Baekdusan boundary stele
Joseon and Qing officials climbed Mount Baekdu, fixed the border and set up a stele; its mention of the “Tomun” River later fed the Gando dispute.
SSchlhmr · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source
The Qing official Mukedeng and Joseon officials set up the stele at a watershed south of the summit. It read: “To the west the Yalu, to the east the Tomun, form the boundary.”
When many Koreans settled in Gando in the later nineteenth century, Joseon argued that the Tomun was a tributary of the Songhua, making Gando Korean, while Qing held it was the Tumen. The Korean Empire sent Yi Beom-yun as inspector of Gando in 1903, but in 1909 Japan, which then controlled Korea’s foreign affairs, recognised Gando as Qing territory in the Gando Convention — an agreement Korean scholars regard as void. The stele disappeared around the Manchurian Incident of 1931.
