Common Camellia of Geumsajeong Pavilion in Songjuk-ri, Naju

In 1519, the fourteenth year of King Jungjong of Joseon, eleven Confucian students of the Taehakgwan, the state Confucian academy, who had sought to save Jo Gwang-jo, retired to the countryside, built the Geumsajeong Pavilion and formed the Geumgang Fellowship of Eleven. There, lamenting the harshness of politics and vowing to await a better day, they planted a camellia tree to symbolise their unwavering integrity, and it survives to the present. Apart from trees growing within forests, no individual camellia has previously been designated on its own; this specimen is the thickest and largest surveyed to date, beautifully hemispherical in shape and vigorous in growth, giving it a value representative of the species as a whole. The tree is 6.3 m tall, with a girth at the base of the trunk of 2.4 m. The Common Camellia of Geumsajeong Pavilion in Songjuk-ri, Naju, blooms with vivid red flowers in winter that then fall whole from the tree, an image combining beauty with poignant sorrow that appears frequently in literary sources such as the Yanghwasorok, a Joseon-period treatise on ornamental plants. As a traditional flowering tree that Koreans of the past kept close to them, it has historical and cultural value together with its origins, and it is designated and protected as a Natural Monument.

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Where it is

Region

Naju, Jeonnam & Gwangju

Designation

Natural Monument · 천연기념물