Gyeongbokgung Palace (A Much-Belated Entry)

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About a week ago, I promised you, loyal readers, a post about our visit to Gyeongbokgung Palace--when our internet connection was up and running and I could post some photos. Well, given that it may be another week plus before said connection materializes, I've decided to sneak a short photo post in here at the school.

Gyeongbokgung Palace was the main and largest palace of the Joseon (aka Choson, Chosun) Dynasty. The Joseon ruled the Korean Peninsula for a little more than five hundred years (1392-1910) after they overthrew the Goryeo Kingdom (sounds like "Korea," doesn't it? Hint, hint.), who themselves rules the peninsula for about 450 years. (Bonus: the Joseon kept right on using the name Goryeo for a long time, both because Koreans love old stuff and because Goryeo was also the name of the first great ancient kingdom in Korea.)

Anyway, among other neat stuff, the Joseon built Five Grand Palaces in Seoul (their capital) and Gyeongbokgung was the one built for the king.

Gyeongbokgung was certainly built to impress. Even without the famous Ganghwamun Gate (under renovation), the palace is a forbidding sight. You enter through a large secondary gate, shown here (along with fellow teachers Colleen and Heidi and, of course, my lovely wife), guarded by impressive looking men in traditional garb and wielding very shiny weapons. The view behind the gate encompasses a series of rocky crags (and the view looking out from the gate encompasses a bunch of skyscrapers, but we'll forget that part for now). Amazing to think that this was actually a somewhat small palace by East Asian standards--Korea's suzerain relationship with China spelled out that the Korean king's palace had to be smaller than the Chinese emperor's by a certain amount.



Here is one of the aforementioned guards. I opted not to try him with my kung fu. Anyone out there know more about the duds or the weapon or anything? A quick search turned up squat.






From the gate, then, you walk across a broad plaza and through another large gate to the throne building (left), hopefully taking time to notice some of the careful architectural details (below).




(By the way, have you ever noticed that Blogger makes it incredibly hard to use photos in your posts? This has been twice as much work as I expected, and the layout looks like crap!)

At the back of the grounds, then, is the impressive Korean National Folk Museum, though since I didn't go in (and Nana went in only briefly), more detail will have to wait for another day. Still, the museum was an imposing structure, and for reasons I haven't quite come to understand, has these little stone and wood (animist?) totems scattered around outside.

Anyway, that's about as much Blogger-wrangling as I can handle right now, so I guess I'd better get back to work. (My real work, that is.)