Ai Beacon Station, Gijang

A beacon station (bongsudae) was an old means of communication that used torches and smoke to send urgent news: fires were lit atop high mountains to give signals, smoke by day and firelight by night. This site was one of the old communication facilities that relayed military intelligence from the Seosaengpo area to the central government, signalling with smoke by day and firelight by night and passing the message along a systematically organised beacon network. The degree of urgency was shown by the number of fires or plumes of smoke, and when rain or bad weather made signalling impossible, the soldiers guarding the station would run to inform the next one. The nationwide beacon network consisted broadly of five main routes, fed by branch beacon routes that carried military information from various regions to them. In Gyeongsang Province there were 34 main stations and 90 branch beacon routes, and this site was one of them, connecting to the central government by way of the Gyeongju area. The network was organised in the Goryeo period and completed under King Sejong of Joseon, and this site matches the specifications used for beacon towers built in King Sejong's time. The central beacon mound is built of stone, 2.4 m high and 9 m in diameter, with an inner stone wall about 1.5 m high and 1.5 m wide forming an enclosure roughly 30 m across, and an outer enclosure about 40 m across marking it off from its surroundings. Among the beacon stations that survive across the country, it is one of those whose original form can still be relatively clearly seen.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Gijang, Busan

Designation

Provincial Monument · 시도기념물