Entering the main gate of hanok, Koreas traditional house, you may encounter a male servant in white olden-day attire diligently sweeping the front yard. The houses daughter-in-law in a chignon scurries to the kitchen, as her maid wearing her hair in braids follows closely behind.
In the open living room stands the houses noble patriarch, with a long pipe in hand. As he looks over his vast territory beyond the wall, two of his grandsons sit in the kneeling position, one reads aloud from a Chinese classic, while the younger one dozes off.
For Park Seon-ju, curator of National Folk Museum of Korea, visiting a hanok is like traveling back in a time machine to the past, to a scene typical of the Joseon Kingdoms days. Her new book Strolling Around Hanok (Haneul Arae Giwajibul Geonilda) is a record of her time travels to 22 time-honored mansions scattered around the nation.
It is thrilling to visit old houses and find vestiges of the ancient residents lifestyles, Park told The Korea Times in an interview on Tuesday at the museum building. Understanding the structure of each hanok helps better understand their daily lives, and vice versa, Park said.
For example, while visiting Garam Chongtaek Mansion in Yeongdok, North Gyeongsang Province, she said the residences design materialize the owners virtue of conciliation and harmonization.
Referring to Yun Chungs Mansion in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, she said the elegant design shows up the integrity of the er owner Yun, a well known Confucian scholar (1629-1714).
Park also said Koreas noble residences are mostly not designed to overwhelm, but rather to comfort visitors through a peculiar juxtaposition in design. In architectural terms, you wont feel any disruption while moving from the gate to the front yard, and around the rooms of a hanok. Thus, you can psychologically feel integrated in the structure, she said.
According to Park, the style is the major difference between traditional Korean and Western mansions. They are apparently grandiose and brilliant, but I do not feel at home within the Western building structure, she said. I feel the Western mansions are viewed more as s, while the Korean structures are more homelike.
To better appreciate the aesthetic aspect of the hanok, Park suggests visitors should see how the residences connect with their surroundings. If you lift the whole compound up and move it to another area, it would become a completely different building. A hanok should be viewed in the context of its surroundings, she said.
Park uses the example of Gwangajeong, meaning observing farming. The mansion, located in Yangdong, North Gyeongsang Province, is designed for its owner to be able to overlook its adjacent rice paddy, where farmers work on the field. The whole compound is built to directly face and harmonize the paddy. In another place, the name would be different, she said.
She also advised visitors to observe how males and females move in the house in the web of routes among gates, rooms, kitchen and stores. Meticulous observers may find every house sets its separate courses for males and females to move along, and it is quite interesting how and where the routes for the two sexes intersect in each house, she said.
Attracted to the beauty of the hanok, she drives out of Seoul almost every weekend. Last year she visited Andong, a city in North Gyeongsang province, nine times. She says its always nice to stumble upon unfounded jewels on her field trips. In every village, there are usually one or two handsome, well preserved houses, she said. The field trip is a decades long hobby for the graduate of the Architectural Engineering Department at Yonsei University. She was even taken in by the police during a trip to Gyodong Island off Ganghwa Island west of Incheon in the early 1990s. The islanders reported her to the police, suspecting the stranger with a camera and measuring equipment was a spy.
For the avid hanok lover, it is regrettable to see more and more traditional houses left unpreserved or inhabited. Of the 22 mansions in the book, nine are empty or used as homestay accommodation. Of the 13 other mansions, mainly only older people reside in them, with most of their offspring living in urban areas. Park points that the old heritage needs more financial support. A house is no longer a house if there are no residents, she notes.
Parks Tips on Appreciating Hanok
1. Look at the scenery around the residence from the inside rather than from the outside.
2. When seeing the mansion from the outside, observe its structural relationships with its surroundings, like roads, mountains, streams and fields.
3. See how the architectural design uses the sunlight for illumination by observing the arrangement of windows
4. Imagine how its male and female residents would have moved within the compound along the nexus of routes. There are always separate routes for the different sexes and, more interestingly, junctures.
