient tombs of the kingdom of Goguryeo, murals still show all kinds of everyday scenes, and among them are two people wrestling. Goguryeo was the largest of the three kingdoms of ancient Korea. The Goguryeo tombs were added to the World Heritage List in 2004.

The oldest surviving written records that mention this wrestling date from the 14th century. Later, King Sejong, the very king who created an alphabet for ordinary people, held wrestling matches for his soldiers.

Now comes the hardest part of the story, and also the best.

UNESCO keeps a very long list called the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The word intangible sounds a little odd, but its meaning is very simple. It is a list for heritage that cannot be touched. Not a pagoda, not a bridge, not an old vase in a glass case. It is for the things people do: a song, a way of pickling vegetables, a festival game. Whatever people stop doing simply disappears, without leaving a single brick behind.

For a cultural practice to be added to that list, a country has to prepare an application and describe the practice in great detail. Then it sends the file in and waits for review.

Both sides on the peninsula had prepared applications, one each, for the same wrestling game on sand. Two files waited in two different places, telling of the same strip of cloth, the same sand pit, the same bull.

Then the two sides agreed to merge the two applications into one.

On November 26, 2018, a UNESCO committee met in the city of Port Louis. It is the capital of Mauritius, an island nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean. At that meeting, the wrestling of the Korean Peninsula was added to the list. The application carried the names of both sides.

The name that went on the list is special too. It keeps both spellings, ssirum and ssireum, because each side spells the name its own way. Neither side had to give up its own word to make room for the other.

Nothing like this merger had ever happened before on the list. It was the first time the two sides had put their names together on a single heritage listing.

In Vietnam, too, village festivals in early spring have a wrestling ring right in the yard of the communal house. There is the same circle of soft earth and the same drums urging the bout on, beat after beat. There are the same two wrestlers in loincloths, stepping into the middle of a packed ring of onlookers.

Come to think of it, that sand pit in Korea is nothing grand. No roof, no walls, no gate, no name board. Just soft sand, a ring of people crowding around, laughter, and in the middle, two people kneeling face to face.

In the end, a village game like that became the first heritage both sides put their names to together. And on the sand, everything is still just as it always was: two pairs of hands gripping the strip of cloth, and no one is allowed to let go first.