In 1902 the Emperor of Korea gave an Alsatian woman a plot of land and the money to build a hotel on it. Antoinette Sontag had come to Seoul in the household of the Russian minister, her brother-in-law, and had brought Western cooking and a wine cellar into Gojong's palace. The house she built served the first hotel coffee in the country — and one Japanese official called its back room a centre of diplomatic conspiracy.
That is the shape of Korean hospitality in one story: the guest house and the state have never been separable here. Every phase of this page is a version of it.
Three ways of being lodged, and two belonged to the government
From Goryeo the yeok were official post stations on the envoy road — horses, fodder and a bed for an official, around 1,300 of them, most closed or converted into commercial inns in the eighteenth century. It is the Korean yam, and the state fed movement rather than the merchant. The gaeksa was the state guest house for foreign envoys: the guest of the court did not sleep in a tavern.
The commercial form was the jumak — the roadside tavern where drink came first and a floor came second, and the traveller carried his own food and bedding. Isabella Bird described a dirty yard and a wooden block for a pillow in the 1890s, and the register carries her account rather than a softer one. Korea's own officials in the sixteenth century compared the jumak with the Chinese inn and found it wanting: in China money bought everything, and here it did not.
⚑ But one Korean thing every foreign traveller praised was ondol. Lillias Underwood called Korean inns inferior only to China's for dirt and discomfort, and then called the warm floors a remarkable device. A technology of comfort that outlasted every building it was laid in, and it is still under the floor of the hanok hotels of Bukchon.
The Silla capital was the eastern end of the exchange
Chinese envoys called Silla the country of gold, and the tombs of Gyeongju hold objects from Central Asia and the Mediterranean. The Library records Gyeongju as the eastern terminus of the overland and maritime network, in the same way it records Dunhuang as the gate and Nara as the cupboard at the end. Three countries, one road, and this register now holds all three ends of it.
1914, and a hotel on a cleared altar
The Gyeongseong Railway Hotel opened on 10 October 1914, designed by the Prussian architect Georg de Lalande, with 52 rooms, the first passenger elevator in the country, the first French restaurant and the first buffet. It became the Chosun and is now the Westin Josun — the oldest operating hotel in Korea.
⚑ And it stands on cleared ground. In 1913 the colonial administration demolished most of the Hwangudan — the altar of heaven raised in 1897 by Emperor Gojong to mark the founding of the Korean Empire — keeping the octagonal shrine, which is still on the hotel's land. A colonial railway put a hotel for foreigners on the altar of the empire it had replaced, and the register states that in the same paragraph as the elevator.
The Bando followed in 1938, eight storeys and the tallest in Seoul. It is gone, and Lotte Hotel Seoul stands on the site — the root of Lotte is a colonial grand hotel, not the tower of 2017.
The state builds a resort so that soldiers stay
⚑ Grand Walkerhill opened at Achasan in 1963 for a reason no other house in this register shares: the government built it so that United Nations troops would spend their leave in Korea rather than in Japan. It was named for General Walton Walker, its buildings named after American generals, and it had a casino, a pool and a yacht club. Kim Swoo-geun designed Pizza Hill.
Whatever one thinks of the motive, it is the moment the Korean government made lodging an industry — and it precedes the chaebol hotels by sixteen years.
Then the conglomerates take it over
In 1973 Samsung took over the state guest house, the Yeongbingwan, and in March 1979 opened The Shilla on the Namsan slope around it. The gaeksa function of the Joseon court, privatised — the same building type, the same purpose, now owned by a family company and named for a dynasty. La Yeon inside it holds three Michelin stars for court cooking.
Lotte, Shinsegae and Hanwha followed, and this is the distinctive Korean arrangement: luxury hospitality as a division of a conglomerate rather than the work of an independent hotelier. Signiel occupies floors 76 to 101 of Lotte's own 555-metre tower — a night inside a chaebol's vertical. Josun Palace is Shinsegae's, and carries a name that goes back to 1914.
The World Cup opened the monasteries
⚑ This is the finding on this page that exists nowhere else in the register. Korea ran short of beds for the 2002 World Cup, and the Jogye Order launched Templestay in response. Eleven thousand people slept in Buddhist temples during the thirty days of the tournament, and on 2 July 2002 the programme was made permanent.
Japan's shukubō is a thousand years old and continuous. Korea's temple lodging is a sporting deadline that became a national institution, and it now takes hundreds of thousands of participants a year, a growing share of them foreign.
What Korea is, against the register
Oman chose restraint and wrote it into a planning code. The Emirates built luxury as an industry. Qatar incorporated a company before it had a hotel. Saudi Arabia designed one from a plan. Japan kept the inn open for thirteen centuries.
Korea's hospitality has always been an instrument of policy, and the owner has changed four times. The Joseon court kept the gaeksa. A Japanese colonial railway built the first grand hotel. The Republic built Walkerhill to keep foreign soldiers spending here. Then the chaebol bought the state guest house and made it the country's most prestigious address. The buildings changed hands with the regimes, and the function did not.
⚑ And the page has a gap worth naming: almost everything before 1902 is a category rather than a place. The jumak, the yeok and the gaeksa are held as types because the Library has not read the individual houses, and they certainly existed.