Changdeokgung: The Palace Joseon's Kings Actually Lived In

At a glance

• 🏗️1405, and not the main palace

  Built under King Taejong as an igung — a secondary palace — while Gyeongbokgung was the beopgung, the principal one.

• 📏74 outer bays, 118 inner

  The size of the palace when it was finished. Work ended in the tenth month of 1405 and it was named Changdeokgung on the 25th.

• 🔁Rebuilt first after the war

  Of the palaces burned in 1592, Changdeokgung was the first one restored — the kings had been living there.

• 🌏UNESCO, 1997

  Changdeokgung and its rear garden were inscribed on the World Heritage List.

The story starts with a capital that kept moving.

Taejo, who founded Joseon, made Hanyang (today's Seoul) the capital and built Gyeongbokgung. His successor Jeongjong then moved the capital back to the old city of Gaeseong. The third king, Taejong, overruled the ministers who wanted to stay in Gaeseong and decided in 1404 to return to Hanyang. Why the capital was in Hanyang in the first place is a separate story, told in why Joseon moved its capital.

Here is the part that is easy to miss. Gyeongbokgung already existed — and Taejong built a new palace anyway. The encyclopedia gives the reason plainly: Taejong shied away from the political events that had taken place at Gyeongbokgung. The lasting consequence was structural rather than personal — it established the two-palace system, a court that operated out of two compounds instead of one.

The work finished in the tenth month of 1405, and on the 25th the palace was named Changdeokgung. It came to 74 bays in the outer court and 118 in the inner. Against Gyeongbokgung's roughly 390 bays at its founding — the figure in the Gyeongbokgung article — this was the smaller house.

Then the palaces burned.

Every one of Seoul's palaces was destroyed during the Imjin War. What matters for Changdeokgung is the order of repair. Of the burned palaces, Changdeokgung was the first to be rebuilt — and the encyclopedia gives two reasons: the kings had mostly been living at Changdeokgung already, and there was a view that Gyeongbokgung was inauspicious by geomancy.

That decision set the next 270 years. Gyeongbokgung stayed an empty site until the 1860s; Changdeokgung became the working palace.

The rebuilding was not smooth. The restoration ran from the end of Seonjo's reign into the start of Gwanghaegun's. About ten years after it was finished, the coup of 1623 burned most of the buildings apart from part of the outer court. The palace was then left for twenty-five years and restored in 1647.

So the "old palace" you are standing in has already been destroyed and rebuilt twice before the eighteenth century even begins.

The palace grew in a particular direction under Jeongjo, the king who also built Hwaseong Fortress.

Jeongjo built a set of facilities to put scholarship at the centre of government — the Gyujanggak and, around it, Bongmodang, Gaeyuwa, Yeolgogwan, a library and Seohyanggak — so that the records of past kings and newly purchased books could be stored and studied. He also greatly expanded the space for the crown prince, of which Junghuidang and Sugangjae are the main examples.

This is one of the more useful things to carry around the grounds. A palace is usually read as a place of ceremony. Here, a large part of the building programme was a research library.

Two fires shaped what survives.

In the twelfth month of 1803 a fire that began in the corridor of Seonjeongjeon burned Injeongjeon and a considerable part of the inner quarters, and rebuilding began at once.

Then the decisive one. The last great fire at Changdeokgung came in November 1917. It started at an ondol — an underfloor heating flue — in the west corridor of Daejojeon and burned most of the inner precinct.

And here is the sentence that connects this palace to the one down the road:

The repair work covered its main parts by relocating halls from Gyeongbokgung, including Gangnyeongjeon and Gyotaejeon. This rebuilding greatly altered Changdeokgung's original appearance.

Read that together with Gyeongbokgung, where the same event appears from the other side: buildings there were dismantled and their timber carried here. Some of what stands in Changdeokgung's inner quarters came out of Gyeongbokgung — which is also why neither palace is quite the building it was.

The same repair brought in a garage for motor cars, electric lighting, tables, chairs and curtains, which changed the character of the architecture again. The colonial background to all of this is in Korea under Japanese rule.

The royal family of the Korean Empire lived in the Nakseonjae precinct of Changdeokgung to the very end.

The Huwon (후원, "rear garden") is booked separately and walked with a guide, and it is the part of the visit most people remember.

It covers about 103,000 pyeong, and in 1997 Changdeokgung together with its rear garden was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

One naming detail is worth knowing before you buy a ticket. The annals call it huwon, bugwon or geumwon, with huwon by far the most common. The name "Biwon" only appears from 1904. If you see the garden called Biwon or "Secret Garden", that is a twentieth-century label, not what the dynasty called it.

The garden has its own destruction and repair story too: it lay derelict for twenty years after the war of 1592, and was taken up again from 1610 when Gwanghaegun restored the burned palace.

Carry three distinctions and the visit sharpens considerably.

• The site and the layout are original — this is the ground of 1405, and the palace was laid out to follow the terrain rather than force it into a grid.
• The standing buildings are not. Injeongjeon and the inner halls are the product of the 1647, 1803 and post-1917 rebuildings, in that order.
• Some of the inner quarters are Gyeongbokgung's buildings, moved here after 1917.

The encyclopedia's own summary of the palace's value is that it was built naturally, in harmony with the surrounding terrain rather than following an imposed structure, and is regarded as the most Korean of the palaces — a quality it passed on to Gyeonghuigung and Gyeongungung. It was used without a boundary between it and Changgyeonggung to its east, and the two together were nicknamed Donggwol, the eastern palaces.

Worth seeing alongside

• 

  Gyeongbokgung Palace

  The principal palace, empty for 270 years while this one was in use — and the source of some halls standing here.

• 

  Jongmyo Shrine

  Jongmyo, the royal ancestral shrine, immediately south and connected to the palace grounds.

• 

  Changgyeonggung Palace

  Changgyeonggung, used together with Changdeokgung as a single compound called Donggwol.

• 

  Deoksugung Palace

  Deoksugung, the palace the court moved to at the end of the dynasty.

Frequently asked questions