An interesting little piece of Korea’s early modern history can be found on the grounds of the Korea Banking Institute in Samcheong-dong. This building, the Beonsachang, was Korea’s first modern armory, built by Chinese laborers in 1884.
This was just a few years after Japan had forced Korea to open up with a little gunboat diplomacy employing modern weapons Korea lacked.
Designed (presumably) by a Chinese architect, the building reveals both Chinese and Western architectural styles.
According to the Seoul Shinmun, although the building was built as a modern arms factory, when 38 Korean students returned home from studying modern weapon-making skills at a factory in Tianjin, China, they found they still lacked the capability to do so. Korea ended up importing weapons and using the Beonsachang to repair them when they broke.
During the colonial period, the building was used as a germ research center, a role it continued under the post-war US military administration. It was then converted into a social welfare research center before it was transfered to the Bank of Korea and attached to the Korea Banking Institute.
Oh, and let me not forget the Flickr Slideshow.
3 Comments
I hope you collect these photo shoots into a nice book.
Yeah, you could write a tour guide of sorts. A book showing the historical architecture of Korea is exactly what Korea needs to boost its tourism, and I don’t mean a book about the same old temples and homes of long dead monarchs and war heroes. The problem is that the tourist information written by foreigners is aimed at backpackers and the stuff written by Koreans is aimed at steering the tourist towards tourist traps and a few of the same old sites.
Very neat. Your focus on late 19th-to-early 20th-century architecture is fascinating, but rather than just focus on the few really well-known buildings from that era, you’re digging up all kinds of obscure structures, like this one, or that Anglican church on Ganghwa-do, or the whole town of Ganggyeong, or those western-Korean fusion houses in Daejeon or wherever it was. How the heck do you even find this stuff—given that much of it seems to be so out-of-the-way?