Cheonggyecheon Stream and More

I had read about Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Stream even before I’d considered coming to Korea. In fact, while I can’t remember what led me to choose Korea, and specifically Seoul, what I’d read and seen in pictures of Cheonggyecheon was probably a factor.

I decided this was my afternoon to see Cheonggyecheon Stream. I made it my primary focus.

However, after I left Changgyeonggung Palace this morning, it was well past my lunch time. My stomach was screaming at me to feed it. There were no eating places in either of the palaces I visited this morning, and I couldn’t see any restaurants near the exit from Changgyeonggung Palace.

I pulled out my trusty walking tour app, looked for nearby “must-see” sights and found that Insadong Shopping Street was a relatively easy walking distance. The app said that, in addition to shops, it had restaurants. So I went there first.

After leaving the shopping street to walk to my focus-destination, just before reaching the starting point of Cheonggyecheon Stream, I passed a public square with a couple of very large statues. I spent a few minutes checking that out.

Only then did I get to Cheonggyecheon Stream, where I spent more than an hour and three-quarters before heading back to my hotel.

Insadong Shopping Street

Insadong Shopping Street is a colourful pedestrianized shopping street that continues for a few blocks. The side streets off it, including some narrow side lanes, are even more interesting, a little more grungy, and have even more character and “colour.” (I mean colour more rhetorically than literally. “Character” might be a better word than “colour.”)

I found a restaurant where I had a delicious seafood and green onion Korean pancake. It was pizza-sized. And it came with small dishes of kimchi and some sort of leafy greens. By the time I finished the pancake, my stomach stopped complaining about being hungry and started complaining about being overly stuffed.

Complain, complain, complain. That’s all my stomach ever does. Well, that and help digest my food.

The stores on Insadong Street sell general merchandise and souvenirs. Not being a shopper, I walked along the street once and left.

Gwanghwamun Square

To my eye, Gwanghwamun Square, which was nameless in my mind when I came across it, is nothing special. It has some trees off to one side, but is otherwise mostly barren paving stones, except for those two giant statues. With the help of a mapping application, I found it was Gwanghwamun Square. Then, with the help of Wikipedia, I found the identities of the people who were memorialized by the statues.

One of them is of Admiral Yi Sun-sin. The other is of King Sejong the Great. He was king from 1418 to his death in 1450.

From Wikipedia, I learned that the square might sometimes look more attractive than it did when I was there. The Wikipedia entry talked about a fountain and showed a picture of several water jets shooting directly out of the surface of the square, without any fountain structure or pool. I guess the water was turned off when I was there. What a surprise. Something wasn’t turned on when I was there.

Cheonggyecheon Stream

A stream, Cheonggyecheon, ran through what’s now central Seoul until 1958. From the early 20th century until the Korean War, people moved from the countryside to the city to find work. They set up shanty towns by the banks of Cheonggyecheon, and I imagine the stream became quite dirty.

To “beautify” the area, the city covered Cheonggyecheon with concrete. How covering a stream with concrete would beautify it is a mystery to me, but it is what it is. Later, they built an elevated highway above it.

In the early 21st century, the mayor of Seoul decided he wanted to tear down the highway, pull up the concrete, and restore the Cheonggyecheon stream. I read somewhere that he ran into a lot of opposition. I read that the objections were primarily over cost, but I imagine some drivers didn’t want to lose the highway.

But the mayor persisted and won out. The highway came down. The concrete came up. And Seoul regained its Cheonggyecheon Stream, running for more than ten kilometres right through central Seoul. The restoration of the stream started in 2003 and was completed in 2005. It’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

I started at one end of the restored Cheonggyecheon, where it begins with a decorative artificial waterfall. There didn’t seem to be any natural source for the stream there, so I imagine some of it is still buried.

The stream is below the normal ground level. The walkways on the banks, which are a little above the stream itself, are probably almost two storeys below street-level. Because of that, walking in the canyon deadens the sound of the city somewhat. You can hear the stream, particularly when it runs over small rapids.

At several points along the course of Cheonggyecheon, there are artificially placed stepping stones that people can use to ford the stream. There are also a couple of pedestrian bridges across it. Where space allows, there are trees, flowers, and/or bushes along the banks. There was even one tiny meadow that I saw.

Along one long section, the path on one bank is much higher than the path along the other bank. The latter is only a little above the stream. Where that was the case, steps were placed in the higher bank at points where there were stepping stones across the stream, so people could get down to or up from the stepping stones.

I walked the majority, but not all, of the ten kilometres. There were a couple of short sections, one on each bank, where the path on one side disappeared, and there were impassible rocks and vegetation on that side. But at those points, there were stepping stones for crossing to the other side of Cheonggyecheon.

At one juncture, a small river intersected with the Cheonggyecheon Stream in a T-intersection. There were stepping stones to cross the river on the side where it intersected, allowing me to continue to walk by the stream. However, there were also paths on the banks of that river. I could have (but didn’t) walked along the river instead. I don’t know how far or where that would have taken me.

It was all beautiful and very calming in the middle of a bustling city.

If I have one complaint about the Cheonggyecheon trails, it’s that I didn’t spot a single bench that had a back to it. I’ve mentioned before in these pages that if I sit on a bench or any surface that doesn’t have a back support for more than a few minutes, my back starts hurting. The pain intensifies the longer I sit.

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of places to sit. And they were well used. Just not ones with back supports.

There were only a few small backless benches, but there were lots of rocks to sit on, stone blocks that created seating like in a Roman theatre, and more modern steps to sit on.

It was sunny and hot today. Most people who sat beside the Cheonggyecheon Stream did so under one of the bridges that cross over the stream. The expanse of overhead concrete distracted somewhat from the aesthetics, but it was quite cool in the heavy shade of the bridge.

I found a stone cube under a smaller bridge that only dappled the light (I think it might have been a pedestrian bridge) to sit down on for a couple of minutes until my back started hurting. While I was there, I looked out into the stream and saw a school of about a dozen fish swimming languorously upstream. Then, they seemed to think, “This languorous swimming still isn’t chill enough for us cool dudes.” So they stopped swimming and drifted a piece downstream, but still facing upstream. Then, after a while, they started swimming languorously again.

I took a picture of the fish, but they’re kind of hard to see because their colouration doesn’t contrast much wth the bottom of the stream.

Farther along downstream, three overhead highway support pillars had been left in the middle of the stream there as a memory of the past. When fully in use, they were in the shape of a “T,” where the thick support of concrete at the top of the T would have held up the highway.

The pillar farthest upstream looked pretty much complete. The middle one had large chunks of concrete knocked off both sides of the top of the “T.” The one farthest downstream had the entire top bar, and part of the upright was knocked off.

With the help of Google Translate, a sign told me that by the early 2000s, there had been considerable deterioration of the elevated highway and heavy vehicles were banned from it for safety reasons. In 2003, it was torn down for safety reasons. I suppose that helped in the decision to restore the stream.

I intended to walk the full length of the Cheonggyecheon, but I gave up. A mapping app showed me I walked the vast majority of it, but there was still a little distance to go.

I turned off at a stream that, like the river I mentioned above, also intersected with Cheonggyecheon in a T-intersection. That stream also had paths along its banks. One of my mapping applications told me I could get to a subway station by walking the equivalent of a few blocks along that. That’s what I did. I took the subway (requiring two transfers) back to my hotel.

The Cheonggyecheon Stream is an absolutely amazing asset for Seoul, and I had a wonderful afternoon.