Nakseongdae

I was trapped inside for most of the weekend working, so Sunday evening I determined to go out for a walk while it was still light outside. I've mentioned before that my building is halfway between two subway stations. They are the Seoul National University (서울대 입구) Station and the Nakseongdae (낙성대 落星垈) Station. Nakseongdae has an intriguing meaning -- "Falling Star Site" -- that I've been curious about since I first saw the Chinese characters at the station entrance. It turns out that the station is named for a nearby area, which is now a small park. That was my destination on Sunday evening.

Inside the park there is a lovely, secluded space with a handful of small buildings and monuments set in well-tended grounds.


On the left is a small stone pagoda. It was moved here from a location nearby, where it marked the site of the birth of the famous Korean general Gang Gamchan (강감창 姜邯贊) (948-1031). Legend has it that on the night of his birth a shooting star was seen descending from heaven above his house.


I'm not sure how old the pagoda is, but it dates from the Goryeo Dynasty so is probably about 1000 years old. It was repaired by the city and moved here when the park was established in the early 1970s.

In fact the whole park is dedicated to the memory of General Gang. The main building is a small shrine where incense burns in front of his image.

Opposite the pagoda is a commemorative stele, which looks no older than the park.


One more view:

Just outside the entrance is an informational sign written in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. As you can see from the English portion at the top of the picture below, the pagoda is designated Seoul Tangible Cultural Property No. 4.


If you click to expand the picture and look at the Chinese section, you'll notice that parts of it have been taped over. There's an interesting story here.

The city of Seoul has been known by many names in the course of its history, including Hanyang 한양 and Hanseong 한성. The current name, Seoul, is unusual because it is a pure Korean word. So far as I know, it is the only geographical name in all of Korea that is not (seemingly) derived from Chinese elements, and so cannot be written with Chinese characters. (That "seemingly" is there as a hedge on purpose -- some of the place names written with Chinese characters are of Korean origin, but that origin is now disguised to most observers.) Seoul means 'capital city', but the precise Korean etymology remains a subject of debate.

Perhaps because the name Seoul has no corresponding Chinese characters, the Chinese continued to refer to the city by its old name of Hanseong (Chinese Hànchéng 漢城) until quite recently. Some years ago the Korean government decided that it wanted to create a new official Chinese name related to the name Seoul. (This may have been motivated in part because one interpretation of the meaning of the characters writing Hanseong is 'Chinese city'!*)

A Korean professor of Chinese linguistics -- whom I know -- is the one who came up with the new Chinese name for Seoul. He chose the Chinese characters 首爾. In Chinese they are pronounced Shǒu'ěr, which sounds similar to Seoul. (Does that pronunciation look familiar to you? It should.) And the first character has the meaning 'head', and is part of the Chinese word for 'capital city', so the meaning of the characters is also appropriate.

On the sign, occurrences of Hànchéng 漢城 have been pasted over with Shǒu'ěr 首爾. For some reason, though, they left Hànchéng 漢城 intact on the top line. (If you're actually looking at the picture and trying to identify the characters in question, there's a complication. The sign is written in the form of Chinese used on the mainland, the so-called "simplified characters". So the two names in question appear as Hànchéng 汉城 and Shǒu'ěr 首尔.)

Out front, near the road, is this impressive statue of the general. He's probably getting ready to ward off the attacks of the Khitans, who had already seized the entire northern half of China from the Song dynasty when General Gang turned them back for good from the Korean peninsula in 1018.



Next door to the park is a Science Park. It's a weird-looking place.

If you were to head up that sidewalk on the right side, you would come to the back gate of SNU and then to the faculty and student dormitories.

Between Nakseongdae Park and the Science Park I saw a bunch of (presumably) South Asian guys playing cricket.


They were drawing a lot of attention, including from me. They looked like devout Muslims, most of them with large bushy beards.


The guy in white was scampering after balls just fine despite the un-sporting outfit he was sporting.


Finally, on my way home I was very amused by this sign.


* In fact, the name Hanseong means 'City on the Han (River)'. The Han River (Hangang 한강 漢江) is one of those toponyms that is written with Chinese characters and looks like it's composed of purely Chinese elements. Gang is indeed the Chinese word for 'river'. But han is in origin the noun-modifying form of an obsolete Korean verb meaning 'large, great'. (That verb, hada 하다, is related to the modern Korean word for 'big', keuda 크다.) It happens to be homophonous with the Chinese word for 'Chinese', so it ended up being written that Chinese character, thus disguising its natively Korean origin.