ABSTRACT
This is the story of how music has become the lynchpin in the emergence of Chindo Island as a cultural paradise, a repository for Korea’s heritage promoted to both national and international audiences. 1 Today, Chindo has more preserved performance arts and crafts designated by national and provincial governments than any other Korean county, and the majority have significant music components. It seems to me, perhaps with rose-tinted spectacles, that the Chindo I first encountered 25 years ago as I embarked on my doctoral fieldwork was something of an archetypal rural idyll caught in an old world that elsewhere had largely disappeared. As a cultural paradise, it is meant to remain so.
