The flash map seems to be inaccurate–why are nation-states prioritized over cultural regions, and why are the political boundaries shown as they are?
There is no simple answer to this. For reasons of geographical proximity, sites are grouped on this website by the urban area or local region that each currently occupies. The drawback of this approach is that the political reality of the present world has cut off certain regions from one another that have historically shared a common identity. In Korea, for example, Seoul and Gaeseong are separated by about a hundred kilometers, and they’ve historically shared a common cultural and political regime well into the twentieth century. However, the modern political division of the peninsula into North and South Korea have made Seoul and Gaeseong mutually inaccessible to one another. Although there’s no such thing as a “North Korean traditional architecture”, the historiography of traditional architectural sites in the North (as determined by North Korean scholarship) is different from the interpretation found in the South. This is not to say that sites in the North are somehow more valuabl
