Hwaseong Fortress

Creak. Creak.

Wood grinds against wood, slow and steady, like an old hammock swinging back and forth. Then comes the sound of a rope pulling tight. It is a very faint sound, the sound of hemp fibers twisting hard against each other.

At the lower end of that rope hangs a block of stone as big as a wardrobe.

Then the stone leaves the ground.

Nobody shouts "Heave!" No team of dozens of men puts its shoulders to the stone and pushes. Only a few people stand by the machine, working evenly and slowly, as if drawing a bucket of water up from a well. Under the stone, a thin line of light appears, then slowly grows wider.

This happened in Suwon, south of Seoul, in 1794. The machine making that creaking sound was called the geojunggi. And the structure it was helping to raise was called Hwaseong.

The story of that fortress begins with a son who missed his father.

King Jeongjo came to the throne long after his father had died. In 1789, he had his father's tomb moved to a beautiful stretch of land near Suwon. After that, he came back to visit every single year. The road down from the capital was far from short, and yet he kept making the trip, year after year.

Then he thought of something much bigger than a visit to a grave. He decided to build a whole new city not far from the place. It would have walls all around it, a market, houses, and a detached palace where the king could stay each time he came. Not a quiet burial ground. A place where people lived.

But building a fortress takes stone.

The planned wall would run almost six kilometers, enclosing an area of about 130 hectares. It would climb all the way to the top of Mount Paldal, then pour back down onto the plain. Four great gates would face the four directions. On top of that came firing towers, watchtowers, and even a bridge across a stream. All of it in stone and fired brick. And the stone had to be hauled in from the quarries, then lifted into its exact place on the wall.

People reckoned the work would take ten years.

The man who solved that problem was not a stonemason.

It was Jeong Yak-yong, a young scholar who was only about 30 at the time. He belonged to a group of thinkers who held that learning had to be put to practical use, not just to reciting poems. He read a great deal, including technical books printed in China, the kind that showed machines in drawings. The king gave him the task of finding a way to lift the stone. He sat down and drew.

What he drew was the geojunggi, a wooden crane that worked with pulleys.

The idea behind it is simple. Hang a wheel up high and throw a rope over it. Tie a heavy load to one end and pull the other end down. With a single wheel, the load hardly gets any lighter. The wheel only changes the direction of the pull. But thread the rope through many wheels, some hung fixed above and some fastened right onto the load, and everything changes.

The weight of the stone is shared out evenly among the lengths of rope. The more lengths hold it up together, the lighter the pull feels in the hands. The price is a longer pull. Several loops of rope must be hauled in before the stone rises a short way. But a long, light pull is something people can keep up all day, while a short, heavy pull wears them out after just a few tries.

So stones that once needed a whole crowd around them now needed just a few people and a rope.

One more thing stood out on this building site. The workers were paid. Stonemasons were paid by the day, in money and in rice. More than 1,800 master craftsmen worked here. They came from 21 different trades, and their names were written down in the books. This was not to honor them. It was simply because the right person had to be paid.

And it is that habit of writing things down that turns out to be the biggest surprise in this story.

All through the building work, there were people sitting and keeping records. They wrote down which quarry each stone came from. They wrote down who built each stretch of wall. They wrote down the price of timber, of brick, and of stone. They even drew the machines, first whole, then taken apart piece by piece, just like a modern assembly manual.

The fortress was finished in 1796. The ten years that had been planned shrank to two years and nine months.

In 1801, all those pages of records were printed as a thick set of books, called the Hwaseong Seongyeok Uigwe. At the time, it was nothing more than a very careful final account of the costs. Once the job was done, it was put away.

Then time passed. A war once swept through this land, and the fortress was badly damaged.

When people wanted to rebuild it, a very hard question came up. Rebuild it from what? No one alive could remember how the fortress looked when it was new. The photographs were patchy, with gaps here and there.

So the thick old set of accounts was opened again.

From 1975 to 1979, the fortress was rebuilt line by line and drawing by drawing, exactly as the books set it down. Which brick went where, how high a wall stood, how a roof curved. The books had been printed 174 years earlier. Now they saved the very structure they had only been meant to record.

In December 1997, Hwaseong was added to the World Heritage List.

Today, standing on top of the wall near the Banghwasuryujeong Pavilion, you can see old stone and new stone lying side by side. The old stone is dark and rough to the touch. The new stone is lighter, its edges still sharp. They fit together only because, more than 200 years ago, someone took the trouble to sit down and write.

The creak of rope running over a wooden wheel fell silent long ago. But every stone in this wall still stands exactly where a line of ink in those books says it should stand.