The name Jangchung means to honor and encourage loyalty. On October 8, 1895, Japanese agents and troops entered Gyeongbokgung Palace and murdered Queen Min, later posthumously titled Empress Myeongseong. Minister of the Royal Household Yi Gyeong-jik, royal-guard commander Hong Gye-hun, and soldiers died resisting the attackers. In 1900, the Korean Empire created an altar and related buildings on Namsan's eastern foot, near the former South Small Gate, and made their remembrance a state ritual.
The altar did not remember every victim in the same way
Jangchungdan honored loyal officials and soldiers, but it did not encompass every victim or every contemporary interpretation of the incident. Named officers, military loyalty, and defense of the imperial household occupied the center. It should be read both as an anti-aggression memorial and as evidence of how the Korean Empire institutionalized loyalty to monarch and state during a crisis.
Colonial authority ended the ritual and rewrote the landscape
After Japan annexed Korea in 1910, colonial authorities abolished the ceremonies and dismantled the altar complex. In the late 1920s, they planted cherry trees and transformed the area into a leisure park, while Japanese commemorative facilities appeared nearby. Seeing today's greenery as neutral, timeless nature would conceal the political act of converting an imperial Korean memorial into a colonial recreational landscape.
The monument's movement shows that memory did not simply return home
The monument was removed under colonial rule, rediscovered after liberation, erected near the present Silla Hotel, and transferred to its current location in 1969. Its front bears calligraphy by the future Emperor Sunjong, and its 143-character rear inscription was composed by Min Yeong-hwan. The stone survived, but the ritual architecture and original movement through the site did not. It is a surviving marker of fragmented memory, not an untouched reconstruction of the entire altar.