Seoul's Five Palaces, Compared: Price, Closing Day, Hours — and How There Came to Be Five

Gyeongbokgung is the first. It was built in 1395 as the principal palace of the new dynasty, and the city was laid out around it.

Changdeokgung followed ten years later as a secondary palace — a spare. It spent most of the dynasty being the real one instead. In 1484 King Seongjong enlarged the compound next door and named it Changgyeonggung, and from then on the two stood as one block divided by a single wall. That block was called the Eastern Palace.

The Imjin War burned all three, and only the Eastern Palace was rebuilt promptly. From then until Gojong reconstructed Gyeongbokgung in the 1860s, the working centre of the dynasty was there rather than at the principal palace. That is why Changgyeonggung reads as somewhere people lived rather than a stage for ceremonies.

Deoksugung and Gyeonghuigung came from outside that line. Deoksugung was a prince's house until Seonjo returned from wartime refuge to a capital with no palace fit to live in, and simply stayed. Three centuries later Gojong moved in from the Russian legation and made it a palace a second time; the stone hall belongs to that second occupation. Gyeonghuigung was the Western Palace, lost most of its buildings to a fire in 1829, and had the survivors demolished under the occupation to clear ground for a school. The school stayed until 1987.

Choose Gyeongbokgung. It is the largest, and the scale of the courtyard in front of Geunjeongjeon is something the other four cannot match. The changing of the guard happens here and nowhere else.

There is a trade. Most of what stands is a nineteenth-century reconstruction, and this is also the palace the dynasty left empty longest. If you want the ground the court actually lived on, go to the Eastern Palace instead — Changdeokgung and Changgyeonggung adjoin, so they walk as a single visit.

The five palaces side by side

Unhyeongung is not a grand palace — it is the residence Gojong lived in before his accession, and where his 1866 wedding was held. It is free, three minutes from Anguk Station, and the right size to fill the gap between two larger stops rather than a destination in itself.