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Showing posts with the label Hanyangdoseong

Seoul City Wall: Which Section to Walk, and Which End to Start From

If you want one walk that explains Seoul, take the city wall. Hanyangdoseong is the fortress the Joseon court put around the capital in 1396, and the city keeps the route open as six walking sections that ring the old centre. Pick a section — that decides whether your afternoon is a ridge above the palaces or pavement between office blocks. Then work out which end you start from; your way home hangs on it. Two of those six sections have no wall. The city says so itself: along the Heunginjimun and Sungnyemun stretches the fortress is gone, built over, and what remains is the line it took. That is the real shape of it: eighteen point six kilometres, six sections, and two of them no longer a wall at all. So the question was never whether you've walked the Seoul City Wall. It's which of the six, and then a second choice: which of its two ends. Decide both before you leave the hotel, because the two ends of a section are rarely the same trip, and on the two hardest sections...