Seol Portrait Seosil

This is the place where Nampa Seol Jin-yeong (1869–1940) trained younger scholars and instilled in them a spirit of national consciousness; he built it in 1910. In 1895, the 32nd year of Emperor Gojong's reign, Seol Jin-yeong took part in righteous army activities at Jangseong together with Gi U-man. When Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, he declared that he could not deal with the barbarians and built the Nampa Seosil (study hall) to the south of Amisan, where he devoted himself heart and soul to scholarly research and to training the next generation, producing many gifted students and patriots who resisted Japanese rule. In 1940, unable to contain his indignation at forced name-changing, one of the Japanese colonial period's policies for erasing Korean national identity, he left behind a farewell statement and a will declaring that he would never change his surname, and drowned himself in the well in front of the seosil. The seosil is a building of four bays across the front and three bays along the side, with a narrow veranda (toenmaru) along both the front and the rear. From the left it consists of a room, another room, and then a wooden-floored hall (daecheong); folding doors (bunhapmun) between the rooms and the hall allow the three bays on the right to be opened up into a single space when needed. This arrangement suited a study hall where many people could be gathered at once for teaching; four folding-and-lifting doors were fitted to the front of the hall and could be raised and left open in summer. It originally had a thatched roof, now replaced with cement tiles, but apart from the roof the building otherwise retains almost its original appearance. Behind the seosil is a bamboo grove, and to the right of the yard stands a shed building that includes an outhouse.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Sunchang, Jeonbuk

Designation

Provincial Monument · 시도기념물