Another thing I came across on Salon  today was an item about Taedonggang, the North Korean beer (spelled Taidonggang on Salon for some reason), which I had an item about a week or two ago.

The piece referenced a post on a good blog based here in Korea called Gusts of Popular Feeling, which asserted that the artwork on the Taedonggang bottle cap was a rendering of the General Sherman, a boat attacked by Koreans in the late 1800s as it came toward Pyongyang up the Taedong River (spelled Taidong in the piece (any editors at Salon these days?)). The boat was burned and everyone on board killed.

From Salon:

A North Korean “dictionary of history” declares that modern Korean history began with “the incident in 1866, in which the first attempt of armed aggression against Korea by the American imperialistic robbers, who are the sworn and inveterate enemies of the Korean people, met a total and complete defeat at the hands of the Korean people.”

Here’s a photo of the General Sherman, which at the time of this drawing was called the USS Princess Royal.

The conclusion being drawn here is that the image on the bottle cap is meant to honor the Korean sacking of the General Sherman. Here’s the bottle cap:

 I kind of wish it were true. The beer is no longer sold outside of North Korea, but that would have been a funny way for a state run  brewery to slip a little piece of propaganda out into the world.

I thought it looked a little fishy and slightly like a bridge I’d seen in photos of  North Korea. Sure enough  one of the commenter on the Salon piece pointed  out  the cap looks more like  the Chongryu Bridge  in Pyongyang.

Oh well. Like I said the General Sherman idea is more fun, but I think it’s clearly the bridge. At any rate, the history in the Salon piece is still worth taking a look at, and Gusts of Popular Feeling is still a good blog.