On July 4th, Baekje Historic Areas have chosen as an Unesco World Heritage. This is the 12th Unesco World Heritage in Korea, following other many famous sites, such as Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes(2007), Namhansanseong(2014), Hwaseong Fortress(1997).
Unesco World Heritage is the heritage that Unesco acknowledged that they have value to be protected for the whole human society from 1972 based on the world heritage convention. It is divided into three groups - Culture heritage, environmental heritage, complex heritage. From this, culture heritage is about 590. From about 600 culture heritages, 41 is located in Italy. Second country which have most culture heritage is Spain with 39, followed by German(32), France(30) and England(27). If we add these top 5 country's culture heritage, it is 169, which is more than 25% of all culture heritage. By this, we can notice that most of the culture heritage is located in Europe.
Unesco selected Baekje Historic Areas as world culture heritage because of several reasons. First of all, they recognized the point that Baekje Historic Area show the history of mutual interchange among ancient countries of Korea, China, Japan. Second, they highly-scored the fact that it is the interesting evidence that includes Baekje's religion, architecture skill, artistic beauty and afterlife view.