Ah…another Gyeongbokgung post. I’ll try to keep this brief.
The first photo is of the entrance to the main hall of the Queen’s quarters. Notice the interesting way of handling unwanted doors…just pin them to the ceiling. the doors are those white things… at right angles to the vertical wall, parallel to the floor. Two panels of the doors are folded up, then for extra ventilation the whole lot is then hoisted up and they rest on metal hooks hung from the ceiling. The design varies with each particular building too.
Flower walls…so-called because of the designs on the walls. They usually occur on the walls surrounding the Queen’s Mother’s and Empress’s palace compounds. Makes it a bit more feminine and less harsh eh? Well the women can never leave the palace so I guess it’s too alleviate some of that boredom.
The next two photos should, on hindsight, have been included in the last post. Oh well. In the fourth photo, the building is resting on stone blocks and that there are spaces on the bottom? Square dark holes. I think this was one of the buildings that had a heated floor. The traditional Korean method of heating rooms is called ondol I think. Either that or the flooring is called ondol. Well, it’s a related term in any event.
Smoke from the cooking fire is directed underneath the flooring, producing a lovely sort of heat in the harsh Korean winter. The floor is covered in yellow squares of grease-proof paper, which provides almost no insulation at all if the floor got overheated…
On the roofs of these two photos, you can see a bit of those stone animal roof decorations too.
I quite like the fourth photo. The mountains in the background makes it look like it’s in the countryside (I must have been facing north when I took the photo), but actually, as I’ve said before, the whole palace is pretty much in the middle of Seoul, and almost in the middle of the whole of Korea, to boot).
The last photo is a museum model of a traditional peasant korean house. There is a model of man in the photo too, which should give you some either of the scale of the house - ie, the house is pretty small! It looks like there is only enough space for a kitchen, maybe a small living room and another bedroom. I suppose the living room is used as a multi-purpose room, like in peasant Japanese houses; in the day time, it’s used for eating and doing general work, and at night the furniture is cleared away and the bedding rolled out for the family to sleep.
The museum is in the Gyeongbokgung complex. Entrance is free (entrance to the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City wasn’t though…grumble). Really worth a look while you’re there. It concentrates on folk history, I think.