(This is our ninth and final post about the films of diplo­mat John Van Antwerp Mac­Mur­ray. See the first post for more background.)

“A typ­i­cal group of Korean women gos­sip­ing on the road near Onseiri.” Post­card to Hen­ri­etta V.A. Mac­Mur­ray, printed from a pho­to­graph by Mac­Mur­ray (Box 26, Decem­ber 4, 1928)

This is the last post fea­tur­ing the films that diplo­mat John Van Antwerp Mac­Mur­ray made while serv­ing as Min­is­ter to China from 1925–1929. The film “The Dia­mond Moun­tains, 1928,” which cap­tures a fam­ily vaca­tion in Korea in the sum­mer of 1928, may be a fit­ting end: in the three pre­ced­ing years Mac­Mur­ray had seen the coun­try that he loved come under the con­trol of Chi­ang Kai-shek’s Nation­al­ist Party, a devel­op­ment that he had watched with cau­tion, as did many of his col­leagues in the diplo­matic corps. His thoughts about how to deal with the Nation­al­ists dif­fered from those of his supe­ri­ors in Wash­ing­ton, which made his posi­tion increas­ingly dif­fi­cult. On August 5, 1928, two months after the Nation­al­ists took con­trol of Peking, he wrote his mother about how much he and his wife were look­ing for­ward to the vaca­tion in Korea. “Lois and I are feel­ing very “fed up” and stale and anx­ious to be away from things for long enough to take a fresh start.” The dif­fer­ences of opin­ion between Mac­Mur­ray and his supe­ri­ors, how­ever, ulti­mately led to MacMurray’s res­ig­na­tion from his post in Octo­ber 1929.

The fam­ily spent their vaca­tion at one of the pools in the Dia­mond Moun­tains (Mount Geum­gang, now North Korea), where they stayed in a hotel in the vil­lage of Onseiri in the Outer Kongo between August 17 and Sep­tem­ber 18, 1928. The film opens with fam­ily swim­ming, fish­ing, and moun­tain scenes, fol­lowed at 6:35 by brief footage of women on a street near Onseiri, also shown on the post­card above. The footage that fol­lows of vil­lagers and monks is assumed to be shot in the Choanji (Changansa) Monastery, which had the largest col­lec­tion of tem­ples in the Inner Kongo. Mac­Mur­ray and his wife spent a few days there on their own, while their chil­dren were looked after at the hotel.