[KOREA ENCOUNTERS] Tracing southwestern Seoul's underappreciated history

Soangnu Pavilion in southwestern Seoul's Gungsan Neighborhood Park in 2010 / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

From magistrate painters and rowdy Confucians to lost bunkers and bulldozed lakes

By Matt VanVolkenburg

During the 1392-1910 Joseon Kingdom, present-day Gangseo District, Seoul's westernmost district, was known as Yangcheon Prefecture. All that remains of the complex from which the magistrate ruled, however, is its "hyanggyo," or Confucian school and temple. Today, stone monuments stand outside the hyanggyo's walls honoring former magistrates, such as Yi Byeong-han, who, we are told, made good policies with care and love for the people.

Not everyone connected with this institution was so upright, however. On Feb. 19, 1898, the English edition of The Independent reported that days earlier someone staying at a Yangcheon-area inn stole from the other guests and ran off, only to be found at another inn, where he "had donned the garb of a Confucian disciple and was sitting with the bar-maid exchanging with her sweet sentiments." When he was arrested and jailed, however, the magistrate had to request backup because "The Confucian disciples of the district became very indignant over the action of the magistrate for treating their fellow-scholar with such an unceremonious procedure and they threatened to break the jail and set the prisoner free."

A shelter stands in southwestern Seoul's Magok area, surrounded by modern construction, May 9, 2010. / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

I had no idea about any of this history when I first visited the area. In 2003, I moved to nearby Banghwa-dong, at the end of Seoul Metro Line 5, and a couple of years went by before I really started to explore the surrounding area by bike. The hyanggyo today has a Line 9 subway station named after it and is open to visitors, but when I first discovered it, 16 years ago, I could only peer through the crack between its closed front doors to get a glimpse of the buildings inside.

Ten years before my arrival, much of Gangseo District near the Han River was a construction site where 300 apartments were rising from former fields. As part of this development, parks were created that paid tribute to the history of the area. On Gungsan, the small mountain behind Yangcheon Hyanggyo, a pavilion was built and named after the 18th-century Soangnu Pavilion that had once graced the riverbank as part of the government complex, a place where the magistrate and his guests exchanged poetry, drank wine and enjoyed the view.

Jeong Seon, known by his pen name Gyeomjae, served as magistrate between 1740 and 1745 and painted the nearby Gwangjubawi, scenic rocks that once rose from the Han River (and were said to have been washed there from Gwangju County in Gyeonggi Province, hence the name). The construction of the Olympic Expressway in the 1980s, however, left them cut off from the river and surrounded by a small pond. This became the basis of Guam Park, which opened in 1994 as residents began moving into nearby apartments.

The Gwangjubawi rocks in Guam Park are now in a pond cut off from the Han River by development. / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

Guam was the pen name of the physician Heo Jun, who was born in this area in 1539 and served King Seonjo when he fled north during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s. He may be the Joseon era's best-known doctor due to his having compiled the UNESCO-recognized "Dongui Bogam," or "Mirror of Eastern Medicine," from over 100 medical texts, but the more likely reason is the popularity of the 1999 TV drama named after him.

Rice grows in an undeveloped green expanse in southwestern Seoul's Magok area, summer 2006. / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

When I visited these areas 15 or more years ago there was usually little more than a signboard to explain the significance of these places and people, and these were rarely even in English. In 2005, however, the Heo Jun Museum opened, followed four years later by the Gyeomjae Jeong Seon Art Museum. The latter was something I stumbled upon by accident, as it was not really promoted in any significant way ― an unfortunate fate for a painter whose name you may not recognize, but whose art you have most certainly seen on the back of the 1,000-won bill.

The history of the area is much more obviously celebrated and promoted now, however, and that is because of the latest wave of development in Magok-dong.

The Airport Railroad Express (AREX) is under construction through Magok-dong in summer 2007. / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

When I first arrived in the area, Magok was a large, undeveloped green expanse where you could watch egrets hunt frogs and catch glimpses of weasels at dusk. Amid the fields along Gonghang-ro, the road leading to Gimpo Airport, was the empty, unused Magok Station on Line 5. It had been completed in 1996 but never opened. In 2007 I peered through the gaps in the shutters at the bottom of the stairs and could see that the terminal station, Banghwa, was written on a sign as "Panghwa" because it predated the new Revised Romanization system adopted in 2000.

Peering inside Magok Station on Seoul Metro Line 5 in 2007 / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

One hint of what was to come for Magok was the mountain of dirt displaced to build Subway Line 9 and the Airport Railroad Express (AREX). Every fall, bales of rice straw dotted the landscape, but this stopped after the last crop of rice was planted in 2009. The next year, bulldozers began digging out an artificial lake that was to be connected to the Han River to create a marina, but this never came to fruition, perhaps because it involved tunneling the Olympic Expressway beneath the entrance to the marina (apparently the architect had completely forgotten about the severe flooding of 2006).

Bales of rice straw dot the landscape in southwestern Seoul's Magok area, fall 2007. / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

Next to Magok Station, which finally opened after refurbishment in 2008, a steel and glass showroom was built to advertise Magok's future, full of models and renderings showing buildings with streams flowing between them. Within a year the showroom closed; an attempt to visit it after that point was rebuffed by the surprised staff of the construction company that had turned it into an office.

A model shows a plan to build a marina off the Han River, May 20, 2010. / Courtesy of Matt VanVolkenburg

Today the still-under-construction Magok area lacks the streams that were planned but does feature a lake park. It is much smaller than the lake that was built initially; clearly, greedier minds prevailed and filled in half of it so as to develop more land. It is part of the botanical garden park since built there, which features a cultural center set in a preserved former agricultural pumping station built in 1928.

Prior to its restoration, this was used as a garage where construction equipment was stored, and the stream it stood beside was lined with weeping willows. Nearby greenhouses sold houseplants, and behind them stood a military bunker covered by trees. All of these were razed when the park was built.

The park and the nearby street leading up to Jeong Seon Museum, Yangcheon Hyanggyo and a recently uncovered tunnel built by the Japanese during World War II, all celebrate local history. All is well and good, you would think, but the desire to make changes and do something new (or spend public money before the end of the fiscal year) is perhaps not always the best impulse. The Jeong Seon Museum, when it opened, had a fascinating display detailing the area's history, complete with old photos, maps, paintings and models. Then, in 2019, this was removed and replaced with a generic exhibition space. A diorama of the area as it looked hundreds of years ago at the Heo Jun Museum also disappeared during that museum's refurbishment.

Not for nothing did French geographer Valerie Gelezeau call Seoul a "plastic city" in order to describe its ever-changing nature. Reflecting this, the way historical locations and museums are maintained is as much a work in progress as the city itself.

Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr, and co-author of "Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising." He will lead a cultural excursion to the locations described above titled Wood, Water, and Stone in Western Seoul for Royal Asiatic Society Korea on April 29. Visit raskb.com for more information or to sign up.