Two hills that stood where the main road in front of Busan Port now runs disappeared because from 1909 they were cut down and their earth and rock used to fill the sea

How we checked

Checked October 7, 2026. We compared against the entries "Yeongseonsan Leveling Works," "Busan Leveling Works," "Gyeongbu Line," "Donggwang-gil" and "Nampo" in the Encyclopedia of Busan History and Culture, compiled by the Academy of Korean Studies and Busan Metropolitan City, and the original text of "About Jung-gu · History" on the website of the Jung-gu Office, Busan Metropolitan City. Every factual sentence in the video was confirmed by an institutional source, so no sentence is confirmed only through news reports (△).

• The heights of the two hills differ by source ("Yeongseonsan Leveling Works": 50 meters above sea level · "Busan Leveling Works": about 9 meters for Yeongseonsan and about 36 meters for British Consulate Hill · the Jung-gu website's "Yeongju-dong" page describes a Yeongseonsan written with different Chinese characters (瀛仙山) as two hills about 40 meters above sea level), so the video did not state them.
• The completion date (March 8, 1912 · August 31, 1912 · March 1913) and the construction cost (992,367 won · 1,051,500 won) also differ by source, so the video did not state them.
• The closing sentence, "This road sits on hills cut down into the sea," is an interpretation linking two sources: the Jung-gu website's "the leveling works formed today's Jungang-ro" and the Encyclopedia of Busan History and Culture's "reclaimed the sea with the leveled earth and rock." We did not find in the sources which sections of Jungang-ro lie on cut land and which on filled land.
• We did not see the original of the contemporary record, the Government-General of Korea's "Report on the Busan Leveling Works" (부산 착평 공사 보고, 1913).
• We do not list personal names or street addresses.