History of Seoul City Walls

This week we had out first crit on the Seoul city Walls project.

Posted various things on the villaneous web site forum (using Vanilla.

This is a description of the walls

History of Seoul City Walls Summary

in 1394 Joseon Dynasty moved capital to Hanyang (Seoul), built palaces and shrines first then in 1395 built the walls.

Smoke Signal station on the Walls at M Mongmyeok very important communications centre receiving signals from 5 national network of signal towers.

Wall construction begun in the leap month of the 9th month of the year in 1395.

Route surveyed by scholar Jeong D-Jeon (story of the route being where the snow boundary was - inside no snow, outside snow).

Very organised building campaign, central admin, divided up control into 97 sections each 600 cheok long (193m), 59,500 cheok in all (c19km).

Each section given a chinese letter - starting with Sky ending with 97th letter of the 1000 basic chinese letters 97 was console. Staff team for each section lead by 1 person with team of 12 supervisors. Each section marked with supervisors name (still to be seen in places)

Work began in 1396 on the 9th day of the 1st lunar month, and completed in 49 days on 28th day of 2nd lunar month.

118,070 workers used (Hanyang pop 50,000)

Low sections were built of clay high sections of stone.

Clay sections crumbled so King Taejo ordered second 49 day campaign with 79,400 civilians (6th day of 8th lunar month - 24th day of 9th lunar month). completed and repaired the circuit.

4 main gates and four mini gates of the wall built at this time.

1422 King Sejong used 322,400 labourers from 8 provinces for 38 days (15th day of 1st lunar month to 23rd day of 2nd lunar month) replacing all clay sections with stone.

Surveyed in 1448 - 60,892 cheok, 19.4km

872 deaths in the construction work.

1704 major restoration work installing 7,081 battlements work done by 5 Army Garrisons which guarded Seoul.

1869 walls not longer functioning as a proper defense.

Different periods can be distinguished by size and style of wall..

1899 walls near some of the gates torn down part of schemes to handle the traffic.
Restoration attempts 1975, 1981 but only 9,790 m survive about half the total length.

2006 S Metro Govt announced plans for a full scale restoration of the City Wall.

Only 6 of original 8 gates survive.

Notes from 'A Field Guide to History. Seoul'
Korea Cultural and Historical Survey Society
Trans Jung ha-yun
Dolbegas Publishers, Seoul 2007

For slide show and video click here