Byeongsan Seowon: How a School Became a Shrine

At a glance

• 📚1563: a schoolhouse

  The predecessor, Pungak Seodang, was built in 1563 and was granted school land after a petition.

• 🚚Moved for quiet

  Ryu Seong-ryong advised moving it because the old site stood beside the road and was unsuitable for study; it became Byeongsan Seodang.

• 🕯️1614: it becomes a seowon

  The shrine Jondeoksa was begun in the eighth month of 1610 and his tablet enshrined on 5 April 1614, which gave the institution the standing of a seowon.

• 🌏UNESCO, 2019

  Inscribed as part of Seowon, Korean Neo-Confucian Academies.

Start where the institution started, which is not with a great man.

The predecessor of Byeongsan Seowon was Pungak Seodang, built in 1563. After a petition by the licentiate Gwon Gyeong-jeon and others, school land was granted to it. A seodang is a village schoolhouse — local, modest, for teaching.

Then a very ordinary problem produced the site you visit. On Ryu Seong-ryong's recommendation that Pungak Seodang stood beside the road and was therefore unsuitable for study, it was moved to Byeongsan and called Byeongsan Seodang.

The school was moved because the old one was too noisy. That is worth holding on to when you arrive, because the setting — the river, the hills across it, the absence of a town — stops looking picturesque and starts looking functional.

It worked as a school. In the seventh month of 1579, Gwon Ho-mun held a lecture meeting at Byeongsan Seodang at Ryu Seong-ryong's request and taught the students there.

Byeongsan Seodang was destroyed during the Imjin War. The war itself is in the Imjin War, and Ryu Seong-ryong served as chief state councillor through it.

The literati of the Pungsan area led the rebuilding, and in 1605 the reconstructed Byeongsan Seodang was named a seowon. At that point it had only a lecture hall and dormitories.

Note what is still missing. It is called a seowon, but it has classrooms and living quarters and nothing else. A seowon without a shrine is a school with an ambitious name.

The missing half arrived because of a death.

When Ryu Seong-ryong died in 1607, his disciples — Jeong Gyeong-se, An Dam-su, and the brothers Kim Yun-sa and Kim Yun-an among them — began in earnest to build a shrine to honour their teacher's learning and virtue.

Construction of Jondeoksa, the shrine, began behind the school in the eighth month of 1610, and on 5 April 1614 the tablet was enshrined — which gave the institution the standing of a seowon.

There is the definition, in dates. A seowon is a school that also performs rites to a scholar. Teaching alone makes a seodang. Adding a shrine and a tablet and a ceremony makes a seowon — and with it a claim about whose scholarship is authoritative, which is why seowon became politically powerful in later Joseon and why they were eventually curtailed.

Byeongsan Seowon received its royal charter in 1863, and it survived the order to demolish the seowon. That order, issued late in the dynasty, closed most academies in the country. Surviving it is the reason this one is still standing to visit. The dynasty's arc is in the Joseon overview.

The man at the centre of all this came from 3 km away.

Ryu Seong-ryong, known by the style name Seoae, was a son of Ryu Jung-yeong (1515–1573) of the Pungsan Ryu, and one of the two brothers under whom Hahoe village flourished; the other was Ryu Un-ryong.

So Hahoe and Byeongsan are one story in two places. The village is where the family lived; the academy is where its most consequential member was taught, remembered and enshrined after his death. Visiting one without the other leaves half the story on the road.

The building everyone photographs is Mandaeru, the open pavilion above the entrance — a long raised floor between bare pillars with no walls at all.

It is worth understanding what an open pavilion is for in a compound built for study. It has no function you could call practical. It frames: sit on it and the pillars divide the river and the hillside opposite into a series of panels. In a Neo-Confucian academy, contemplating the landscape was not a break from the curriculum; it was part of it.

That is the general argument for these places, and it is why they are on the World Heritage List. Seowon, Korean Neo-Confucian Academies was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019, as a group of nine academies rather than one.

Two practical notes on fabric. The site was designated a historic site on 31 March 1978, covering 27,251 square metres. And nothing here is continuous from 1563: the schoolhouse burned in the 1590s, the present arrangement follows the 1605 rebuilding and the shrine of 1610–1614, and Korean timber buildings are repaired and re-erected as a matter of routine.

Worth pairing with

• 

  Andong Hahoe Folk Village

  Hahoe village, 3 km away, where Ryu Seong-ryong's family lived and still lives.

• 

  Buyongdae

  Buyongdae, the cliff over the river opposite Hahoe.

• 

  Jongmyo Shrine

  Jongmyo in Seoul — the same Confucian logic of tablet, shrine and rite, at the scale of the state.

• 

  National Museum of Korea

  The National Museum of Korea, for the wider world of Joseon scholarship and its books.

Frequently asked questions