Tang Emperor Cultural Differences

The film started with a meeting among the rulers of four regions. Their identity difference can be easily noticed by the language they speak. Tang Emperor began by speaking Chinese, follow by Baekche, Shilla, and Koguryo speaking in different dialects of Korean. They were arguing on a political issue and seems to be having communication difficulty because they don’t share the same language. Soon, the war started between Baekche and Shilla with support from Tang. Since Shilla King’s son is an official in Tang’s court, so he understands both Chinese and the Shilla dialect. Therefore, his role is like an interpreter whom translate the conversation between Shilla general and Tang general. There is also tone differences between Tang general, who is arrogant and forceful, versus Shilla general who is

It is clear that Tang, Baekche, and Shilla each has their own dialects and so they dressed/armored differently. From the film, we can see that Tang’s army is well armored and there are many of them. To someone that has no history background, it showed that Tang is the giant among nearby regions and must had more power. Arguably, Chinese is spoke by most people as opposed to Baekche and Shilla dialects. By the same token, Baekche only had army of 5,000 soldiers, which is ten times less than Shilla and Tang. This means that Baekche dialect was not spoken by a lot of people. Ironically, Baekche war plan was kept secretly due to not many spoke the dialects. The word “it” and “that” were being used in Baekche’s army. Shilla sent two spies to Baekche and end up obtaining no useful information about their war plan. Shilla general then ordered the decoder to crack the meaning of “it” and “that” but there is just too many possibilities. Even after narrow it down to hundreds, Shilla still need to make a lot of educated guesses to figure out the exact meaning of the word “it” and “that” spoke by Baekche