Hwaseong Fortress and Koryo Songgyungwan

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Hwaseong Fortress

   Hwaseong is a love letter from a son to his father, written in stone. In 1762, Crown Prince Sado was locked in a rice chest by his own father, King Yeongjo, and left to die, one of the darkest episodes in Korean royal history. His son, who became King Jeongjo, never forgot, and he moved his father's tomb to a site near Suwon and built a grand fortress there, completed in 1796, intended perhaps as a new capital. The engineer and scholar Jeong Yak-yong used cranes and pulleys to speed up construction, and the walls, gates, towers and bastions combine Korean, Chinese and Western ideas of fortification. UNESCO listed it in 1997.

   Read the complete Hwaseong Fortress write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Hwaseong Fortress is where the day begins. Next is Seosamreung Cluster.

2. 2. Seosamreung Cluster

   The kings and queens of the Joseon dynasty, who ruled Korea for more than five hundred years until 1910, chose their graves with enormous care. Geomancers studied hills, water and wind to find sites with the right energy, and the royal tombs were laid out with burial mounds, stone guardians, ceremonial halls and long processional paths. Forty of these tombs are listed together by UNESCO as the Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty, and Seosamreung, the three western tombs in Goyang just north-west of Seoul, is one of the clusters.

   Read the complete Seosamreung Cluster write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Seosamreung Cluster comes up about 61 km into the recorded legs. Next is Koryo Songgyungwan.

3. 3. Koryo Songgyungwan

   Kaesong was the capital of Korea for nearly five centuries, long before Seoul, and the Koryo Songgyungwan is the best reminder of that age. The compound began in 992 as the Gukjagam, the national academy, in the Goryeo dynasty, which gave Korea its Western name, and it was turned into the Songgyungwan in the late fourteenth century. The present buildings, with their curved tile roofs, wooden pillars and ancient ginkgo and zelkova trees, mostly date from the seventeenth century, after the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, and the site is now a museum of the Koryo period, with celadon, metalwork and printing blocks on display. Kaesong's historic monuments and sites were inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2013.

   Read the complete Koryo Songgyungwan write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 122 km into the recorded legs you reach Koryo Songgyungwan. Next is back through Seosamreung Cluster.

4. 4. back through Seosamreung Cluster

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Seosamreung Cluster write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Seosamreung Cluster, late in the day. Next is Hwaseong Fortress.

5. 5. Hwaseong Fortress

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Hwaseong Fortress write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at Hwaseong Fortress. That is the ride.