Seoul's History: From Hanyang to Modern Seoul

At a glance

• 🏗️About two years from September 1394

  The state's strength went into building Jongmyo and the Sajik altars, palaces, government offices and the city wall.

• 🏷️Hanyang-bu became Hanseong-bu

  The administrative name changed partway through the construction.

• 🏢A building that hid the throne hall

  The Government-General building was erected in front of Geunjeongjeon and completely hid the palace's central structure.

• 🔁Summer 1950, three months

  Occupied on 27 June; UN forces entered on 26 September and the recapture ceremony was held on the 29th.

The first fact about Seoul is this: it is a built city, not a grown one.

From September 1394, for about two years, the state's strength went into a continuous programme at Hanyang: Jongmyo and the Sajik altars, palaces and the various government offices, and the city wall. And partway through, Hanyang-bu was renamed Hanseong-bu.

The order of that list is the city's logic. Ritual installations first, then the ruler's residence, then the administrative apparatus, and finally the wall enclosing all of it. Why that order is taken up in the move to Hanyang.

The arrangement is still there. With Gyeongbokgung at the centre, Jongmyo lies east and the Sajik altars west, and the wall runs around the outside along the ridgelines.

Hanyangdoseong was a defensive work and at the same time the definition of the city. Inside the wall was the capital; outside was not.

The best way to see that boundary now is to walk a stretch of it. Climb the Inwangsan or Naksan sections and you get, in one view, the wall running along the ridge with the towers of the centre filling the space inside it. That single view explains six hundred years of Seoul.

Several of the gates are now islands ringed by roads, because streets were driven through where the wall was broken. That the gates survived while long runs of wall did not is itself a record of twentieth-century urbanisation.

Seoul's modern period happened at the exact centre rather than at the edges.

After 29 August 1910, Japanese imperialism established the Government-General of Korea as its colonial governing apparatus, and militarily stationed the Japanese Army's 20th Division at Yongsan with responsibility for central and southern Korea. That is the background to Yongsan's long life as a garrison.

The largest symbolic act happened inside a palace. A very large stone Government-General building was put up directly in front of Geunjeongjeon, the palace's central structure, completely hiding it.

How long that building lasted also says something about Seoul's twentieth century. After liberation in 1945 the Government-General building the Japanese had put up was used as a government complex, and the former Government-General building was demolished in 1995 for the fiftieth anniversary of liberation. Then the Heungnyemun precinct that had originally stood on the site was restored and completed in October 2001.

A site from 1395 was given back in 1995 and rebuilt in 2001. You can walk over it at Gyeongbokgung.

The most abrupt change Seoul has been through took three months.

The full invasion that began at dawn on 25 June 1950 had already occupied Seoul by 27 June, and by 3 July had crossed the Han River and was continuing south.

Then UN forces, having landed at Incheon, entered Seoul on 26 September, and once the city was fully recovered a recapture ceremony was held on 29 September.

The city changed hands twice in three months. What Seoul went through in the Korean War is part of why old buildings are scarce in the centre.

The practical way to see history in Seoul is by layer rather than by chronology.

• The fourteenth-century layer — the sites of the palaces and Jongmyo, and the boundary the wall drew
• The nineteenth-century layer — most of the palace buildings actually standing
• The twentieth-century layer — Yongsan, and what was erased and restored in the centre
• The present layer — the city laid over all of it

There are a few points where these layers are visible at once. In front of Gwanghwamun is one; the view down over the centre from the Inwangsan wall path is another.

Where Seoul's layers are visible

• 

  Hanyangdoseong

  The city wall. The original boundary of the city, readable along the ridgelines.

• 

  Gyeongbokgung Palace

  A 14th-century site carrying 19th-century buildings, with a precinct the 20th century erased and the 21st restored.

• 

  Jongmyo Shrine

  Jongmyo, built before the palaces in the capital's own construction order.

• 

  Seoul Museum of History

  A museum whose subject is the city of Seoul itself.

Frequently asked questions