Today started with a visit to the Suwon Fortress, an 18th century fortress built in what is now a satellite city of Seoul. We did an archery activity, then took a walk around in another part of the fortress, where there is a palace. We then ate at a restaurant that sold exactly three items: whole chicken, chicken skin gyoza, and tteokbokki (all three were delicious) before visiting the Samsung Innovation Museum. In the evening, we walked around the Namdaemun Market, which reminded me a lot of the busy markets of India, and then I walked around the night market to eat street food.

Back to the fortress because that’s what I’m thinking about today.

I was a bit surprised by the scale of the fortress, especially in comparison to other fortresses I’ve been to that were built earlier or in a similar era. It was very expansive, the walls making a 4 mile loop, however those walls seemed surprisingly light in terms of defensive capabilities. In comparison, I recall the Heidelberg Castle in Germany, which is set up on a mountain and has 20-foot thick stone walls in some places. The fortresses were built only a hundred years apart, both built for defensive purposes and housing royalty. The walls of the Red Fort in New Delhi, India, are 75 feet tall in some places. It was also built about a hundred years prior to the Suwon Fortress. Also in India, the Jaisalmer Fort, built much earlier, was built on a mountain with three layers of walls and four separate gates.
The Suwon Fortress, on the other hand, while very large in area, doesn’t seem as fortified considering that it was built in the age of large cannons. And although part of the fort is on a hill with significant prominence, the main gate and most of the palace is on the flat land around the hill (likely due to principles of Feng Shui), leaving it more vulnerable to attack than if it were built up the hill. Even the walls are only 2-3 meters high in some places.
I did a bit of research here, and found a few things. First, my question of why the fortresses are small is not a super uncommon one. Second, the walls are not just simple brick walls, they are actually short brick walls that are built on top of large rammed-earth walls, which are excellent at absorbing cannon blasts (if you see the featured image of this post, you will see the short wall on top of a large mound of earth). Also, the Suwon Fortress turned out to be a bit of an outlier, most of the defensive fortresses of Korea are built high on mountains, but since this was constructed with the intention of being part of a new capital city, there would likely have been other defenses outside.

Another thought I had about the fortress, now an architectural observation rather than a defensive one, is that it’s very maze-like. While European and Indian (from what I’ve seen) castles typically have very grand architecture, spires, tall towers, large halls, etc… which serve as landmarks within and which the entire structure is generally centered around, with the exception of the main gate, the Suwon fortress did not, and the palace especially did not. Instead, many of the courtyards, corridors, and small buildings look almost identical; even the royal dwellings are not easily discerned as they are in the typical European castle. In addition, I noticed only a few large gates or openings inside the palace, contrary to European sites, which tend to have interior archways and outstanding gates leading to the most important buildings. Since these are lacking here, each courtyard space feels isolated, and you cannot see into other spaces, making navigation difficult if you are not already familiar with the site. Speaking of which, both this fortress and the palace we visited on Day 1 (Gyeongbokgung?) seem to be organized around courtyards and other large open spaces rather than roads or corridors or great buildings, the way I feel that the European and Indian forts/castles I have been to often are. In this way, they remind me a lot of Incan architecture, where the buildings are organized around Pampas and Kanchas: usually rectangular courtyards of various sizes, the former for public gatherings and the latter for private ones. In fact the Incan structures as well, if I remember correctly, didn’t have especially opulent or prominent buildings for important structures. If you look at layouts of the Suwon or Gyeonbokgung forts and then look at the layouts of Incan sites such as Choquequirao or Vilcabamba, there are some similarities in the lack of any particularly large buildings, and the presence of courtyards scattered about (more in the Korean structures than the Incan).
Why are the structures built like this? Since Korea has a collectivist culture, it seems reasonable that this is the reason why the structures are organized around meeting spaces. In terms of the buildings being low and the important ones not being especially prominent (at least at Suwon, not as much at Gyeongbokgung), this could be because the traditional Korean architecture is based on the ideas of Confucianism; humble, modest, and respectful of nature. The result of all of this is that it is easy to get disoriented and lost inside the fortress/palace. I wonder if this was intentional or just a useful byproduct of applying values and beliefs to the architecture.

I might spend a bit more time looking in the architecture behind these structures. If I find anything interesting, I’ll write a bit more about it. Until then, that’s all from me for today.