From July 1962 to July 1964, Jo Chang-won (趙昌源), then the director of the Sorokdo hospital, made those with Hansen's disease an offer: if they took part in a land reclamation project, they would be given a new settlement on the mainland once they left Sorokdo. For people who had lived isolated lives for so long, this was, in itself, the hope of finally being able to live on the mainland, and many accepted the offer, setting out to fill in more than two kilometers of sea between the Pungyang Peninsula north of Sorokdo and the Bongam Peninsula in Doyang-eup. Over three years of this labor, they created reclaimed land three times the size of Yeouido, the island district in central Seoul.
But when the seawall construction was roughly 80 to 90 percent complete, the government suddenly drove all the Hansen's disease patients off this land. This happened because, ahead of a general election, the political establishment caved to complaints from residents near the reclaimed land who objected, saying they "could not live alongside people with Hansen's disease." For people who had built this land with their own labor over three years, only to be driven off it just before completion, this project turned out, in the end, to be a deception carried out by the government. Today, people other than those with Hansen's disease farm this reclaimed land, and in Oma-ri, Dodeok-myeon, Goheung County, the Omado Reclamation Hansen's Disease Patients Memorial Park now stands, overlooking both Sorokdo Island and the Omado reclaimed land that these patients once so wanted to call their own.