Seoul Sub-urban by Charles Usher

Author:Charles Usher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seoul Selection

On a May evening in the spring of 1592, vessels carrying 7,000 Japanese soldiers landed at the port city of Busan, initiating what would come to be known as the Imjin War: six years of invasions intended to conquer Joseon Korea and, eventually, Ming China. After laying siege to Busan, the Japanese forces swept north toward present-day Ulsan and soon arrived at Tongdosa Temple, Korea’s largest, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Sinbulsan. In the course of laying waste to both buildings and inhabitants, they also saw fit to relieve the temple of its most prized possession: a tooth that had reputedly belonged to the Buddha himself. Predictably, this did not sit well with the country’s monks, among them Great Master Samyeong, the head priest at Geonbongsa Temple on Mt. Geonbongsan, close to what’s now the border with North Korea. A figure straight out of central casting, draped in robes and a long flowing beard, he responded by assembling a militia of fighting monks, a collection of holy warriors that ultimately helped expel the invaders from the peninsula. Following the war’s conclusion, in 1604, Samyeong traveled to Japan as an envoy of the Korean government and met with Tokugawa Ieyasu, the ruling Japanese shogun. It’s impossible to know exactly what Samyeong said in that meeting, but it ended with Tokugawa returning both the tooth and 3,500 Korean prisoners, which, it must be said, is not a bad day’s work. A statue of Samyeong now stands near the entrance to Dongguk University, Korea’s most prestigious Buddhist school, the monk’s right hand holding a staff, his left placed over his heart.

Past the monk, the Dongguk campus itself is largely unremarkable; many of its buildings are bland in a 1960s kind of way common to Korean universities, but it is home to one structure of great significance. Built between 1617 and 1620, Sungjeongjeon Hall was the main hall of Gyeonghuigung Palace, one of five royal residences in downtown Seoul. It was in Sungjeongjeon that three kings were crowned and where they and others held official ceremonies and entertained foreign emissaries. Following the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, Gyeonghuigung was largely destroyed and a middle school was built in its place. The hall was moved to Jogyesa Temple and then, in 1976, moved again to its present location. The brightly painted structure is now called Jeonggagwon and used as Dongguk University’s sermon hall.

Before my first visit to the Jangchung area, as this part of town is known, my knowledge of it was limited to the odd couple institutions with which the area is most closely associated: the Buddhist university and pork trotter restaurants, the latter of which cluster on the first block or two north of the station. Most of them have some combination of the words “fat,” “original,” and “grandma” in their names, and with so little to separate them, they all employ barkers to work the sidewalks, trying to cajole pedestrians into their respective establishments.

When I got to the neighborhood, however,

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