All afternoon, I read about how from mid November of 1948, the uplands of Jeju burned for three months and upward of thirty thousand civilians were slaughtered. By the spring of 1949, when the scorched-earth policy was temporarily abandoned after the state failed to find the whereabouts of the roughly one hundred guerrillas, an estimated twenty thousand civilians were hiding out in Hallasan, mostly with their kin. They had judged it safer to brave starvation and the cold than risk facing summary executions along the shores.
