Hwaseong Fortress: A City Built in Two and a Half Years

At a glance

• ⏱️1794 to 1796

  Preparation began in 1793 and construction ran from the first month of 1794, finishing in about two and a half years.

• 📐5.4 km, not 4

  The wall came out at about 5.4 km — longer than the 4 km Jeong Yak-yong had originally envisaged.

• 📖A book about the building

  The Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe, compiled in 1801, records the construction from the first month of 1794 to the eighth month of 1796.

• 🌏UNESCO, 1997

  Hwaseong Fortress was inscribed on the World Heritage List.

The fortress begins with a relocation, and the sequence matters.

In 1789 Jeongjo moved the tomb of Prince Sado — his father — from Yangju to Hwasan, where the Suwon prefectural seat had stood for centuries, and renamed it Hyeollyungwon. He then ordered the Suwon town centre moved to a new location below Paldalsan, and had the prefecture, until then called Suwon-bu, renamed Hwaseong.

Read that carefully, because it is a large administrative act described in one sentence. A tomb was moved; an entire town was moved to make room for it; and the resulting place was given a new name. The name stuck for a century: Suwon was called Hwaseong until the administrative reorganisation of 1895 returned it to Suwon-gun, and it is Suwon City today.

Prince Sado's death is one of the most discussed episodes in Joseon history, and it is not this article's subject. What the record supports is the sequence of decisions, not an account of the king's inner motives. The dynasty this all belongs to is set out in the Joseon overview.

After the prefecture was moved, preparation for building the wall began in earnest in 1793, work started in the first month of the following year, and it was completed in 1796 — about two and a half years.

Korean fortress walls generally follow the land in irregular shapes, and Hwaseong does too. What sets it apart is the equipment.

The wall carried facilities not seen on other fortresses — jeokdae, nujo, gongsimdon and poru among them. A gongsimdon is a hollow observation tower a garrison can occupy and fire from; a nujo is a water-spout for dousing a gate that is being burned. These are answers to specific attacks, designed in.

The construction is specific too. The wall is stone, 4 to 6 metres high depending on the terrain, with a parapet about 1 metre high pierced by loopholes. It was built on a gyu-hyeong profile — battered so that it leans inward as it rises.

There are four gates and five secret gates, and the detached palace sits at the centre of the walled area. The north gate is Janganmun and the south gate Paldalmun; both are two-storey gatehouses on a scale and form comparable to the gates of the capital's own wall. If you have already seen Hanyangdoseong in Seoul, that comparison is the point — a provincial town was given gates of capital-city rank.

The setting explains the shape: Paldalsan stands to the west, a low ridge to the east, and a stream runs north to south between the two slopes with a little flat ground around it.

Now the part that makes Hwaseong unusual among world monuments.

The Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe was compiled by Kim Jong-su in 1801 and records the circumstances, systems and ceremonies of the construction. The construction of the Hwaseong walls, from the first month of 1794 to the eighth month of 1796, was a large civil-engineering and architectural project requiring great expense and technique, and the record was made in order to leave a detailed account of the work.

A monument with a surviving, official, contemporaneous account of its own building is rare anywhere. It means the fortress can be repaired against its own specification rather than against a guess — which matters, because much of what stands today has been restored.

Hwaseong Fortress was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997.

The encyclopedia's own assessment gives the argument in the terms Korean scholarship uses: the building of Hwaseong is characterised as a construction project carried out by a modern mode of production, produced by Jeongjo's reformist political line, by the rational thought grounded in the Silhak — "practical learning" — of the time, and by a free market economy. It is also held that Korean modern architecture begins with the building of Hwaseong.

Whether or not one accepts every part of that framing, it explains why this wall is discussed differently from older Korean fortresses. The claim being made is about labour, payment and method as much as about stone.

Be honest with yourself about the fabric.

• The plan is original. The circuit, the gates' positions, the relationship of wall to hill and stream are the 1794–96 design.
• Much of the standing masonry is restored. The fortress passed through the colonial period and the Korean War, and long stretches have been rebuilt — which is precisely what the Uigwe made possible.
• The detached palace at the centre, Hwaseong Haenggung, was largely lost and has been substantially reconstructed.

None of that diminishes the site; it is the normal condition of Korean heritage after the twentieth century, and the same distinction applies at Gyeongbokgung. But it changes what you are looking at from "an eighteenth-century wall" to "an eighteenth-century design, rebuilt to its own written specification."

Worth pairing with

• 

  Yungneung and Geolleung Royal Tombs

  Yungneung and Geolleung — the tomb whose relocation started all of this, and Jeongjo's own tomb beside it.

• 

  Changdeokgung Palace

  Changdeokgung, where the same king built the Gyujanggak library complex.

• 

  Korean Folk Village

  The Korean Folk Village at Yongin, for the domestic architecture of the same period.

• 

  Hanyangdoseong

  Hanyangdoseong in Seoul — the capital wall whose gate scale Hwaseong's north and south gates match.

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