Namsangol Hanok Village

At the highest point of a small village in the middle of Seoul, a marker sets a date for an appointment.

The date is November 29, 2394.

It bears repeating. Not 2024. The year is 2394. That day is still more than 360 years away.

The village is called Namsangol, and it sits on the northern slope of Namsan, a mountain right in the heart of the city. From the village yard, the forest on the mountain rises behind, and the tall glass towers of downtown stand in front.

The village opened in 1998. It holds five groups of old wooden houses of the kind Koreans call hanok.

One point here is easy to get wrong, so it is best said right away. These five houses have not always stood in this spot. Each once stood in a different neighborhood of Seoul, and they were the homes of nobles and officials in the Joseon period. Joseon was the royal dynasty that ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392. The houses were moved one by one to this mountainside and rebuilt in their original form. Most kept their old materials. One had to be built with new materials, because the old ones had decayed too far to reuse.

So in a sense, the whole old village is one big move. Houses from all over the city were gathered onto one mountainside, to go on standing together.

Inside the village, the daily life of earlier generations shows in very small details. The doorways are low, so everyone who goes in has to duck a little. The wooden floors shine from all the bare feet that have crossed them. Paper is pasted over the wooden frames of the doors, and the light comes through as a soft, pale yellow. Outside there is a traditional garden and a small pavilion, where people sit to enjoy the breeze.

The village also has stages for performances, a place to try on hanbok, and a place to learn a few old crafts. Hanbok is the traditional clothing of the Korean people.

One detail about the dates deserves attention. The village opened its doors only in 1998. Yet the most important thing buried in its ground had already been there for four years. At that time, this spot was not yet a village that visitors could enter.

In other words, it was already lying in the ground, waiting there, before the village ever opened its gates.

But the most memorable thing about Namsangol is not the houses.

Back, then, to the marker and its date from the start of the story.

In 1994, Seoul marked 600 years as the capital, counted from the time the Joseon court moved its capital here. To mark a milestone like that, a city could do a great many things. It could hold a grand ceremony, raise a stone monument, or publish a thick book.

Seoul chose to do something else.

On November 29 of that year, the city gathered more than 600 objects. They were not treasures, and they were not gold or silver. They were things that spoke of daily life for the people of Seoul at that time. Then everything went into a large capsule. The capsule was carried to the highest point of Namsangol village and buried.

With it went a promise. Four hundred years later, it would be opened.

Four hundred years is hard to take in.

The people who put objects into the capsule that year will certainly not be there on the day it opens. Neither will their children. Neither will their grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren after them, or the generations after those. Only about 15 generations later will someone stand on this exact spot and watch the capsule being lifted out.

So the whole project was done for people that none of us will ever meet. There is no reward for those who buried it. No one gets thanked. They simply thought that, four hundred years on, someone would be curious about how people lived in 1994. And they wanted to leave that person an answer.

This is a way of thinking that people very rarely manage. It is like planting a tree whose shade the planter will never sit in. It is like laying the foundation of a house the builder will never live in. Even the great palace in the middle of Seoul is being rebuilt in the same spirit, with its completion set as far off as 2045.

At the top of the village, above the buried capsule, the whole idea comes down to one small choice. The choice is a single object, just one, that would let people 400 years from now open the box and understand how a family lived this year. That is the very choice a whole city sat down to make together, on a day at the end of November 1994.