By Sunny Lee
Korea Times Correspondent

BEIJING ― Former President of South Korea Kim Dae-jung once characterized Koreans as unbending people who have never assimilated the Middle Kingdom's cultural influence despite the fact they lived next to the giant for thousands of years.

The remark was meant to underscore Koreans' effort to preserve their cultural traditions. Koreans also seldom accepted anything foreign as given but modified it to suit their own taste whenever possible. After all, they were the people who put kimchi in a hamburger.

Jajangmyeon was no exception. The history of it in Korea goes back to 1882 when a military mutiny broke out in Korea among factions that had different attitudes on the reform and modernization of the nation, compounded by the rivalry between China and Japan over the peninsula.

The incident was quelled by Qing Dynasty general Yuan Shikai. Meanwhile, some 40 merchants also came to Korea with Qing's military and settled in today's Incheon, a port city, west of Seoul. In 1905, these Chinese immigrants introduced a black-bean noodle to Koreans, and the salty food (zhajiangmian in Chinese) soon metamorphosed into a sweet one called 'jajangmyeon,' with the addition of caramel into it, putting Chinese cuisine on a new course in Korea. Nowadays, Koreans cannot live without jajangmyeon. Every day, a whopping 7.2 million bowls of it are consumed in Korea, a country with 49 million people.

Jajangmyeon's influence in Korean society was clearly felt when a well-known explorer, Heo Young-ho, came back from his three-month trans-North Pole expedition and told reporters that the first thing he wanted to eat was, you guessed it, jajangmyeon.

Koreans' love affair with jajangmyeon perhaps went too far. They have now begun to sell it back to where had come from: China. On noon Wednesday, a Korean restaurant in Beijing's college district, Wudaokou, was filled with people. The restaurant's name is very appropriately titled ''I love jajangmyeon.'' ''About 70 percent of our customers here are Chinese,'' Kim Jeong-nam, the Korean owner, said. That's somewhat unusual in Beijing, where most Korean restaurants mainly lure the Koreans in China, many of whom gave up their businesses when the economic crisis hit China hard at the end of last year. ''I was lucky,'' Kim said.

Kim's business strategy was to sell jajangmyeon inexpensively and mainly to Chinese. A bowl of jajangmyeon here sells at 15 yuan ($2.2), while in up-scale Korean restaurants it usually costs more than twice as much. His five-year-old restaurant offers Korean-style jajangmyeon that, according to him, is of just the same ''regular taste'' as in Korea. But it became popular after some Chinese customers posted good reviews on a peer-reviewed Internet restaurant guide. Soon, more and more Chinese customers began to come. Sun Hongtao, 35, an editor with an educational publishing company, is one of Kim's regulars. ''I like the Korean style because it's not very salty.''

It was also the popularity of the Korean TV drama boom that helped to popularize the Korean-style jajangmyeon in China. When they saw Koreans eating some black noodles in the drama, they became curious and wanted to try it. ''Korean dramas indeed helped,'' said Kim.

But the problem with jajangmyeon in Korea also began to happen in China. That is, once you begin, there's no point of return. As Kim put it, ''jajangmyeon grows on your taste buds. It's universal.'' Kim cited as an example a Chinese college student who came to like jajangmyeon so much that when he returned from a month-long winter break, ''he came straight to my restaurant.''

There are no statistics available on how many bowls of the Korean jajangmyeon are sold in China. But more and more people have begun to notice the ''potential'' of it, and other Korean cuisine, as a promising cultural product that can be exported abroad. ''It's really a promising area that can earn foreign currency. Unlike other industries, it doesn't pollute the environment, either,'' said Kim Sung-sook, a Korean culinary expert who teaches Korean cooking at the Korean Cultural Center in Beijing.

Since this year, the Korean government and grass-roots organizations have held a series of meetings to brainstorm how to promote Korean cuisine abroad. These meetings, including the latest, held on the seventh this month in Seoul, often include foreign culinary experts offering their expertise and suggestions. ''I think the government is heading in the right direction,'' she said, adding that a successful strategy would require a dual-track approach. The first track is to focus on traditional Korean taste and sell it in upscale restaurants, where she said the ''non-food aspect'' is very important, including the bowl, lightening and atmosphere. ''People who are successful in running an upscale Korean restaurant abroad are those who sell culture with food,'' she said.

Secondly, she said there should be something that is affordable enough so that it can appeal to the general public. ''We definitely need this. We don't have to stick to the original Korean taste because China has very clearly defined regional markets with different preferences.'' To drive her point, she took spaghetti an example. ''Spaghetti has been very popular in Korea for the last some 15 years. The taste is not Italian. It's very much altered to fit the Korean taste. But Koreans still call spaghetti Italian food.'' Will jajangmyeon do the job? Maybe, according to Kim, who repeatedly pointed out the ''universal addictive quality'' that jajangmyeon has over people.

Meanwhile, what do the Chinese think about Korean-style jajangmyeon's popularity in China? After all, the food originated in China. ''I don't regard the popularity of the Korean-style zhajiangmian as a form of cultural invasion. Rather, it's a form of cultural exchange,'' said Sun. ''For example, pizza originated from China. Marco Polo took it to Italy and it became very popular there. Now, it has come back to China again,'' he said, adding he disagrees with people who see the popularity of Coca Cola as a cultural invasion.

Byon Sung-yeon, 30, who teaches the Korean language at the Beijing Language and Culture University, said: ''From my experience in encountering foreign students, I've come to believe that food and language are the two things that bring different people together.''

For Kim, the whole discussion of 'cultural invasion' on jajangmyeon is an unnecessary diversion from the core of the matter. ''People come here because they like the food here. That's it. No politics, please.''

sunny.lee@koreatimes.co.kr