Hwaseong Fortress

Yesterday, my dad took us to one of UNESCO's World Heritage sites, Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, Korea. Hwaseoung is around 30 km from Seoul, and is basically a walled city built by King Jeongjo between 1794-1796.

Hwaseong Fortress was built over two and a half years, from 1794 to 1796. Designed by the architect Jeong Yak-yong, who was a leader of the practical learning movement (Silhak), the fortress walls incorporated aspects of Chinese and Japanese architecture as well as Korean. Yak-yong really encouraged the use of science and industry in his plans, which lead to the use of brick, instead of just traditional stone, as a building material. Furthermore, Hwaseong's walls were also built using cranes and pulleys. I've heard that King Jeongjo actually wanted to make Suwon the new capital of Korea instead of Seoul, but I'm not sure if that's true.

The city was really pretty though. There are four main gates to the city, as well as myriad other "water gates". This is Paldalmun, the south gate of the city.
the top of the gate...
a better view from the Hwaseong official site.


After wandering around the south end of the city for all of 10 minutes, we decided that we were too hot to actually walk around the circumference of Hwaseong as we had planned, and returned to the car to drive around the city. Right beside the car, people were drying chilis. Nice.

mmm. if only i liked chili...
sightseeing by car - so much more comfortable than sightseeing on foot!

After making a loop around the city, we paused at a particularly picturesque gate, Hwahongmun, which is one of those water gates that I mentioned earlier.

so pretty!!! Supposedly one of the top 10 views in Suwon.
kids playing in the stream. the little boy was hunting for his sister's flip-flop...adorable!
hwahongmun from the front.
the stream cuts across the entire city. i'm guessing it was the main water source back in the day.

After gazing at all the pretty greenery and walking around the gate, we returned to our car - only to discover that the battery had completely died on us! My dad tried to start the car up multiple times, only to be met with a somewhat spluttering noise. We called the car company to come jumpstart the car for us, but it took them ages to find us since we weren't actually in Seoul. Luckily we managed to entertain ourselves fairly well while waiting...

we found a small general store near the road, and immediately bought ourselves ice-cream. Mine had solid lumps of sugar in it...
waiting for the car company...we were excited by the motorcycle guy stopping by our car, but he turned out to be a random passer-by who needed to make a phone call.
the dragon train tour of hwaseong. the 3 cars in the back are designed in the shape of sedans, which were the main mode of transport for the King.
that's what's under the hood. fascinating isn't it...NOT.

afterwards we drove home as fast as we could.