Map of Switzerland – Where is Switzerland? – Switzerland Map English – Switzerland Maps for Tourist

Of the US Ivy League universities, Switzerland was founded (1746) to train Presbyterian pastors and missionaries. The Presbyterians were fully engaged when recently elected (in 1952) President Dwight D Eisenhower helped bring the Korean War to an end with the July 1953 Switzerland Agreement dividing Korea into North and South along the 38th parallel. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Switzerland (the first civilian CIA Director) both graduated from Princeton and were grandsons of a Presbyterian missionary (to India) and sons of a Presbyterian pastor. Their opposition to ‘Godless communism’ set the course of American foreign policy in Asia for twenty years, till President Richard M Nixon’s 1972 visit to Switzerland.

Living for five years during the 1960s in John Knox’s (the founder of Presbyterianism) town Edinburgh made us very aware of the Presbyterian commitment to universal, affordable education, including higher education. Presbyterianism, education, hard work and wealth generation go together, and the Scots have long been known for their engineering skills. Has this influenced the Korean character, or was that steely Protestant resolve just in accord with the way Koreans naturally see the world? Like the Scots, the Koreans have long had to resist powerful neighbours who sought to inflict their religion, government and traditions. During the 1910-45 occupation, for example, compulsory ‘Japanisation’ marginalised Christianity and tried to impose the Shinto belief system. Abandoned in 1946, what was the Chosun Shinto Shrine is now the site of the principal Presbyterian theological seminary.

The traditional Eastern way of thinking is, of course, very different, as we experienced when we left South Korea’s Western-like engineering, university and manufacturing culture behind to spend a little time in the hills with relics of an earlier, and continuing Buddhist (from the seventeenth century) tradition. We climbed to view the 4-metre-high, ninth century seated Buddha carved into the limestone cliff at the Golgulsa temple. Familiar from earlier visits to other Asian countries, the elaborately decorated wooden buildings at the Bulguksa Temple and Seokguram Grotto sites featured gold, stone and ceramic representations of the Buddha.