Nakan Eupseong (낙안 읍성)
The original rammed-earth walls of Nakan Eupseong were constructed in 1397 as a means to keep bandits, especially Japanese pirate bands, from raiding the village. A stone facade was added to the walls after the Imjin War. Nakan Eupseong and Folk Village today provide an escape back in time. More than a theme park, this is a living, breathing village wherein some 93 residents actually still live, creating a sense, within the low walls, of time standing still. Well worth a visit if you’re in the Suncheon area as this type of walled village/town became the standard response to pirate raids during the later Goryeo and early Joseon eras and would have at one time been quite common in Southern Jeolla and Gyeongsang Provinces.
The long, straight Eupseong walls are clearly later Joseon and display the Chinese influence so prevalent at the time, forming the shape of a rough rectangle around the less orderly arrayed homes and shops within.
Irrigation here serves a dual purpose as a defensive obstacle along much of the Eastern and Southern walls.
Quite a unique gate, we’d not run across anything quite like this to date, though again, the style is clearly late Joseon.
The village is…well, everything you might expect a Medieval Korean village to be. Plus cars, air conditioners, and fuel oil, that is. That said, walking along the narrow alleyways one can easily forget the touches of modernity coloring the place and focus only on the sensation of stepping back in time.
To make the point, I took the liberty of filtering a few pics in grayscale. Looks like they could have been taken about a hundred years ago!
Communal storage of sauces and fermenting kimchi would have been important. This is one of the larger such repositories I’d ever seen.
The wall of the eupseong bounds Nakan Village and creates a clear sense of “us” and “them” . . . “safe” and “dangerous”.
At numerous places along the inside of the eupseong wall the simplest of stairs provided access. Not intended to fend off invading armies, the walls of eupseong are generally pretty low and lacking in defensive structures, yet seem to have served their purpose in keeping marauding pirates and bandits outside and the local population safe within.
The southern gate complex.
The western end of the eupseong includes a low hill and so the wall climbs and then descends in the usual manner for Korean fortresses, following the local terrain in order to take greatest advantage.
The northern third of Naksan is devoted to yangban—educated elite—structures and so the thatch of lower-class houses gives way to the stately, ceramic tile roofing of the upper class. The courtyards get bigger and the walls surrounding them more ornate.
Just our luck we captured a crew working to replace roofing thatch on a house just beyond the eupseong wall. Watching for only a few minutes my back hurt and I decided that “Joseon Dynasty Roof Thatcher” is probably not a viable post-Army career!