Seoul: Five Hundred Years of Joseon

In fifteen ninety-two, the Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched a massive invasion of Korea. His armies burned Gyeongbokgung to the ground within weeks of their arrival. The Joseon court fled. The palace sat in ruins for two hundred and seventy years — not because Korea forgot it, but because it became politically complicated to rebuild, and then there was no money, and then there was the next crisis, and the next. Two hundred and seventy years of ruins at the heart of the capital city.

Then in eighteen sixty-three the regent Heungseon Daewongun took power as guardian of the young King Gojong, and decided the empty ruined palace was an insult to Joseon dignity. He rebuilt it. To source the stone and timber he demolished seven hundred and fifty-four private buildings across the city. He conscripted labour. He imposed a tax called the "gate toll" that was deeply unpopular. The rebuilding was completed in eighteen sixty-eight — a statement that Joseon still existed, still mattered, still had power. Within forty years, it would be gone.

Japan annexed Korea in nineteen ten. The Japanese colonial authorities set about dismantling the symbolic infrastructure of the Korean state. At Gyeongbokgung, they did something precise and devastating: they demolished most of the buildings within the palace complex and then, in nineteen sixteen, they began construction of the Japanese General Government Building — a massive European Renaissance–style administrative block — directly in front of the Gwanghwamun gate, on the central ceremonial axis of the palace, blocking the view of the throne hall from the street. The building was completed in nineteen twenty-six. It stood there, an architectural statement of colonial domination, until nineteen ninety-five, when the South Korean government demolished it as part of the palace restoration.

Inside the complex, walk to the Gyeonghoeru Pavilion — a two-storey wooden banqueting hall built in fourteen twelve on a rectangular artificial lake, supported by forty-eight stone columns. It is one of the most beautiful wooden structures in Korea: functional, grand, and perfectly reflected in still water. The original was burned in fifteen ninety-two; this is the eighteen sixty-seven reconstruction. The National Folk Museum and National Palace Museum are both within the grounds if you want to go deeper into the history.

The changing of the guard ceremony at this gate happens twice daily, at ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. The ceremony is a reconstruction — it was discontinued during the colonial period and revived in modern times — but the costumes, the formations, and the ritual are based on historical records. Come back for it if you can. But for now, enter the palace and walk its courtyards, and understand that what you are standing in is a city's argument with itself about what it is and what it was.

The history of this neighbourhood is more complicated than it looks. These are not ancient aristocratic hanok. The vast majority of what you see was built during the Japanese colonial period, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, by modern real estate developers who bought up large plots of land in the old aristocratic quarters and subdivided them into smaller lots for the urban middle class. The hanok they built were smaller than traditional aristocratic hanok, more regular in plan, with less elaborate decoration — but still traditional in materials, still built by master carpenters using the same techniques, still with the curved roof and the ondol floor. Colonial-era vernacular architecture, built under Japanese rule, expressing Korean form.

After the Korean War many hanok were demolished or modified — concrete walls added, metal roofing replacing the tiles, rooms subdivided for multiple families. The neighbourhood declined. Then, from the nineteen eighties onward, a combination of heritage designation and the growing international interest in Korean culture made Bukchon valuable again. The Seoul city government offered subsidies to homeowners who restored their hanok to traditional standards. Cafes and guesthouses moved in. The alleyways — the bone-white tile walls, the grey curved roofs descending in layers down the hillside, the view of the palace complex below and the mountains above — became one of the most photographed views in Seoul.

The residents of the private hanok that remain have put up signs in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese asking visitors to be quiet, not to peer over walls, not to ring doorbells for photographs. The signs have a particular sadness: "This is our home. We are your hosts, not your attraction." It is the tension that heritage neighbourhoods everywhere face — the more beautiful and preserved a place is, the more it is consumed by its own beauty.

The best time to walk these alleys is early morning, before the tour groups arrive. The light is low, the cats are out, the smell of breakfast is coming from the occupied hanok, and you can hear the city below waking up. Go slowly. Look at the rooflines. Look at the lattice windows. Look at the way the lanes turn and compress and open. This is what Seoul looked like for centuries, at scale — a city of courtyards and curved roofs — before the twentieth century remade it into something else.

The Huwon is the opposite of a European palace garden. There is no axis, no symmetry, no parterre, no topiary. The paths wind through existing forest, arriving at clearings where pavilions sit beside ponds. The ponds are not rectangular — they follow organic shapes, one famously in the form of the Korean peninsula. The pavilions are small, precise, and placed to frame specific views of water and mountain. Lotus flowers in summer. Brilliant autumn colour. Ancient specimen trees — a two-hundred-year-old scholar tree in the examination courtyard where Joseon scholars sat their civil service exams under the open sky.

The garden is accessible only on guided tours of limited size, with a ticketing system designed to limit daily visitor numbers. This is not bureaucratic obstruction — the garden's ecology is genuinely fragile, the soils compacted by centuries of foot traffic, and the limit protects it. Buy tickets online in advance if you can. The tour is in Korean but the garden communicates for itself.

Come to Changdeokgung on a weekday if you have any choice. It receives far fewer visitors than Gyeongbokgung — partly because it is slightly harder to find, partly because it requires a guided tour for the garden — and a weekday visit in the shoulder season can feel almost private. The same stones, the same ponds, the same pavilions that the Joseon court used for five hundred years. The same hillside, the same trees growing larger every decade.

There is a quality of accumulated time in this place that is different from Gyeongbokgung, which has been so dramatically destroyed and reconstructed that it carries the weight of loss. Changdeokgung was also damaged — also partially destroyed by the Japanese, also restored — but the Huwon survived more intact than almost anything else of the Joseon period. Walking in it, you are walking somewhere that has been continuously tended, continuously valued, for six hundred years. That continuity has a texture you can feel.

Five times a year during the Joseon period, the reigning king would come to Jongmyo to perform the Jongmyo Jerye — a state ritual of sacrifice and music honouring the royal ancestors. The ritual was prescribed in every detail: what was offered, when, in what order, by whom, wearing what, accompanied by what music. The music — Jongmyo Jeryeak, the court ritual music of Joseon — is itself a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, one of the oldest continuous musical traditions in the world. It was composed in the fifteenth century and has been performed without significant modification for six hundred years. If you have any way to be here on the first Sunday of May, the Jongmyo Jerye is still performed by the descendants of the Joseon royal family, in full period costume, with the court orchestra playing the ancient music in the ancient forms. Two thousand people attend. The ritual takes most of the day.

The shrine is set within a dense forest of ancient trees — zelkovas and oaks that have been growing here since the Joseon period, some of them several hundred years old. The combination of the forest, the silence (which is enforced and genuine — this is not a place where people talk loudly), the extreme horizontal architecture, and the knowledge of what is housed here — the accumulated dead of five centuries of monarchy — creates something unusual. It is not exactly sacred in the way a church or mosque or Buddhist temple is sacred. It is more like witnessing a civilisation's argument that its dead still matter, still require attention, still deserve ceremony. That argument is six hundred years old and is still being made, every first Sunday of May, by the people who remain.

During the Japanese colonial period, the neighbourhood became a market for antiques and cultural artifacts. Some of what changed hands was looted — taken from royal collections or temples or aristocratic families who had lost everything in the collapse of the dynasty. Some was sold by Koreans who needed money in difficult times. The antique trade gave the street its character as a place where Korean material culture was preserved, traded, and — not entirely without ambivalence — monetised.

After liberation and the Korean War, Insadong became the centre of the traditional arts revival. The ceramicists who were trying to reconstruct the techniques of Goryeo celadon and Joseon white porcelain had studios here. The calligraphers who were working in traditional ink and brush. The paper-makers who were reviving hanji — traditional Korean mulberry paper — as an art form. Those workshops are still here, alongside the tourist cafes and the souvenir shops.

The side alleys are worth more of your time than the main street. Ssamziegil, a courtyard complex just off Insadong-gil, contains independent designers and galleries in a building specifically designed to preserve the human scale of the old lanes. The pojangmacha — the orange-tented street food stalls that appear in the evenings — sell hotteok (pancakes filled with brown sugar syrup and crushed peanuts, cooked on a flat iron), tteok (rice cakes in dozens of forms), and sikhye (a sweet cold drink made from fermented rice, served with pine nuts floating on top). The sikhye in particular is a Joseon-period drink, documented in royal records: a palace serving a street, five hundred years later.

The four-hundred-year-old zelkova trees in the courtyard were already ancient when the temple was built around them. Those trees are older than anything else here, and they impose a scale and stillness on the courtyard that the relatively recent buildings cannot supply on their own. In spring the zelkovas leaf out in pale green against the temple's ochre walls and white exterior trim. In autumn the leaves turn amber and fall through the incense smoke.

Walk into the courtyard and stop. The temple operates continuously. Monks chant in the Daeungjeon through the day in scheduled sessions — the low, rhythmic sound of men's voices and the wooden percussion of the moktak block. Incense burns at the outdoor altar. Elderly women in grey Bodhisattva robes do prostrations on the wooden boards in front of the main hall — each prostration a prayer, and they do hundreds in a session, slowly, without apparent effort, as they have done for decades. The enormous bronze bell in the bell tower is struck thirty-three times in the morning and twenty-eight times in the evening; you can hear it across this entire neighbourhood.

On the occasion of the Buddha's Birthday — celebrated on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, which falls in May — the street in front of Jogyesa fills with thousands of lotus lanterns suspended from wires strung between the plane trees. The Seoul Lantern Festival: an entire street transformed into a tunnel of coloured light. Each lantern was assembled by a different family or group, and each carries a prayer tag. The effect at night is extraordinary — a city street become entirely otherworldly for one week of the year.

Come in and sit for a few minutes if the main hall is open. You don't have to be Buddhist, and you don't have to do anything in particular. Just sit with the incense and the chanting and the old trees, in the middle of a city of ten million people, and notice what silence feels like when it exists inside noise.

Then, incrementally, in the two thousands and especially the twenty-tens, something shifted. Young Seoulites — designers, chefs, photographers, musicians — began moving into the cheap hanok space. A cafe in the front room of a hanok. A cocktail bar in a converted courtyard. A naengmyeon restaurant where the same family had been making cold noodles for three generations. The narrow lanes, which were a disadvantage for conventional commercial development, became an advantage for intimate, atmospheric hospitality.

The naengmyeon here is worth lingering over if you haven't encountered it. Naengmyeon is cold buckwheat noodles in an iced beef or mul broth, served with sliced cucumber, a hard-boiled egg, and thin sheets of Korean pear. It is a North Korean dish — its origins are in Pyongyang and Hamhung — brought south by refugees during the Korean War, and it is one of the great dishes of the Korean table: simultaneously light and deeply flavoured, bracing and comforting. The restaurants in Ikseon-dong that have been making it for decades are not tourist restaurants; they are neighbourhood institutions that tourists are now welcome to share.

Come at evening if you can. The light in these lanes at dusk — the warm glow of interior lighting through paper-screen doors, the low rooflines against a darkening sky, the smell of cooking and coffee, the sound of conversation from behind wooden walls — is as good as Seoul gets. It is the city at its most habitable, a pocket of scale and warmth in a metropolis that can otherwise feel relentless.

The food hall is entirely occupied by small cooking stalls, each run by a family or an individual vendor, each specialising in a few dishes. The specialties of Gwangjang are specific and famous. Bindaetteok: pan-fried mung bean pancakes, filled with kimchi and pork, cooked on a flat iron until the outside is dark and crispy and the inside is dense and savoury. These are not delicate things — they are substantial, hot, and as good as fried food gets. Mayak gimbap: tiny rolls of seaweed and seasoned rice, sometimes with a little carrot and pickled radish, dipped in a sauce of mustard and soy. They are called "narcotic gimbap" — mayak means narcotic — because people who try them cannot stop eating them. Nakji-bokkeum: spicy stir-fried small octopus with gochujang paste and vegetables, served sizzling in the pan. Yukhoe: Korean beef tartare — raw beef, julienned, dressed with sesame oil, soy, and Asian pear, served with a raw egg yolk on top and thin slices of pear alongside.

Anthony Bourdain ate at Gwangjang Market for his television programme and called the bindaetteok the best pancake he had ever eaten in his life. The episode ran, the market appeared in guides, and the tourist traffic increased significantly. The vendors at Gwangjang are accustomed to this now. They are neither warmer nor colder than they have always been — they are people running a business, and they will cook for you and take your money and cook for the next person without fuss.

Sit at one of the small stools at a stall counter, order by pointing if necessary, and eat with the vendors' other customers. The market is one of the few places in Seoul where you can be next to Korean grandmothers eating the food they have been eating here for forty years, and next to tourists from everywhere else in the world, all eating the same thing, all equal in front of a hot pan.

By the early two thousands, the elevated highway above the Cheonggyecheon was deteriorating. A structural assessment said it needed either major repair or demolition. Lee Myung-bak, then mayor of Seoul, proposed demolition and stream restoration. The proposal was controversial: business owners along the highway worried about losing customers, engineers worried about groundwater, historians worried that the restoration would be a Disneyland reconstruction rather than a genuine revival. The project went ahead. The highway was demolished in two thousand and three. The stream was excavated, cleaned, and the banks planted. The restored Cheonggyecheon was opened to the public in two thousand and five.

The restoration cost nine hundred million dollars. It is credited with reducing inner-city air temperatures by three to four degrees Celsius, generating an estimated sixteen billion dollars of economic activity in the surrounding area in its first decade, and restoring a habitat corridor through the urban core that bird and fish species quickly recolonised. The elevated highway had carried one hundred and sixty thousand vehicles per day; after its removal, traffic in the surrounding streets did not increase as predicted — many of the trips simply did not happen, a phenomenon urban planners call "traffic evaporation."

The stream runs eleven kilometres from Cheong-gye Plaza, near Gwanghwamun, to where it joins the Han River in the east of the city. The banks are planted with grasses and wildflowers that change through the seasons. People jog here in the morning. People walk here at lunch. In summer, children wade in the shallows. On weekend evenings the banks are busy with couples and families. The lantern festival that runs along the stream each November puts tens of thousands of floating lights on the water.

Seoul paid an enormous price to bury this stream — not in money, but in livability, in ecology, in the loss of something that cities need and that you cannot put a precise value on. Then it paid nine hundred million dollars to get it back. Both decisions tell you something about what a city values, and when. Walk the banks for a few minutes and consider the highway that is not here anymore.

The Japanese kept Gojong at Deoksugung under effective house arrest for the last twelve years of his life. He died here on January twenty-first, nineteen nineteen. He was sixty-seven years old. Three days before his death he had been expected to attend a meeting of Korean nobles that might have produced a petition challenging Japanese rule. His death was officially attributed to a stroke; many Koreans at the time and since have believed he was poisoned. The evidence is circumstantial and the question is unresolved.

His death sparked what is now called the March First Independence Movement — Samil Undong — the largest mass protest in Korean history. Within weeks, two million Koreans in every province participated in demonstrations. They read aloud a Declaration of Independence modelled on the American and French versions. The Japanese response was violent: seven thousand five hundred people were killed, sixteen thousand wounded, forty-seven thousand arrested over the following months. The movement did not achieve independence — that would not come until nineteen forty-five — but it transformed Korean national consciousness and is commemorated as one of the defining events of modern Korean history.

Walk through the palace grounds and look at the European-style stone buildings — the Seokjojeon, a neoclassical building completed in nineteen ten; the Jungmyeonjeon, a Renaissance-style structure — built during Gojong's reign as Korea tried to present itself to the world as a modern sovereign state capable of entering international relations on equal terms with Western powers. The buildings look profoundly strange now, surrounded by skyscrapers: Western architecture built by Korean craftsmen under Japanese occupation, expressing a sovereignty that was being stripped away simultaneously.

The changing of the guard ceremony here, at the Daehanmun gate, happens three times daily and reconstructs the royal gate ceremony of the late Joseon period. The wall path around the outside of the palace — Deoksugung Doldam-gil — is one of Seoul's most famous romantic walks, lined with plane trees that form a canopy in summer.

Stand in the palace grounds for a moment before you leave and consider the full arc of what you've walked today: a city founded in thirteen ninety-four, destroyed repeatedly, rebuilt repeatedly, colonised, liberated, destroyed again in war, rebuilt again faster than almost any city in history, and now — six hundred and thirty years after the first palace was built — still here, still arguing about what it is and what it was and what it owes to the people who built it.