Before the current May 18th National Cemetery existed, the uprising's victims were first buried nearby, in what's now called the Mangwol-dong Old Cemetery. The burial process itself was brutal. The military government that had crushed the protests by force loaded the victims' bodies onto garbage trucks, wrapped them carelessly in plastic sheeting normally used for storing kimchi, and dumped them into the ground at Mangwol-dong with no real ceremony. It's a site that carries the plain evidence of a state that killed its own citizens and then tried to hide the killing.
Turning this ground into the properly honored memorial site it is today took years. Real reassessment of the Gwangju Uprising only began in earnest after President Kim Young-sam's government took office in 1993, and Gwangju city, with central government support, began building a new cemetery. Construction started in November 1994 and finished three years later, on May 16, 1997. That year, the remains of the victims — bodies that had been dishonored and hidden — were exhumed from the Mangwol-dong Old Cemetery and reinterred at what's now the May 18th National Cemetery. Deaths that had been concealed under plastic sheeting and hauled off in garbage trucks were, seventeen years later, finally moved to a properly maintained national cemetery. Walk through the memorial hall and the history education center together, and you can feel just how long that gap in time really was. If you're visiting Gwangju, this is a place worth setting aside real time for, not just a photo stop.