Sungnyemun Gate

Korea keeps a list of the most precious things in the country, and at the very top of that list stands number one.

Number one is not a gold crown lifted from a royal tomb. It is not a jewel, an old painting, or a statue in a glass case with a guard beside it all day. Korea's number one is a gate.

It is a gate standing in the open air in the middle of Seoul, with traffic circling it from morning until late at night. Everyone who passes can see it, and most of them do not stop.

Why that gate? There is a real answer, but it takes a little while to get there.

The gate is called Sungnyemun. Work on it began in 1396, under King Taejo, and it was finished in 1398. It was the southern gate of Hanyangdoseong, the long city wall that ringed the old capital.

The lower part of the gate is a great platform of stone, with an arched passage cut through the middle for people to pass. The upper part is a two-story wooden pavilion, five bays wide at the front and two bays deep. Its sweeping curved roof rests on clusters of wooden brackets fitted tightly together.

In the old days, this gate did a job that nobody needs anymore. It kept time for the whole city. At ten at night, the gate closed. At four in the morning, it opened. A bell hung in the pavilion, and its ringing told the people of the city when it was time to go home, or time to carry their goods to market.

Its name was not chosen just to sound grand. Sungnyemun means honoring propriety. Propriety was one of the four virtues people of old valued most, together with benevolence, righteousness and wisdom. People in the area call the gate by a much easier name: Namdaemun, the great south gate.

A wooden sign carved with the gate's name hangs above it. Tradition says the characters on that sign were written by Grand Prince Yangnyeong, the eldest son of King Taejong.

And that sign has one odd feature that no other gate in Seoul shares.

On the other city gates, the name is written in a horizontal line. Only at Sungnyemun do the characters run vertically, from top to bottom. People of old believed that Gwanaksan, a mountain south of the capital, carried the energy of fire, and that its fire could spill into the city. The characters on this sign belong to the fire element, so the sign was stood upright, to let one fire hold back another. That is what people tell. The sign itself really does stand upright, for anyone who comes to look.

The gate stood there for a very long time. It was heavily repaired in 1448 and repaired again in 1479. In 1868 it was repaired once more. The city around it changed completely. The wall broke apart piece by piece, buildings grew taller, and roads grew wider. In time the gate stood bare in the middle of a traffic circle, like an old stone island.

Now comes the answer.

On December 20, 1962, Korea drew up its list of national treasures. The list followed the order of an older register, drawn up a few decades before, and on the first line, once again, stood Sungnyemun. That was all. Number one here never meant the most precious. It only meant the first to be entered, just like a student's number on a classroom roll call.

Even so, for decades almost everyone read that number as a ranking. In 2021, Korea decided to stop numbering its heritage altogether. That way no one would think one treasure was worth more than another just because it came earlier in the register.

At this point the mystery seems to fall flat. Number one turns out to be nothing more than the first line in a register.

Except that one winter evening showed it was not so simple.

On the evening of February 10, 2008, a fire broke out in the wooden pavilion above the gate. By the time it was put out, the upper story was nearly gone, with about 90 percent of it lost. But the stone platform still stood where it had always stood. About 90 percent of the lower story was saved. And the carved name sign had been taken down and carried out in time.

The next morning, the whole country looked at the empty space on top of that stone platform. Number one really had been meaningless. But the gate was not.

Had speed been the goal, they could easily have rebuilt it with modern machines. A power saw cuts timber far faster than a hand saw. Pressed roof tiles come out of molds in endless batches, each one just like the next. Industrial paint goes on evenly and lasts.

They chose the opposite way.

The rebuilding took five years and three months, and the rule set from the start was to work the old way. Carpenters shaped the timber with chisels and axes, cutting each joint by hand, never touching a machine. Stonemasons struck the stone the same way masons of old had struck it. Instead of buying ready-made iron at the market, the builders set up a forge right on the building site. There they made their own nails and iron fittings in the style of Joseon, the royal dynasty that ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392. The roof tiles were fired in a traditional kiln. And the dancheong, the bands of blue-green and red painted on the column tops and the rafters, was meant to be mixed from natural minerals. That paint did not turn out as hoped. About half a year after the gate reopened, it began to peel.

The timber had to be found. Large pine trees were cut in Samcheok, in Gangwon Province. And then there is this. Many people from all over the country brought pine trees from their own gardens and gave them to the building site, so that their trees could become part of that gate.

As the work went on, the builders saw that they could do one more thing. On both sides of the gate, sections of the city wall that had been lost long ago were built again. The gate stopped being an island. It was joined once more to a stretch of the wall it had always belonged to.

There was also a very quiet piece of luck. During an earlier repair, someone had measured and drawn the gate in careful detail, down to the smallest part. Thanks to those drawings, the builders knew exactly what had been lost, instead of having to guess.

On May 4, 2013, the gate opened again for everyone to walk through.

Standing in front of Sungnyemun now, you hear car horns and the footsteps of people heading to work in the morning. But through the years of rebuilding, this street corner had a completely different sound. The knock, knock, knock of a hammer on the handle of a chisel. The blade biting into the grain of the pine, dry and clean. Over and over from morning to afternoon, day after day, more strokes than anyone could count to raise one pavilion.

The gate standing there today is a new gate. But because every stroke of the chisel followed the path the old craftsmen had cut, it is still the old gate too.