Cheonghak-dong and Samseong-gung: Excellent with a capital E through T.

My much better half and I took a trip to Hadong county on November 1st to take in some fall foliage. We ended up visiting two sites that I'd rank as perhaps the two most interesting and most striking places I've seen in Korea, quite surprising since I hadn't heard of either of them until the week before.

As the title indicates we went to Cheonghak-dong (청학동) and Samseonggung (삼성궁). The very informative website San Shin has quite a bit of information about both, so I'd recommend reading the entries on both sites here and here. I will quote heavily from both of them, but will supplement those entries with descriptions and photos of my own.

Both sites are located on Jirisan, the second-highest mountain in South Korea. We visited Cheonghak-dong first, of which I knew absolutely nothing before I went there and had no expectations beyond viewing some maple trees. Here's a bit of a description from San Shin, which I didn't find until a few days after we got back:

Currently, two different unique native-Korean religious cults make their home [on Jirisan]; my impression is that only the one in the northeast sector is very well-known to the Korean and foreign-resident publics. That cult is famous for continuing to live in a reconstruction of the Joseon-Dynasty Neo-Confucian style, with traditional clothing and long uncut hair (worn in a long braid by unmarried men and women, and in a topknot covered by a horsehair hat by married men). Until 1992 they did not have electricity and there was no road reaching this area (visitors had to hike a few hours from the end of the dirt road); therefore they had no television or other modern-culture influences, and their children learned only classical teachings in Chinese characters, like the Koreans of centuries gone by. They live in old-style Korean Hanok wooden houses with tile or thatched roofs and mulberry-papered walls, and survive by traditional agriculture and crafts, all quite deliberately. Due to official recognition of their religion-inspired special lifestyle and commitment to remaining un-modern, this was the only village in Korea that was exempted from the military draft, and also from the 1960s~80s Saemaeul-undong [New Village Movement] that transformed Korea's rural communities from poverty to prosperity -- and destroyed their traditional lifestyles in the process.

The second site, Samseong-gung is just down the road, and is a huge garden and palace site comprised of countless stone walls, pagodas, and of course gorgeous maple trees. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As it's common for Korean travelogues to show pictures of the departure points and the tickets, I'll begin there, too. It was beautiful sun-shiny day, a break from the clouds and rain we had a few days before. We woke up uncharacteristically early on Saturday morning to catch the 9:04 train. It was my first train ride in South Korea, so I was pretty excited.





This was taken just around the corner from one of my schools. It shows how abruptly it changes from city to country in Suncheon.



Below is cute little Okgok Station (옥곡역) in Gwangyang. Opened in 1968, around the same time as a bunch of other stations, it looks considerably older.



Hadong Station is cute, too, and well-groomed.



One of the themes of the trip was cute dogs. We found them everywhere, including this one chained outside the station. Most of the ones we saw, and in fact many of the ones I see around Korea, look kind of like this. "Yoda dogs," I call them, but I don't know what species.



We walked around Hadong for an hour before the bus left for Cheonghak-dong. While we were looking into a coffee shop---yes, Hadong has a modern-style coffee shop---this cute old grandmother grabbed us and tried to take us inside to buy us ice cream. She was struck with how 예쁜 an 아가씨 my girlfriend is, and kept slapping her on the arm. Then she tried to convince us to come to Busan the next day for her daughter's wedding. We couldn't go, but we walked down the street for a while as the woman was looking for a hair dresser. Then a few other grandmothers came over and spoke a little Japanese to my girlfriend. And to me, but with a considerably less successful outcome. My girlfriend and the first grandmother exchanged phone numbers, but we have yet to hear back. :( Anyway, Hadong also has a Shilla Hotel and an E-Mart, as seen below. Not quite as active as their namesakes in Seoul.



The Shilla Hotel is closed.



It's an hour-long busride from Hadong-eup to Cheonghak-dong. You'll pass by a lot of little villages and depending on when you go you'll pick up a lot of middle school students. I always like seeing students way out in the middle of nowhere, because it reminds me that life goes on all over the place. It's a very windy ride, and I was pretty nervous the day before because of all the rain. Every now and then you'll read about bus accidents on Jirisan. However the ride passed without incident and dropped us off here:



If you're on your way to Cheonghak-dong you have to walk up the hill a little bit more. You'll pass a few little restaurants and shops. Here's one with persimmon strung outside.



The scenery was gorgeous, and there were few people out that day.



Here's the entrance to the little village of Cheonghak-dong, built on a hill terminating with a little shrine.




Here is a little more on the village from San Shin:

When at the beginning of the 1990s the Korean government built a paved highway all the way up that long valley to Cheonghak-dong, and brought in electric and telephone lines, this cult faced major challenges to the survival of their chosen lifestyle. Their children started watching television, public buses and telephones made contacts with the outside world much easier, and many Koreans started driving their private cars up to this legendary refuge and acting like tourists. The cult evolved in response, deciding that this was a sign that the savior-hero would soon be born, and that these curious picture-snapping tourists were a Heaven-granted opportunity to earn enough money to build a proper Palace for the Sage-King to rule the world from. They built parking lots, restaurants and a souvenir/crafts shop (featuring their own "Shinseon-ju", herbal-wine of spiritual-immortality). With the sharply increased revenue and interest in their lifestyle and beliefs, they have started construction of a gigantic new Palace-Temple in the cleared area above their Jinju-am. The future of this group will be quite interesting to watch.

Below are a few pictures of the traditional houses and surroundings.













There is a small courtyard next to the shrine, with some stone pagoda-towers (돌탑), a pond with koi, and some bright maples.





This village resident was following us for a bit. Here's a white guy photoshopped in.



When we first walked up the hill we told one of the vendors we'd buy something on our way back down. As we were leaving the woman reminded my girlfriend of her promise and pulled her back to the shop. If you enlarge the picture you'll see the little black dog happy for our return.



If you walk back down the hill past the original bus stop and continue along that road for about twenty minutes you'll come to the entrance of Samseong-gung. This museum with a crane on it is at the entrance, and you can't miss it.



San Shin has several lengthy pages on the site, so please give them a read. Here's a bit of an introduction:

As said on the previous page, there are two different native-Korean religious cults that make their home in the legendary remote Azure (refined blue) Crane Village [Cheonghak-dong]. The less-known (but more interesting, in my opinion) one occupies the south-western side of the alpine valley, in an area also called the Spirit-immortal Valley [Shinseon-gol] or Daoist-Masters Village [Do-in-cheon]. They are led by a hereditary Daoist priest and martial-arts teacher by the name of Ham Pil who is called by the title Seon-sa [meditation-master], who claims that his family-based Daoist lineage has occupied that land for 400 years.

He has led the construction of the earthly-paradise they call the Three Sages Palace [Samseong-gung], especially the hundreds of stone pagoda-towers [dol-tap]. The group is devoted to martial arts, meditation, Korean traditions and ceremonial worship of the "Three Sages" (see below) enshrined in the building shown above. Serenely confident in their basic orientation of extreme Korean-cultural-nationalism, they maintain a serious, dignified, religious atmosphere here. Their colorful semi-annual festivals, however, are filled with joy, friendship, drink and dance. Casual "tourists" are not welcome, but they admit all with a sincere desire for knowledge, readiness to participate and respectful attitude -- a refreshing difference from most other "folk culture" sites in Korea. Visiting the Samseong-gung is a privilege that leaves a lasting spiritual impression; it is my choice for "the coolest place in Korea".

It's worth mentioning that things have apparently relaxed since the author made his original visits to the site. While there is a bit of a gatekeeper, which I'll show below, tourists were certainly welcome, and there was no dress code. It's the type of site that really doesn't photograph well; that is, you can't really capture it on film, and just have to see it. Nevertheless here are a few photographs:











The above photos were taken in a large wooded area surrounded by all those stone walls and statues. The path eventually led to this gate. On the ceiling were paintings depicting what one would assume are men.




After passing through the gate you walk a little through a forest, whose greens were in remarkable contrast to the bright reds and oranges of the maples through which we just strolled.





You'll come to a second tunnel with a wooden gate and a bell outside it. On San Shin's page the gate was a simple frame, but it is now a large stone tunnel. You are supposed to ring the bell three times to summon a man---sorry, I don't know who or what he is---who introduces what follows. But since there were quite a few people waiting, we didn't have to ring the bell.





We had already wandered among the forest for nearly 45 minutes, and were struck by the size of it all. But through the tunnel were equally huge grounds. The focal point is a shrine to three of Korea's mythic founders, Dan-gun, Hwan-in, and Hwan-eung. However, when I visited Samseong-gung I didn't know anything of its history or its significance, and just appreciated the scenery.












This grand building is . . . a lavatory.





One of the bridges across a creek was a little underdeveloped. Beside this little bridge is a small tea shop and souvineer shop.





Heading back out.




I have 240 pictures on my Flickr page if you want to take a look, though I haven't captioned them all yet. As for getting there, buses and trains run to Hadong. From Suncheon there are six trains a day: 5:30, 8:00, 9:04, 12:29, 13:50, and 15:50. It takes about 50 minutes. Getting there by bus is a little trickier, as you have to get to Gwangyang first, then take the bus into Hadong. There are five buses a day from the terminal in Hadong-eup to Cheonghak-dong: 8:30, 11:00, 13:00, 15:30, and 19:00. It takes about an hour, and when you get to that bus stop pictured at the top of this post, ask the driver when he'll be back. We took the 11:00 bus, got there around noon, and took a 5:00 pm bus back to Hadong. That gave us just about exactly enough time to walk around and see everything, though we could have spent a little more time in Samseong-gung.