An early summer rain plays softly on the roof tiles. The paper door slides back to reveal beads of water dripping from the eaves and smattering with a bright, clear sound onto the yard below. Somewhere outside, a cuckoo adds its lonely, gentle notes to the melody. White smoke drifts from the chimney, and the stoked fire below is just starting to warm the floor. Where are we? In a small, cozy room of a traditional Korean house, experiencing what it would have been like to live there, even if only for a day.

Old Homes with a Proud Lineage
Korea’s Confucian culture is the driving force that has kept many of these old houses alive, when so much of Korea has been developed and modernized around them, while one of the central tenets of Confucian teachings is the idea of filial piety. Although honoring one’s father and mother is a universal principle, in Korea this filial piety extends to relationships with generations that have since passed on. The ancestral rites performed for previous generations are the responsibility of the eldest son of the family, and this responsibility is handed down from generation to generation, from first son to first son. The family that follows this line of succession is called the “head family,” and many of the traditional houses that still stand around Korea are those of these head families.
During the Joseon Dynasty period (1392- 1910), these families owned large tracts of land that were tilled by tenant farmers, and this income helped them to maintain their large houses and ritual responsibilities as head families. However, with land reforms in the mid 20th century, these families lost their primary means of income and fell into decline. Some left their ancestral homes to seek their fortunes in big cities such as Seoul. Others stayed behind, but both houses and families lost their former grandeur.
It was not until relatively recently that the government has made a focused effort to restore these treasures, giving the now scattered descendants both an opportunity and a reason to come home. Today, they welcome visitors, giving them a taste of what it is like to live in a traditional house, and many of them offer cultural programs that allow guests to experience games, food, and other aspects of Korea’s traditional lifestyle.

Delightful Charm
The Korea Tourism Organization operates a Korean website that is filled with information on these traditional houses, listing 68 homes found in the provinces, of which 39 are located in Gyeongsangbuk-do Province, thanks to the region’s strong and continuous respect for Confucian culture. Many of the houses offer a traditional meal for breakfast, and there are hands-on cultural experiences, such as using a traditional mill, learning Korean tea etiquette, dressing up in traditional attire, pottery making, and various traditional games. There are also some homes where visitors can observe actual performances of Confucian ancestral rites, while gaining valuable insight into the food, clothing, architecture, traditions, and other cultural aspects, which have been diligently preserved by these head families. Some traditional houses take advantage of their undisturbed natural environment to offer nature-appreciation programs, giving children a chance to see plants, animals, and insects that they would never encounter in the big cities.
Ever more Koreans are discovering the charm of these traditional houses each year. For modern city dwellers, one of the most obvious advantages of staying at a traditional house is the ability to escape from the tense, suffocating environment of the city and return to a time and place more closely connected to nature. A survey conducted by the Architecture & Urban Research Institute last year asked 1,007 people to cite their reasons for wanting to live in a traditional house. The top three responses included: “closeness to nature” (35.5 percent), “health benefits” (27.0 percent), and “peacefulness” (23.5 percent). One visitor to Yi Man-hyeon’s house in Andong, Gyeongsangbuk-do Province, had this to say: “My troubled mind became clear, and the stress that had built up over the past year disappeared without a trace after spending one night in this quiet, old house.”
Other visitors are looking for something more, like two 30-year-old women who stayed at the house of Kwon Cheol-yeon in Chunyang, Gyeongsangbuk-do Province. They had left the company where they had worked and set out on a 10-day journey to visit cultural sites and stay at traditional houses, hoping to reconnect with something that had been missing from their lives. There is also a group of people that have formed a club to learn about and experience Korea’s traditional culture who spend their free time visiting culturally and historically important sites around the country. In Gunja Village in Andong, not only did they stay at traditional houses, they also arranged for performances of traditional Korean music and dance to coincide with their visit.
Most of the visitors, however, are families, especially those with young children. A couple that brought their children to Jeonju Hanok (Traditional Korean House) Village, located in Jeonju, Jeollabuk-do Province, appreicated the learning experience: “There is so much to do here. For only a small fee, the whole family can make mixed rice or mugwort rice cakes, and if you apply in advance, you can learn about traditional etiquette and handicrafts. It was a valuable experience that allowed our children to see for themselves the beauty and importance of Korean tradition, as well as things that they had only seen in the pictures of their textbooks.” Another couple, who stayed at the house of Yun Jeung, in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do Province, found a special joy in their son’s reaction to the experience: “The dandelions and wild flowers, whose names we didn’t know, the beautiful and abundant garden seen from our room, the geometric shapes of the paper door latticework...and our son, who looked at all of these things with wonder in his eyes...it was a precious time for him, a step toward a world of beauty.”
What makes these traditional houses so special, of course, is that they are not simply for show. They are living museums, homes to the descendants of the people who built them. These descendants carry on the traditions of their families and are more than willing to share their experiences with visitors over a cup of tea. On an early summer evening, as the raindrops fell from the tiled eaves, Kwon shared his story. He is the great-grandson of Kwon Cheol-yeon, the man who built the house that still bears his name. The family fortunes rapidly declined after the land reform, and Kwon moved to Seoul as a young boy. The ancestral rites were still performed, but the ancestral home was eventually abandoned and sat vacant for 16 years.
Then the government came to him with an offer: they would help to restore the house if he would return and live there, and open it up to visitors who wanted to experience life in a traditional house. He accepted the offer and has been taking in visitors for the past three years. In the first year, he had around 50 visitors, but by the second year that number jumped to 200. This is the third year, and he expects the visitor traffic to continue to rise.
Kwon has often pondered why it is that Koreans today are so drawn to these traditional houses. A large part of it, he believes, is the realization that many of the traditional values of Korean society, such as the Confucian concept of filial piety, are fading away due to today’s fast-paced, industrialized society. “Parents suddenly felt an urgent need to emphasize this culture of filial piety in their children’s education,” he says, “and this culture is fundamentally related to the Confucian spirit. Then the government started to emphasize the culture of Korea’s traditional houses in the media, and all this has led to our recent rise in popularity.”
Lee, the owner of Yi Man-hyeon’s house, shares Kwon’s respect for traditional Confucian values. The house is located within the city limits of Andong, which is already a popular destination for those looking to experience traditional culture, and this has helped attract many visitors each year. It has been only three years since the government helped him restore the house, but he has already reached a level of about 5,000 guests per year. He lists five reasons for the popularity of his house, and traditional houses in general: a greater appreciation for culture as opposed to mere recreation, desire of parents to teach their children things they cannot learn in the cities, added leisure time due to the five-day workweek system, diversity of traditional houses (“No two are exactly alike,” he says), and interest in traditional culture in general, including the Confucian culture that has helped to keep these houses alive throughout the generations.
But he also feels that the current popularity of traditional houses is only the tip of the iceberg. “[Visitors] are just scratching the surface nowadays,” he says, “but when they start to dig a little deeper, they will start wondering about the lives of the people who lived in these houses. They will want to understand the culture.” When that happens, Lee believes that Korea’s traditional houses will see an explosive rise in popularity: not as relics of a time gone by, but as the living face of a traditional culture that has so much to offer modern Korea.

Finding the Future in the Past
Lee emphasizes the importance of Confucian values in today’s society, in particular the desire to realize a world in which everyone can live together in peace and a willingness of the individual to place the good of society ahead of personal interests. “Futurologists believe that this is the only way to bring about happiness to the whole world in the 21st and 22nd centuries,” he explains. For his part, Kwon points to a wooden tablet hanging on the wall, engraved with a simple family motto: “Sincerity is our family tradition.” He takes great pride in the fact that, when the tenant farmers ran short of food, his great-grandfather ordered his family to eat only two meals a day so they could open their storehouse and feed the hungry farmers.
Although it may seem a tautology, Korea’s present has long been torn between its past and its future. Korea’s modern history has been especially painful: 35 years of colonial rule under Japan, who sought to erase Korea’s identity and incorporate her into the Japanese Empire; bitter North-South war that ravaged the peninsula after Japanese rule; and over 50 years of living as a people divided by ideology. Yet, despite its poverty-stricken state after the Korean War, South Korea has somehow managed to pull itself up by its bootstraps and become the world’s 13th-largest economy. This period of rapid economic growth is so astounding that it has been dubbed “The Miracle on the Han River.”
But there is also danger in moving forward at such a relentless pace; that is, losing touch with one’s past. When your past contains as many painful memories as Korea’s, this might not seem to be such a bad thing. But there is much that can and should be preserved from the past, and much that can be used to build a road into the future. Korea’s local governments have recognized this and invested in traditional houses and their inherent culture.
Although the visitors might not wax philosophical about their reasons for staying at these traditional houses, the fact that so many of the guests are families with young children says something about their motivation: namely, that they feel there is something of value here that needs to be passed on to the next generation. Though they may not articulate it, many realize that the pursuit of modernity should be tempered with an understanding of and respect for tradition. There is much in the past that needs to be overcome, but there is also much to be treasured, such as the human values that people like Lee and Kwon truly cherish. The traditional Korean houses that they call home are just the tangible face of this precious tradition.