Overview
The Karatal Korean History Center in Ushtobe was established by Korean-American missionary Helen Park, who relocated to Kazakhstan after working in Russia. The museum occupies a small compound with both indoor and outdoor sections. Indoors: one room is set up for screening historical documentary films about the deportation and early settlement, with bookshelves, photographs, and letters from the first generation; a second room displays household items, Korean clothing, and newspapers from the collective-farm period. Outdoors: an open courtyard contains a recreated burrow of the type survivors dug on Bastobe Hill in October 1937, an original cast-iron oven from a collective-farm kitchen, a wooden rice pounder, and a thatched-roof hut. The outdoor exhibits are small in scale but specific — the rice pounder in particular is concrete evidence of the agronomic knowledge the deportees carried and redeployed in the Ili valley. Koryo-saram families established 20 collective farms within two years of arrival and built the irrigation channels that first made paddy rice viable in the region.
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Visit notes
Viewing visit notes for Ushtobe — Koryo-saram Memorial
Karatal Korean History Center
Step 6 · 3 km from previous · 8 min drive
The Karatal Korean History Center in Ushtobe was established by Korean-American missionary Helen Park, who relocated to Kazakhstan after working in Russia. The museum occupies a small compound with both indoor and outdoor sections. Indoors: one room is set up for screening historical documentary films about the deportation and early settlement, with bookshelves, photographs, and letters from the first generation; a second room displays household items, Korean clothing, and newspapers from the collective-farm period. Outdoors: an open courtyard contains a recreated burrow of the type survivors dug on Bastobe Hill in October 1937, an original cast-iron oven from a collective-farm kitchen, a wooden rice pounder, and a thatched-roof hut. The outdoor exhibits are small in scale but specific — the rice pounder in particular is concrete evidence of the agronomic knowledge the deportees carried and redeployed in the Ili valley. Koryo-saram families established 20 collective farms within two years of arrival and built the irrigation channels that first made paddy rice viable in the region.