Clinging to Korea’s past, tile by tile

In this city of high-rise apartments and hyper-hip coffee shops selling lattes for eight dollars, maintaining hanoks is a dedication to a slowly disappearing piece of history.

In two neighborhoods, a pair of hanoks – traditional Korean houses, both built more than 100 years ago – are carefully preserved. One is a museum, the other a renovated house; these hanoks remain largely as they always have been, even as Seoul continues its vertical climb around them.

On an autumn afternoon – what turned out to be the last day of work before a new South Korean winter arrived – Choi Jae Pil, a certified master craftsman, or wa-gong in Korean, and three colleagues were putting the finishing touches on a section of the roof to the Bukchon Traditional Cultural Center in the ancient city Bukchon Hanok Village. Mr. Choi has been restoring hanoks for almost 45 years. It feels perfectly at home among the black clay tiles that cover the gently sloping roofs of the wooden and stone block buildings.

The district, which has about 900 hanoks, including private homes, guesthouses, restaurants and teahouses, attracts large numbers of tourists all year round. And the cultural center, once home to a prominent Korean family, houses a visitors center and museum with about a dozen rooms explaining the history and building techniques of the hanok style. Like any century-old house, it needs regular repairs.

Today, that work at one point resembled the warm-up before a baseball game, when workers on the ground threw blobs of clay mixed with lime to a colleague on the scaffolding, who then rounded them up to another colleague on the roof. The clay was then poured into place at the bottom of one of several vertical rows of tiles so that it would act as a sort of stabilizer to hold the row in place. And the rows, in turn, help hold together the larger horizontally curved tiles, called giwa tiles, that drape a traditional Korean roof.

Mr. Choi and his colleagues are all giwa craftsmen, certified by a department of the South Korean government that also mandates basic practices.

“The tiles must be installed by a craftsman certified by the Korean government,” said Mr. Choi, now 78, as he oversaw workers filling the last few cracks in the roof tiles with clay. “And the tiles that were made up to 200 years ago, for example, are so much better than those made in the past 50 years. We want to keep that.”

The giwa tiles, made of cast and fired clay, are each shaped like a semi-flattened U (which workers call the feminine tiles) and are arranged in horizontal rows along the roof, almost like bumps or scales, which are pressed into place held by more vertical U-shaped tiles (the males) inverted on either side, about every 8 inches or so. No nails or pins are used. Everything is connected and held in place like a jigsaw puzzle.

“We replace the mud that holds the male tiles in place and repair cracks and erosion in the female tiles, which are most exposed to the elements and where water drains from the roof,” said Kim Hyun Woo, assistant director at the Hanok. Policy Department of the Seoul Municipal Government, as he gestured toward one of the rooftops. (He is also certified as a traditional carpenter.)

“The process of cleaning and repairing is like cleaning the scales of a dragon,” Mr Kim added. “They have to be done in an exact and delicate way.”

Although the division estimates there are 85,000 hanoks across South Korea, Seoul’s rapid urbanization has reduced their numbers in the city from about 22,000 in 2006 to about 8,000 in 2020. Mr Choi said fewer young people are taking up the craft of are taking on the task of restoring hanoks as they are lured away by better-paying jobs in South Korea’s strong economy. But he is hopeful that this will change.

“There are young people learning the trade, but mainly outside Seoul,” he said. “It’s not going to disappear, but it is difficult manual work.”

A couple in Seoul, Park GoodWon and Boo YoungJin, know a thing or two about hard work when it comes to restoring a hanok house. Theirs has five rooms, with wooden beams and wooden sliding doors, centered around a courtyard of about 12 square meters, and is located in the Jongno-gu district, about a mile from Bukchon Hanok village.

The couple has spent the past seven years refurbishing their 150-year-old hanok, which stands in stark contrast to the sleek apartments that have come to define Seoul’s skyline and the city’s economic boom of the past 25 years.

“When we bought the house it had a suspended ceiling, so we had to remove it and renovate the original ceiling, which took about six months,” said Mr Park, now 65, who leads Taoist meditation groups in one of the five rooms of the house. “The ceilings and wood all had to be repainted and cleaned. More than fifty windows and doors also had to be cleaned.”

They also had the house rewired, with the new wiring running along the original beams in a delicate line of red and blue.

The design of most Hanok houses was based on the buildings of the Joseon Dynastywhich lasted from 1392 to 1910. Many hanoks were built in the last decades of that dynasty, although Mr. Kim of Seoul’s hanok division said most of the hanoks left today were built in the 1920s and 1930s, since the centuries-old design remained popular even after the dynasty ended.

“It was during the Japanese occupation, especially in the first few decades of the 20th century, that the country was introduced to modernity,” he said. “But it happened in a powerful way.”

As a result, the restoration of many hanoks has been about undoing that modernity – and memories of the Japanese occupation – and reclaiming Korean heritage.

“We thought if we bought this house we could fix it the way we wanted,” said Ms. Boo, 51, a retired civil servant. “It’s in our style, our taste and our touch, but we weren’t prepared for how much work it would be.”

“Ignorance guarantees courage,” she added, laughing.

The restoration also included installing stones that were once heated under the floors in traditional Korean “ondol” style to the courtyard, was a full-time job. The whole process was finally completed in early 2017 – seven years after Mr Park and Ms Boo bought the house. They did not want to say how much it all cost.

“When we finished everything, I could tell the house was dancing in a way,” Mr. Park said. “Think of it as if you haven’t had a bath for six decades, but then you clean yourself up. How would you feel?”