Hidden SideThe Hidden Side of ArchitectureNo.077Published October 8, 2026

Seodaemun is missing from Seoul's Jeongdong intersection because it was torn down in 1915 to widen a road, and its gatehouse wood and tiles were sold for 205 won

At Jeongdong intersection in Seoul, only the name Seodaemun (West Gate) is left, and there is no gate. Donuimun, the west gate of the Seoul City Wall (Hanyangdoseong), was torn down in 1915, in the middle of a road-widening project begun in 1913, and the wood and tiles of its gatehouse were sold at auction for 205 won. Rebuilding it would cost more than 100 billion won, so in 2019 it stood at its original site again only on screens, through augmented reality. We attached the institutional source to each sentence of the video.

✔Checked against the institution's original text △Original not available, checked through news reports ○Our interpretation or a linking sentence Tap a mark to open its sources. Tap a sentence to play the video from there. The video is narrated in Korean; the English text follows it sentence by sentence.

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Sources

Every source behind the script, including claims we checked and left out.

How we checked

Checked on October 7, 2026. We compared the video against the originals of the Seoul Museum of History's Seoul History Archive commentary and newspaper text "Maeil Sinbo (March 2, 1915): Sale of Seodaemun" (매일신보(1915.3.2)_서대문 불하기), the Seoul Metropolitan Government's Seoul City Wall website page "History of the City Wall" (도성의 역사), and a December 2019 article in the Korea Heritage Service newsletter Gukgayusan Sarang (written by the Cultural Heritage Education Team of what was then the Cultural Heritage Administration). Every sentence was confirmed in an institutional original, so no sentence was confirmed only through news reports (△).
  • The original goes as far as saying the stone was to be used for road construction. We could not confirm which road it was actually laid in, so the video says only "The stone was held back for roadwork."
  • The restoration cost of "more than 100 billion won" is the figure in the 2019 Korea Heritage Service newsletter article. A 2024 report that the Seoul Metropolitan Government was reviewing the restoration of Donuimun together with putting Saemunan-ro underground (about 400 billion won) was left out of the video because we found no institutional original.
  • We could not confirm whether the augmented reality and virtual reality apps still operate, so the video describes that part in the past tense.
  • The video does not mention the winning bid converted into today's money (about 5.21 million won in the museum's commentary) or the cost of the road work (142,859 won).
  • The history that the gate was first built in 1396 and rebuilt in 1422, when it came to be called Saemun (New Gate), is not covered in the video because we did not see an institutional original directly.
  • The video's "Just over a kilometer" is a shortened form of the original's "584 kan (about 1,062 m) long" (a kan is a traditional Korean unit of length).

Corrections

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