– Or, Why Have We Become So Obsessed with Lines?
Not long ago, an interesting edit appeared on OSM: a question about which country a small sandbar in the Amnok (Yalu) River, between Joseon (North Korea) and China, actually belonged to. One person’s edit drew another’s objection, and various pieces of evidence were brought in on both sides. But this is where things get complicated.
There’s no good way for us to confirm which side actually controls this island right now. Local Chinese government records or satellite imagery can be found, more or less — but that’s ultimately just “China’s claim”. As for the other side, there’s almost no way to hear how Joseon (North Korea) sees this island. It’s as if only one side has been handed a microphone.
So this piece isn’t trying to settle whose land that island is. If anything, the very fact that no conclusion can be reached is the doorway into what this piece wants to talk about.
These river islands were, in fact, sorted out quite carefully once before.
During the 1962 Sino–North Korean Border Treaty negotiations, the two countries divided up 451 islands and sandbars scattered across the Amnok and Tumen rivers. What’s interesting is the criterion they used to divide them — not “which side is this island closer to”, but “who was actually living on and farming this island at the time the treaty was signed”.
The result: 264 went to Joseon (North Korea), 187 to China. At a glance that might look like a rough even split, but in terms of area the gap is far larger, since most of the larger, more densely settled islands ended up on the Joseon (North Korea) side.
Worth remembering: the border was drawn not according to the land itself, but according to who was on that land.
Because rivers don’t sit still the way maps on a negotiating table do. Sand piles up and erodes; islands grow, vanish, or quietly fuse onto a riverbank. So does the border assigned more than sixty years ago to “the island where people were living” still hold now that the island’s shape has changed completely?
Following how different countries have tried to answer this question turns out to reveal a far more varied landscape than you might expect.
A Ridgeline Wasn’t Quite a Ridgeline
In 2025, gunfire broke out along the Thailand–Cambodia border.
Trace it back to its roots and you land in 1904, in a treaty signed well over a century earlier.
At the time, this agreement between France and Siam (Thailand’s former name) specified that the border would follow the watershed of the Dângrêk Mountains — that is, the mountain ridgeline. As a principle, nothing could be clearer: just follow the ridge.
The problem was the map drawn up afterward.
The line actually drawn on the map diverged subtly from the watershed described in the treaty text — and on that map, the Preah Vihear Temple ended up on the Cambodian side. This discrepancy went uncorrected for a long time afterward. The “principle written in words” and the “line drawn on paper” were saying two different things. And this century-old gap eventually erupted, in the 21st century, into an International Court of Justice ruling over the temple — and into actual armed conflict.
The land itself is unambiguous. But the words used to describe it were never quite as unambiguous as the physical land.
Or, put the other way around: the words themselves were clear enough — it was the actual land, fixed and unchanging as it should have been, that turned out not to be so clear.
That might be the sentence running through this entire piece.
When Nature Shakes the Border, Countries Respond Differently
Sometimes the land itself simply moves. And when it does, countries’ responses can diverge dramatically.
Here are two opposite cases.
One is Switzerland and Italy.
Near the Matterhorn, the border between the two countries has followed the watershed of the ridgeline since 1861. But as glaciers melted, the actual highest point — the watershed itself — shifted.
The two countries formed a joint commission and negotiated the matter. In 2023 they agreed on a new border adjustment, and in 2024 the Swiss parliament ratified it.
Not a single shot fired — the whole thing settled with a few maps and a few signatures.
The other is the United States and Mexico.
In 1848, the two countries agreed that the deepest channel of the Rio Grande would mark their border. But a major flood in 1864 suddenly sent the river swinging south. Overnight, the area known as El Chamizal — until then Mexican territory — found itself north of the river, and thus, on the map, inside the United States.
The dispute that followed dragged on for nearly a century before finally being settled in 1963, through an agreement between President Kennedy and Mexican President López Mateos. Their solution was, frankly, both hilarious and drastic: they decided to lock the river itself into a concrete channel. Construction was completed in 1968, and to this day the stretch of the Rio Grande running between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez is an artificial concrete channel. If a river wandering around causes problems, the logic goes, just stop it from wandering at all — quite possibly the boldest solution of any case in this piece.
Same problem, opposite solutions. One country redrew the border to follow nature; the other set nature in concrete so the border would never have to move again.
And the Best Plot Twist — the Island Was Already Gone Before the Verdict That Was Meant to Decide It
The last case has a rather anticlimactic ending.
In 1970, after Cyclone Bhola tore through the Bay of Bengal, a small sandbar newly emerged at the mouth of the Ganges.
India called it New Moore Island; Bangladesh called it South Talpatti Island — and each claimed it as their own. It was uninhabited, but speculation that the surrounding waters held oil and gas made the dispute a serious one. Naval vessels were involved at points, and it dragged on for more than forty years.
In 2014, the Permanent Court of Arbitration finally ruled that sovereignty over the island belonged to India — the conclusion to forty years of dispute.
But here’s the twist: even before that ruling, back in 2010, rising sea levels had already submerged the island entirely. The court had finally decided who owned the land — except by then, that land no longer existed.
Back to the Sandbar
Thailand–Cambodia, Switzerland–Italy, the US–Mexico, India–Bangladesh — these four cases share at least one thing in common.
Whether the outcome was gunfire, a signature, concrete, or submersion, in every case both sides were able to draw their own maps, present their own evidence, and take a seat at a courtroom or a negotiating table.
At the very least, both sides held a microphone.
Coming back to that sandbar in the Amnok River makes it clear all over again that this minimal condition is exactly what’s missing.
The river may have shifted, the island may have grown or shrunk, people may have left or newly settled there — but there’s no way to confirm any of this on one side, while there is, at least somewhat, on the other. Chinese sources exist, but they amount to China’s claims; there’s almost no way to hear from the Joseon (North Korea) side. The absence of information becomes, in itself, a border problem of its own.
What’s interesting, though, is that the border disputes described in this piece are, in a sense, being re-enacted inside OSM every single day.
OSM even has a tag specifically for marking a “disputed boundary”.
Around places like Kashmir, Crimea, and Western Sahara, chronic revert wars among editors are still happening right now. Stories that took presidents shaking hands, international courts spending years in deliberation, or one side pouring concrete into a riverbed — nearly a century, in some cases — are being replayed here, several times a day, by a handful of anonymous users logging in and clicking a mouse a few times.
That sandbar in the Amnok River is likely just one more unremarkable frame in this vast, ongoing edit war.
And One More Question
But here I’d like to ask a slightly different question.
Why do we want to draw such clear lines in the first place? Why are we so intent on making borders unambiguous?
To me — born and raised south of a border that is, technically, still just an armistice line in an unfinished war — a border has always meant barbed wire and minefields, something dangerous you don’t approach carelessly.
And yet the system we take for granted today, of controlling borders one by one through passports stamped with photos and seals, isn’t actually that old. It only took its current shape in the early 20th century, largely through the First World War.
The sense that “a border is naturally this hard and this frightening” may itself be a fairly recent invention in human history.
Go back a little further in history, and an entirely different landscape appears.
Setting aside China — now more or less a single country — across East and Southeast Asia more broadly, stories of someone from one country going to another and building something, painting something, or holding office there were once quite common.
Europe’s Habsburg dynasty, for centuries, expanded its territory through marriage rather than war: an Austrian princess would become the queen of Spain, and her descendants would go on to rule the Netherlands, Bohemia, and Hungary. There was even a saying: “Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry”.
As royal houses became entangled across borders this way, painters, architects, and musicians naturally moved between courts as well.
Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian, spent his final years at the invitation of the French king Francis I, living at the French court until his death.
By today’s standards, that’s one head of state keeping another country’s artist by his side — but at the time it wasn’t especially strange.
Columbus is a similar kind of figure. He came from Genoa, a city-state in northwestern Italy, yet the funding for his voyage came from neither Italy nor Portugal, the country he’d first approached. Rejected by the Portuguese king, he crossed into Spain — specifically, the Kingdom of Castile — and secured the backing of Queen Isabella. In effect, an Italian sailor’s plan crossed the Atlantic under Spain’s name.
None of these people stayed neatly within the framework of nationality we take for granted today.
Look at a map of Europe from that era through today’s eyes, and the borders look somewhat sloppy, blurred.
And yet within that blur, people, ideas, and technologies moved freely, and the art of the Renaissance and the Baroque grew richer for it.
In ways hard for us to imagine now, there were things that flourished precisely because the boundaries were faint.
Which raises the question: are the lines we work so hard to defend today really worth defending to this degree? Or have we simply grown too accustomed to the act of drawing lines itself?
The rights to this article belong to 깨몽 (adreamy), and it may be freely used under CC BY 4.0.
Author’s Note :This article was written by me. To better capture some subtle nuances in meaning, I used a large language model (LLM) to help translate it into English, with some light editing during the translation process.
