Myeongdong Cathedral

Up close, almost touching the wall, a visitor sees something that cannot be seen from farther away.

The bricks are not all the same.

Some are deep red. Some are a lighter red. Some lean toward gray. Some are fully gray. They are laid in alternating bands that run both up and across, and that very difference draws the pattern on the face of the wall.

Twenty kinds of brick. That is how many went into building this church.

Not twenty bricks. Twenty different kinds, red and gray, each fired separately to go in exactly its own place.

And here is the most remarkable part. All of those bricks were fired locally.

That means no one shipped bricks over from Europe. People took the earth of this land, mixed it, pressed it into molds, fired the kilns, and watched the flames until all twenty kinds of brick came out. The church looks thoroughly Western, yet in the end it is made from the very ground it stands on.

Work began on August 5, 1892, and the church was finished in 1898. Six years.

Six years sounds long for one building, but consider what those years had to hold. The work was not only construction. Before a single brick could be laid, people had to find clay, test it, make molds, and build kilns. Then they fired one trial batch after another until each kind came out right. Twenty kinds of brick meant getting it right twenty times.

And all of this happened in a land where Western-style brick buildings could still be counted on one hand. To most of the builders here, a pointed arch must still have been a very strange thing.

The man who drew up the design and oversaw the building work was a French priest named Eugene Jean Georges Coste. He died before the church was finished. The cost was about 60,000 US dollars, with support from the Paris Foreign Missions Society.

The style is Gothic Revival. It imitates the Gothic churches of medieval Europe, with pointed arches, tall windows, and lines that all pull the eye upward.

The main body of the church rises 23 meters. The bell tower, which carries a clock, rises 45 meters.

In 1898, a height of 45 meters was enormous.

It was so tall that when the work was done, this was the largest building in Seoul.

Seoul at that time was a capital of wooden houses and low tiled roofs, with narrow streets. Above all those roofs stood the four mountains that ring the city. Then suddenly, on a mound of earth, a mass of red brick rose higher than everything else. At its top was a clock whose time could be read from far away.

People walking to market in those days must have tipped their heads back to look at it. Visitors today do the same, looking up at it among glass towers many times taller.

Beneath the main altar of the church lies a crypt.

The crypt holds the remains of nine martyrs of the Korean Church. They died in the times when following the faith was forbidden. This is the quietest part of the building, and also a part older than the building itself. Those people had died before the first brick was ever fired.

On November 22, 1977, the South Korean government listed the church as Historic Site number 258.

There is something worth noticing in that listing. The building was designed by a foreigner, in the style of a faraway place, to serve a religion that came from outside. Even so, the state wrote it into the list of things that belong to its own history, and kept it.

Now for the most curious thing about where it stands.

The church sits right beside Myeongdong, one of the busiest shopping streets in Seoul, where the stream of people hardly ever thins out. A few hundred steps from the middle of that crowd, up a short slope, lies the churchyard.

Two worlds lie a few hundred steps apart. The streets below have changed more times than anyone can count, while the church has stood here for more than a hundred years.

One small thing here is well worth doing, and it takes only a minute.

Stand at the foot of the wall, put a hand on the bricks, and count how many shades of red and gray fit into a single glance.

Then step back, ten steps, twenty steps, until the whole building fits into view.

At that distance, no single brick can be seen anymore. There is only a mass of deep red, a tower, and a clock. From behind comes the music of the shopping streets below, drifting up very softly.