YANGJU — The Hoeamsa Temple Site in Yangju, which is seeking inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, has cleared a major hurdle after the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), UNESCO's official advisory body, recognized its potential for listing.
Yangju in Gyeonggi Province said on the 12th that it had received an overall assessment from ICOMOS indicating a strong likelihood that the site would satisfy World Heritage criteria (ii) and (iii). The city had submitted the nomination, titled "Hoeamsa Temple Site: An Archaeological Site Representative of 14th-Century East Asian Seon Buddhist Monasteries," to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre for preliminary assessment.
The preliminary assessment is a procedure introduced by UNESCO to raise the success rate of nominations. It calls for consultations with international advisory bodies from the earliest stages of preparation and rigorously verifies outstanding universal value (OUV), integrity and authenticity.
Yangju said the roughly yearlong documentary review had affirmed the site's value as a World Heritage property.
In its assessment, ICOMOS stated that Hoeamsa was likely to meet criterion (ii), which concerns the interchange of architectural, technological and artistic culture, and criterion (iii), which concerns evidence of a distinctive cultural tradition or civilization. The body also offered recommendations for improvement, including expanding the property's boundaries to encompass the surrounding landscape to maximize conservation and elaborating on the detailed descriptions of the listing criteria.
Yangju plans to incorporate the ICOMOS recommendations and to build close cooperation with the Korea Heritage Service and Gyeonggi Province to move quickly through the remaining steps, including selection as a candidate for nomination to the World Heritage List, in an all-out push for final inscription in 2029.