 A tram passes by Bosingak in Jongno around 1900. |
By Robert NeffBosingak Bell ― actually a replica ― sits in the center of downtown Seoul. Because of its central location, it is a popular landmark for people to meet and other than ringing in the New Year the large bell has little significance to the average person.
It wasn’t always that way.
During the 1880s, a ceremony was held each night at the palace and the bell kiosk prior to the closing of the gates. The status of the kingdom was verified each night by observing the “fire signal towers” located on Mt. Nam (South Mountain). The mountains and hills throughout Korea had “fire signal towers” located on their peaks and these were used to flash signals throughout the entire length of the country in a short amount of time. Different information was provided to Seoul depending on the number of fires lit in the fire signal towers, and in what position they were. Once the signal was received the assembled, a Korean band would play haunting music which alerted the ringers at the bell kiosk at Chongno that they were to ring the bell and signal the closing of the gates.
The toll of the bell was described as “a voice of command” and “mournful” by one visitor, “extremely sweet and solemn, low and yet penetrating,” were the words of a female missionary, and perhaps more poetically, Homer Hulbert, an English teacher, declared that the great bell “breath[ed] forth its soothing evensong.” The bell’s toll could be heard throughout the city and the surrounding countryside and was a warning that the gates were closing.
Once this bell began to toll, the people who needed to enter or exit the gates became desperate to get there before they shut. One early Westerner described his own entrance into the city at dusk in January 1891:
“The sun was just casting his last glorious rays on the horizon, and the excitement grew greater as the strokes of the bell became fainter and fainter, and with the mad crowd of men and beast mixed together upon it, the road might be compared with the tide entering the mouth of a running river.” Those that were slow in getting into the gate were subject to the guards’ wrath. They were “pushed back and ill-treated, with words and kicks,” and when the guards finally lost their patience they closed the huge gates until the following morning.
The closing of the gates had a large impact on some of the foreigners: “Shut in! Shut in! No way to get out, imprisoned inside,” and another wrote “Seoul was severed from the outer world till the following morning,” and that the city’s interior “was in silence like that of a tomb.”
Once the gates were sealed they were not opened until the morning or until word was received from the palace. Sometimes travelers were too late and they were left outside begging and pleading with the gate keepers to let them in. These pleas were ignored. Those left outside were then faced with spending a night with the ferocious man-eating tigers that were reported to prowl the countryside (especially during the 1880s) or making their way to one of the small inns and trying to find a spot to sleep. The dawn of a new day awaited with the opening of the gate.
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