The main hall
Home of the royal portrait.
Sadopaul — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mobius6 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · No machine-readable author provided. IGEL assumed (based on copyright claims). — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Bernard Gagnon — CC0
A royal shrine built in 1410 to keep the portrait of King Taejo, founder of the Joseon dynasty, in Jeonju, the city his family came from. It burned in the war of 1592 and was rebuilt in 1614, and it still keeps the royal portrait, one of Korea's most prized National Treasures. You enter by a red gate into quiet courtyards shaded by old bamboo, pines and ginkgos, with the main hall, where the portrait hangs, at their centre. At the back is a small museum of royal portraits showing pictures of Joseon kings and how they were painted and kept. In another corner of the grounds is a rebuilt archive for the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, the day-by-day record of five centuries of rule, listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Jeonju's copy was the only one to survive the war of 1592, after the townspeople carried it into the mountains and guarded it. The old trees make it one of the loveliest places in autumn, when the ginkgos turn yellow. A visit rounds off a walk through the hanok village opposite.
Home of the royal portrait.
Five centuries of records.
Autumn gold in the courts.
44 Taejo-ro, central Jeonju, at the entrance to Jeonju Hanok Village
The portrait of King Taejo, founder of the Joseon dynasty, a National Treasure. The grounds also hold a royal-portrait museum and an archive for the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty.
