In 1990, if you stood in the central courtyard of Gyeongbokgung, you wouldn’t be looking at a Joseon throne hall framed by a mountain. You’d be staring at the Japanese General Government Building—an immense, European-style stone headquarters planted in the palace’s core.
That’s the first thing to understand about what you’re seeing today. Gyeongbokgung isn’t simply an old palace that survived. It’s a place that had to be reclaimed—above ground and, in a way, in the national imagination.
When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the project wasn’t only political control. It was also symbolic control. The palace had been laid out with a powerful north–south spine: mountain behind, throne and main halls in line, the city unfolding in front. That alignment mattered to Korean geomancy, and it mattered as a statement of order.
In the years that followed, most of the palace buildings were torn down. And the colonial government built its headquarters right where it would dominate the site—blocking the view of the main hall from the city, sitting literally in front of the old seat of kings. From its windows, officials could look down over what remained of Joseon authority.
By the 1990s, South Korea was democratic and prosperous, but the colonial building still sat there, unavoidable. Some people argued it should remain as a reminder. Others wanted the palace’s sightlines—and what they symbolized—back.
The government chose removal. In 1995, the building was dismantled and cleared away in a highly public, emotionally charged process tied to the anniversary of liberation. Pieces of it were preserved and displayed elsewhere, including one prominent section placed in a sunken setting where visitors naturally look down into it—a deliberate reversal of the original hierarchy.
Once the stone was gone, the harder work began. Under the lawns and driveways of the colonial era, restoration teams found that the ground itself had been altered—fill dirt laid over older courtyards, surfaces re-graded, foundations obscured. To rebuild lost structures, they first had to find where the Joseon stones actually were.
That detective work shaped decisions all the way to the front gate—Gwanghwamun’s own axis restoration in the 2000s is part of the same long project of recovery, and if you’re listening there, you’ll hear that story in full.
Here inside the palace, the deeper loss was spatial. Joseon architects designed Gyeongbokgung as a sequence: you passed through the outer gate, crossed a broad courtyard, then arrived at Geunjeongjeon—the throne hall—with Bugaksan mountain rising directly behind it. The geometry was deliberate. Open sky between the outer wall and the hall gave the throne room weight; the mountain framed it like a seal. When the colonial building occupied that space, the sequence collapsed. There was no approach, no arrival—just a European facade blocking what used to be one of the most carefully composed views in the city.
Restoring the buildings is still ongoing, but the sequence is beginning to return. If you walk from the reconstructed Heungnyemun inner gate toward Geunjeongjeon today, you can start to feel the original proportion—the expanding then focusing of space that Korean palace design used to signal you were entering somewhere that mattered.
So when you see artisans on scaffolding painting the red, green, and blue dancheong patterns under the eaves, you’re not just looking at craft. You’re looking at a long effort to put a sequence back together—one courtyard, one foundation, one beam at a time.
