Earthen Fortification in Pungnap-dong, Seoul

For nearly five hundred years, from the first century to 475, Baekje ruled from a walled city on the Han river called Wiryeseong, and for most of the twentieth century nobody was sure where it had been. A flood in 1925 washed bronze vessels out of an earthen bank here, but the bank was thought to be a minor outwork. Then in 1997 builders digging apartment foundations cut through the interior and hit Baekje layers two metres deep, with roads, houses, storage jars and ritual deposits. The bank was the capital's wall. It is the largest earthen fortress in Korea: 3.5 kilometres round, forty-three metres wide at the base and eleven or more high, built up in layers of rammed earth by a labour force that ran to hundreds of thousands. Two long stretches of the wall survive as tree-covered ridges between the streets. The rest is under houses, which is the difficulty. Excavation happens one plot at a time as buildings come down, and the state has been buying land inside the wall for a generation. What you see is a neighbourhood with a very large embankment in it, and a small museum that explains why it matters.

Original Text

Where it is

Region

Songpa-gu, Seoul

Designation

Historic Site · 사적