For the Flickr slideshow, click here.
Restoration work on the Cathedral Church of the Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception — a.k.a Myeong-dong Cathedral — has just about been completed, and to celebrate, I’m going to give the cathedral — perhaps Seoul’s most beautiful piece of contemporary architecture — the photo essay it so richly deserves.
The Myeong-dong Cathedral area, the heart of Korea’s Roman Catholic community and a symbol of the democratization struggle, is rich in early modern history. In addition to the cathedral itself, the church grounds is also home to the historic Former Archbishop’s Residence (now the Archdiocese Building), Archdiocese Annex, Coste Hall and Seoul Convent of the Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres.
Note: I worked extremely hard on this post. Translation: Expect four comments. Tops, five.
Myeongnyebang Church
Even before the construction of the cathedral, the Myeong-dong area — called Myeongnyebang in Joseon days — had a special significance for Korean Catholics. It was here in 1784 that Korea’s first church was set up in the home of Thomas Kim Beom-u, the son of a local translator. Running the show was Peter Yi Seung-hun, formerly a member of the royal tribute mission to China who, having been pointed in that direction by his Catholic brother-in-law Yi Byeok, was baptised by French Jesuit missionary and musician Jean-Joseph de Grammont in Beijing, becoming the first Korean ever baptized. Returning from China with Catholic writings, religious objects and convert’s zeal, Yi established a “lay clergy” system, with himself as priest. Yi held weekly mass in Kim’s home, performed baptisms and proselytized the faith.
The Myeongnyebang church gathered an impressive congregation that included some of Korea’s best and brightest, including famed silhak scholar “Dasan” John Jeong Yak-yong, his two brothers, Yi Byeok, Kwon Il-sin and other literati associated with the Namin faction. In the spring of 1785, however, the authorities — quite accidentally — happened upon the meeting and arrested the flock. With the exception of Kim, the rest of the churchgoers were yangban elite from major families, so were let go. Poor Mr. Kim, on the other hand, was from the middle jungin class, so he was tortured and sent in exile to Danyang (not a bad place to get exiled to, actually), where he died from his wounds within a year, becoming the first Korean to die as a result of his Catholic faith.
Catholic Fun Fact: Technically speaking, Peter Yi Seung-hun was not the first Korean to be baptized. During the Imjin War, the Japanese Catholic daimyo and general Augustine Konishi Yukinaga brought back with him to Japan an orphaned three-year-old Korean girl, who was given the Japanese name of Ota-a. Raised in Konishi’s household, she was baptized Julia. When Konishi was executed following the Battle of Sekigahara, Julia ended up in the household of the new shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. When the shogun banned Christianity, he demanded Julia renounce her faith, something she refused to do. She was banished, eventually ending up on the small island of Kouzushima, where she spent the rest of her life doing good works and praying a lot. The island apparently holds an annual festival to commemorate her. Julia was probably only one of many Korean prisoners to have adopted the Catholic faith after the war — see for instance, the tale of Antonio Corea.
From the 1830s, the Myeongnyebang area was a center of secret proselytizing activities — St. Andrew Kim Dae-geon, Korea’s first ordained priest, was active there immediately upon his return from China in 1845.
In 1883, French Catholics acquired the land where Myeong-dong Cathedral currently stands. Mind you, this was not exactly legal — while the priests made their move after Korea had signed a trade and relations treaty with the United States in 1882, France wouldn’t conclude a treaty until 1886, and French negotiators were having a tough time of it precisely over the issues of religious freedom for Catholics. The land, atop a hill next to the royal music and dance academy (the predecessor of the National Center for the Korean Traditional Performing Arts), was formerly the home of a recently departed royal minister. At first, the Catholics used the existing home as a church, but in 1887, work began to prepare the grounds for a proper cathedral.
Royal Opposition and Baby Riots
Ah, if only it were so easy. Citing feng shui (the hill was attached to the hall where the portraits of the Joseon kings were kept), the royal court — not liking either the symbolism (the cathedral would be on higher ground than the palace), the security situation (from the cathedral, you could look right down into the palace), or the fact the French priests, who weren’t even supposed to be in the country, hadn’t told them about the purchase — asked the priests to please choose a different location for their church. The priests — one could imagine after over a century of brutal persecution of Catholicism, they were happy to finally stick it to the royal court — responded with a resounding “non,” despite combined pressure from both the king and, apparently, the French legation. Naturally enough, this pissed off King Gojong, so much so that in May 1888, he banned the propagation of Christianity (non-proselytizing activities by foreign missionaries, on the other hand, were still welcome). On top of this came the June 10–25 “Baby Riots,” when angry Korean mobs — incensed by rumors that foreigners were kidnapping Korean babies to eat them, turn them into medicine or pop their eyes out to make film development liquid — threatened Westerners in Seoul, prompting the legations to call in bluejackets from Chemulpo. The rioters may have been backed by the ultra-conservative Heungseon Daewongun as a means to destroy Queen Min, who was generally pretty friendly with the round-eyes.
The ban on propagating Christianity only lasted until November of that month, but the conflict over the cathedral continued until 1890, when the French legation finally convinced the royal court to allow the priests to build their church on the Myeong-dong hill. In 1890, the grand bishop’s residence — the oldest existent Western-style building in Korea — was built, and in 1892, the cornerstone of the cathedral was layed; just to show there were no hard feelings, King Gojong himself held the ceremony. Due to the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War and the death of its first architect, Father Eugene Coste, the cathedral took an unexpectedly long time to built, with construction finally completed in 1898.
Father Eugene Coste’s Gothic Masterpiece
Unlike the slightly older Yakhyeon Catholic Church, which was built in a mixture of Gothic and Romanesque styles, Myeong-dong Cathedral is all Gothic, all the time.
The church was designed by Father Eugene Jean Georges Coste of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, which handled French missionary activities in Asia and, incidentally, foot the bill of the cathedral. Father Coste, born the son of a wealthy landowner near Montpellier in 1842, joined the Paris Foreign Missions Society in 1866 and was dispatched to the Far East two years later. He spent two years in Hong Kong handling accounting duties, but in 1870 was sent to Singapore to work on building a sanatorium. In 1872 he returned to Hong Kong where he participated in the construction of Bethanie Sanatorium (see this pdf file, too), the 2006 renovation of which into the new home of the School of Film and Television of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts won an honorable mention in the 2008 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards for Culture Heritage Conservation program (Note to Seoul City and other city authorities: See? It’s a GOOD thing not to trash your contemporary cultural heritage!). Learning on the job from the skilled technicians he worked with, he discovered a talent for Gothic architecture… A talent he would put to good use in Korea.
In 1874, he went to Shanghai — again, to handle accounting — where he asked to be sent to Korea. This, however, was not a banner period in Korean tourism: in 1878, for instance, Bishop Félix Clair Ridel (nice topknot), back in Korea illegally after barely making it out of the country by the skin of his teeth in 1866, was arrested, imprisoned and — in the spirit of the newer, kinder, gentler Hermit Kingdom of the post-Treaty of Ganghwa era — deported to China when Beijing interceded on the behalf of the French. Coste spent 10 years wandering around Manchuria and Japan looking for a chance to enter Korea. In the meantime, he involved himself in printing, designing and producing the first-ever Korean printing type.
In 1885, at the age of 43, he finally made his way to Korea. The following year, the French signed a treaty with the Koreans, and the Church — and the French missionaries — could finally come out from underground… and they needed churches, seminaries, convents and parsonages. So Coste spent the last decade of his life building — his beautiful Gothic/Romanesque landmarks include:
Myeong-dong Cathedral, however, is his masterpiece… which makes it all the sadder that he didn’t live to see it completed. In December of 1896, he died of fever, two years prior to the completion of the cathedral. After his death, the remaining construction was entrusted to Coste’s assistant, the Norman priest Father Victor Louis Poisnel, who went on to have a very productive church-building career himself.
The cathedral — called Jonghyeon Cathedral until 1945, when it took its current name — was a massive project that cost 60,000 dollars, a massive amount of money at the time. Korea lacked skilled bricklayers, so as in the case of many of Korea’s older Catholic churches, Chinese masons were brought over to do the work. Actually, finding enough bricks was a problem — the cathedral uses 60 different kinds, most of which were supplied by a Chinese brickmaker the church had invited over who set up shop on the Waseohyeon hill in Yongsan (near what is now Yongsan Post Office).
Built in the shape of a Latin cross, the cathedral follows all the basics of Gothic construction — OK, it’s not Chartres Cathedral or St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but for a Korean church, it’s fairly ornate, especially the bell tower. Judging from its liturgical east end — see the last photo above — it appears to follow the French model, with a high vaulted apse and an ambulatory. The massive bell tower is 46.7m tall — for a while, it was one of the biggest and tallest buildings in Seoul, built atop one of the highest spots in the city. In old pictures like this, you can see how it just dominates the urban landscape.
Yep, it’s a Gothic cathedral — a high, vaulted nave flanked by two aisles. The ceiling employs rib vaulting; as far as I know, this is the only old church in Korea that uses it. The nave is supported, in true Gothic fashion, by an arcade, triforium and clerestory, with plenty of pointed arches for the windows, etc. It’s an absolutely stunning place to sit.
The original stained glass was produced at a Benedictine monastery in France. In 1982, it was replaced by beautiful stained glass by the late Korean painter Lee Nam-gyu.
Fortress of Democracy
These are the Stations of the Cross, done by Catholic sculptor Choi Jong-tae, who also did the big statue of Jesus in front of the cathedral. Not that they are minjung art, per se, but they do segue quite nicely into Myeong-dong Cathedral’s other historical role — as a sanctuary for dissidents and a focal point of Korea’s pro-democracy struggle of the 1970s and 1980s.
Myeong-dong Cathedral started taking on a political role during President Park Chung-hee’s Yusin dicatorship (1972–1979). This was the product of many factors — global trends in the church after Vatican II, the progressive leadership of Cardinal Stephen Kim Sou-hwan (who, in 1969, became the youngest cardinal at the age of 46) and, perhaps most directly, attacks on clergy. In 1974, Bishop Daniel Tji Hak-soon, the bishop of Wonju, was arrested by the KCIA on charges of helping dissident students — while in custody, he issued a statement denouncing the Yusin constitution. The arrest outraged the church — younger priests formed the National Conference of Priests for the Realization of Justice, while even the Conference of Bishops established the Committee on Justice and Peace to voice Church concerns on social and political issues. The articles linked above give a good overview of the role of the Church in the democratization struggle, but if you read Korean, the history section on the Myeong-dong Cathedral homepage has a ton of stuff on the subject that is quite interesting.
Anyway, over the next two decades, Myeong-dong Cathedral provided Seoul’s only sanctuary from the police, if for no other reason than nobody — not even Chun Doo-hwan — likes to storm a church. Well, almost nobody — ex-President Kim Young-sam actually did have the church stormed in 1995 to arrest labor activists taking sanctuary there. Now that Korea’s a democracy — perhaps a bit too pugnaciously so — you don’t find as many protesters there as you used to, although labor activists, migrant laborers and others will still show up on occasion. Since 2000, the cathedral has been less welcoming to uninvited protesters — it is, after all, a house of worship, not a protest ground.
Tales from the Crypt
Underneath the main altar, and entered through small doors in the ambulatory, is a small crypt chapel, where the relics of nine martyrs (five Frenchmen, four Koreans) are kept. Seven of them were killed at Saenamtae in the 1839 persecution, including St. Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert, the second bishop of Korea. From Wikipedia:
On 10 August 1839, Bishop Imbert, who was secretly going about his missionary work, was betrayed. Realising that it was only a matter of time before he was arrested and killed, he celebrated Mass and surrendered himself to those who lay in waiting for him. He was taken to Seoul where he was tortured to reveal the whereabouts of foreign missionaries. Believing that his converts would be spared if all foreign missionaries came out from hiding and gave themselves up, he wrote a note to his fellow missionaries, Fathers Pierre-Philibert Maubant and Jacques-Honoré Chastan (also enshrined in the crypt), asking them to surrender to the Korean authorities as well. He had written, In desperate circumstances, the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.
They did and the three of them were imprisoned together. They were taken before an interrogator and questioned for three days to reveal the names and whereabouts of their converts. As torture failed to break them down, they were sent to another prison and finally beheaded on 21 September 1839 at Saenamteo, Korea. Their bodies remained exposed for several days but were finally buried on Noku Mountain.
The remaining two — both French priests — were martyred in the 1866 persecution.
The crypt chapel is quite beautiful and amazingly peaceful — for comparison’s sake, check out the Romanesque crypt chapel of Seoul Anglican Cathedral. Pilgrimage masses are held in the crypt at 10am weekdays.
Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres
Behind the cathedral is the convent of the Seoul Province of the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres. The sisters — well, four sisters, two French and two Chinese — first came to Korea in 1888 at the invitation of Bishop Marie-Jean-Gustave Blanc, who took over as Vicar Apostolic of Korea when the intrepid Bishop Ridel died in 1884. Initially setting up shop in Chemulpo, they set up an orphanage in Seoul in 1889. Interestingly, the first five Korean aspirants to the congregation were daughters of martyrs.
The convent has several buildings of historical interest, most notably the former convent chapel (built in 1930) and the former Japanese church (built in 1928). What you see above is the former convent chapel, now the convent museum. I was unable to photograph the former Japanese church, which now serves as an educational hall. Visiting the museum is easy enough, and well worth the visit, but taking photographs is frowned upon (understandably enough, I suppose). In fact, I really shouldn’t have taken the ones above.
One of the things I learned while I was at the museum was the tragic story of Mother Beatrix — as documented here several times, many foreign clergymen and women died on the March of Death to prison camps on North Korea, but this was particularly grim:
BÉATRIX, MOTHER
A Catholic missionary, she was 76 years of age when she was captured. Born in France, she had wished since early girlhood to devote her life to God’s poor. Before her arrest by the Communists, she had been assigned to the Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres Orphanage in Seoul, South Korea. In very frail health, she was shot on the Death March on November 3, 1950 for failure to keep up with the fast pace set by The Tiger.
Sweet guys, those North Koreans.
The chapel, coincidentally, was designed by Father Emile Pierre Devise, who designed Gongse-ri Catholic Church and its parsonage.
Oh, and the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres have another large and very historic convent in Daegu — I took a couple of photos of it in April last year.
Coste Hall
Coste Hall, formerly the cultural center of the cathedral, was built in 1939, and recently renovated for use as a concert hall.
Former Archbishop’s Residence and Archdiocese Annex
As you approach the cathedral from the main entrance, two very historic structures are on the right, the Former Archbishop’s Residence (right) and the Archdiocese Annex (left).
The former Archbishop’s Residence, designed by Father Coste, was built in 1890, making it the oldest existent Western-style building in Korea — see this photograph from the early 1890s, when the cathedral was under construction. The archbishop now lives elsewhere, and the building is being used as the administrative office of the archdiocese. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe the style of both it and the annex is Georgian, as is the similar Coste-designed Yongsan Seminary.
The Archdiocese Annex is a wonderful old colonial-style building built in 1927. I really like the balconies and balustrades. The building used to be annex to the Archbishop’s residence.
Something to note — with the exception of the cathedral itself, none of the other buildings are cultural properties, designated or registered. Not that any of the structures are in any immediate danger, but they certainly are worthy of official recognition of their preservation value.
