The defining feature of the Hwasun dolmen cluster is that some 596 of them are densely concentrated within a narrow area. Among these is the largest capstone found anywhere in Korea: the dolmen in Daesin-ri, Chunyang-myeon, measures 7.3 meters long, 5.0 meters wide, and 4.0 meters thick, weighing approximately 280 tons. How Bronze Age people quarried and transported a stone of this size remains genuinely astonishing even today.
More remarkable still is that the entire construction process of the dolmens can be traced in a single location here. The surrounding area preserves quarry sites alongside dolmens with support stones still in place, dolmens with exposed stone chambers, and stone chambers missing their capstones entirely — allowing the full sequence, from quarrying the stone to completing the finished burial monument, to be followed step by step. This scholarly significance earned the site UNESCO World Heritage status on November 29, 2000, at the 24th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Cairns, Australia, under the name "Dolmen Sites in Gochang, Hwasun and Ganghwa." This vast collection of stones, built for funerary and ritual purposes around 1,000 BCE, has become, three thousand years later, a heritage that humanity as a whole is now charged with protecting.