Ttangkkeut Village, located in Songho-ri, Songji-myeon, Haenam County, sits at 34 degrees, 17 minutes, 32 seconds north latitude — the southernmost point of mainland Korea. Joseon-era geographic understanding had already designated this very Haenam district as the country's southern reference point, with the northern one at Onseong-bu in North Hamgyong Province. Centuries later, in the modern era, the scholar Choe Nam-seon, in his work Joseon Sangsik Mundap, calculated the distance from Ttangkkeut to Seoul as one thousand ri and from Seoul to Onseong as two thousand ri, using this measurement as the basis for describing Korea as "three thousand ri of embroidered rivers and mountains." A single narrow village thus served, for centuries, as the reference coordinate for the entire country's geography.
Yet the actual physical monument marking this long-symbolic significance came relatively recently. Atop Mount Sajabong, at an elevation of 156.2 meters, the Ttangkkeut Tower — a long triangular structure reaching toward the sky — was erected on July 18, 1987, alongside the 38-meter Ttangkkeut Observatory, designed to evoke the shape of a torch. This land, already defined as "the end" within Joseon-era geographic understanding, only came to have a tower marking itself in the latter half of the twentieth century. Visitors standing beneath that tower today confirm an old symbol: that the end of one road is also the beginning of another.