Place to see: Jian, Shenyang, China

About this place:

Jian is a small (by Chinese standards) city in Jilin Province along the border with North Korea. Fairly nondescript today, in the early centuries CE it was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, which during its heyday stretched from deep within what is today Northeastern China, east to the maritime provinces of Russia, and south as far as Seoul, Korea. Goguryeo has in recent years become the center of a vociferous, and often uncivil, debate among Chinese and Korean scholars and public as to whether it constitutes a part of the cultural heritage of "China" or "Korea", though of course at the time of its ancient height one could argue that neither of these two modern nation-states existed. Even today the city is a wealth of archaeological remnants from the Goguryeo era.