Bukchon Hanok Village

The story

Bukchon means "north village". In the old capital the high officials lived here, north of the stream that cut the city in two, close to the palaces where they worked. Poor scholars lived in the south village, under the mountain.

The officials' houses were large, with many courtyards. Almost none of them is left. What you see is what replaced them: small city houses in the Korean style, built close together in rows between about 1920 and 1940. About nine hundred remain, the largest group in Seoul.

Close by, with a page of its own: Changdeokgung, Gyeongbokgung.

What is here

There is no ticket and no gate. The lanes are public streets. Three things have their own doors, and all are free.

If you have one minute

In the steep lane, looking downhill

This lane is in Gahoe-dong, and it is the picture of Bukchon that everyone knows. The houses on both sides were built together in 1936.

Look at one house. The roof is tile, with the corners lifted. The frame is wood and the walls between are white. That is as old as Korea. Now look at the lower wall: patterned brick and cut stone. Look at the eaves: a tin gutter. Look for glass in the doors. Those were new in the 1930s. This was a modern house in its day.

Now look past the roofs. The towers of the modern city stand at the bottom of the lane.

Notice how quiet people are. There are signs asking for silence, and district staff at the corners. Behind each wooden gate a family is having an ordinary day.

Things people often get wrong

"These houses are six hundred years old." The district is. The houses are mostly ninety years old, and many were rebuilt after 2001 with new wood.

"It is a folk village." It is not a museum and there is no gate. It is a neighbourhood of about six thousand people, with schools, a laundry and a church. More than six million visitors a year walk through it.

"You can go any time." Since 1 March 2025, visitors found in the lanes around Bukchon-ro 11-gil before 10:00 or after 17:00 can be fined 100,000 won. Residents, their guests and people staying in a guesthouse there are exempt.

"Hanok means an old house." Hanok only means a house built in the Korean way. The word was coined about a hundred years ago, when Western and Japanese houses appeared and a name was needed for the other kind.

People who stood here

• Jeong Se-gwon (property developer and patriot, 1888–1965)He is the reason Bukchon looks as it does. From 1920 his company bought the great estates here, cut them into small lots and built Korean houses that ordinary Koreans could buy in instalments, at a time when Japanese settlers were moving north into the district. He gave a building to the society that was compiling the first dictionary of the Korean language. In 1942 the Japanese police arrested him for it and took much of his land.
• Kim Ok-gyun (reformer, 1851–1894)He lived here, and so did most of the young nobles who seized the king in 1884. They had studied together in a house in Jae-dong, reading Chinese books about the West. His own house stood where the library is now.
• Horace Allen (American missionary doctor, 1858–1932)On the night of the coup he saved the life of the queen's nephew, who had been cut down with swords. The king thanked him with a house in Jae-dong, taken from a dead rebel, and in 1885 Allen opened Korea's first Western hospital in it.
• Kim Seong-su (founder of the newspaper Dong-a Ilbo and of Korea University, 1891–1955)He bought the school at the top of Gye-dong in 1915 and lived in the lane below it. In January 1919, in the school's night-duty room, his friends and a student back from Tokyo planned the rising of 1 March.
• Han Yong-un (Buddhist monk and poet, 1879–1944)In 1918 he lived at number 43 Gye-dong and published a magazine from the house. The next year he was one of the thirty-three who signed the declaration, and he went to prison for three years. His poem The Silence of My Beloved (1926) is one every Korean pupil reads.
• Baek In-je (surgeon, 1899–?)The best-known Korean surgeon of his day, and the founder of a hospital; several hospitals still carry his family name. He bought the largest house in Bukchon in 1944. In the summer of 1950 North Korean soldiers took him away from it, and he was not seen again.
• Yun Bo-seon (president of South Korea, 1960–1962)He came from a rich family and lived most of his life in the great house in Anguk-dong, at the southern edge. His family still lives there. You can see only the gate.
• Bae Yong-joon (actor)In the television series Winter Sonata (2002) he plays a schoolboy at the school at the top of Gye-dong. The series was a sensation in Japan, and the Japanese women who came to see the school gate were the first foreign tourists Bukchon had.
• Hong Sang-soo (film director)His black-and-white film The Day He Arrives (2011), called "Towards Bukchon" in Korean, follows a man who walks the same few lanes and drinks in the same bar for what may be three days or one.
• David Kilburn (British journalist)He bought a house in the famous lane in 1988 and lived in it for some thirty years. He fought the city in the courts and the newspapers over repairs that, he said, pulled old houses down and put up new ones with the old look.

Go deeper: seven stops, from a white pine to a library

The walk goes from the subway up the east side, across the top and down the west side. It takes about two hours. Stops 4 to 6 are inside or beside the lanes with visiting hours.

1. The white pine

Two minutes from exit 2 of Anguk station is the Constitutional Court. In its grounds stands a pine with a trunk as white as plaster. It is about six hundred years old.

This kind of pine is not Korean. It grows in north China. Envoys who went to Beijing brought seedlings home, and a white pine in the garden showed that the family had held high office.

Three things happened on this plot. The young reformers of 1884 studied here. The first Western hospital opened here in 1885. And in 2017, and again in 2025, the judges in the building behind the tree removed a president from office.

2. The culture centre

Walk east to Gyedong-gil and go up. At number 37 is a hanok with its gate open. The city runs it as a free information centre. Take the paper map.

This is the easiest place to see how a hanok works. The rooms stand round a small yard. One room has a floor of oiled paper, warmed from below by the flue of the kitchen fire: that is for winter. The open hall beside it has a floor of boards, raised off the ground so that air passes under: that is for summer. Koreans sit and sleep on the floor, which is why shoes come off at the step.

3. Gyedong-gil and the school at the top

Gyedong-gil is the village high street, with small shops and cafés in old houses. It is an "orange zone", where staff ask groups to keep their voices down.

At the top is the gate of Choong Ang High School. Its halls are of red brick and grey stone, built between 1921 and 1937. A small house in the grounds marks the room where the rising of 1 March 1919 was planned.

The school is in use. On school days you see it from the gate.

The same shot: in Winter Sonata the two pupils arrive late at this school and climb over its wall. Stand in the middle of the lane about thirty metres below the gate and point the camera uphill. The series Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (2016) also used the school.

님은 갔습니다. 아아, 사랑하는 나의 님은 갔습니다.

My beloved is gone. Ah, my beloved, whom I love, is gone.

Han Yong-un, the opening of The Silence of My Beloved (님의 침묵), 1926; our translation. He lived at 43 Gye-dong in 1918.

Koreans have argued for a century about who the beloved is: a woman, the Buddha, or the lost country.

4. The largest house

Cross the main road to the west side. At Bukchon-ro 7-gil 16 a tall gate stands at the top of a ramp. This is the Baek In-je House, and it is the one large house in Bukchon you can walk into. It is free.

It was built in 1913 by a banker who had done well out of Japanese rule, and he built it to entertain Japanese officials. So it is a Korean house with things no Korean house had. The men's wing and the women's wing are joined by a corridor, where custom kept them apart. Part of it has two floors. There are glass windows, red brick, and rooms with straw mats in the Japanese way.

The film Assassination (2015) used it as the mansion of a rich collaborator.

5. The lane

Go north up Bukchon-ro and turn left at 11-gil. From here you are in the "red zone", open to visitors from 10:00 to 17:00.

This block, number 31 Gahoe-dong, was one nobleman's estate. Jeong Se-gwon's company divided it in 1936. Count the gates: each is one house, on a lot that is often little more than a hundred square metres.

The houses turn their backs to the lane. The windows on this side are small and high. Everything opens inward, onto the yard. That is why the lane feels private even when it is full.

Look at the lower walls. Some have patterns in brick and tile: a turtle shell, a string of squares, the character for long life. These were the builder's way of making plain rows look rich.

6. The view from the top

Walk to the top of the lane and turn round. The roofs go down in steps, and over them you see the towers of the centre and the mountain with its mast.

The same shot: almost every poster of Seoul uses this view. Stand at the top of the slope, a few steps back from the last house on the left, and keep the roofs of both sides in the frame with the tower in the gap. The light is best before eleven, when the sun is behind you.

From the lanes just above, the roofs spread out like a grey sea. A Korean roof is not straight anywhere. The ridge sags a little in the middle and the eaves lift at the ends, a line Koreans compare to the sleeve of a dress.

7. The library on the hill

Go down the west side to Jeongdok Library. The white buildings were a school for boys, the most famous in the country, until it moved south of the river in 1976. Now anyone can sit and read.

Before the school, this was the home of Kim Ok-gyun, who led the coup of 1884. After it failed his house was taken and pulled down.

The garden in front is where the district comes in April for the cherry blossom.