On a first walk through Jeongdong, it is easy to treat the Deoksugung Stone Wall Road as nothing more than a pretty promenade. Yet this short street held a palace where a king became an emperor, foreign diplomatic missions, schools where women and men studied in new ways, a Western-style church, and a newspaper office. Start at Daehanmun Gate from Exit 2 of City Hall Station, and about 100 minutes is enough to follow that transformation in sequence.
0–25 minutes: See an emperor's palace from Daehanmun
Deoksugung began as the private residence of Prince Wolsan. It entered the center of history after the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, when King Seonjo returned to Seoul and used it as a temporary palace. After proclaiming the Korean Empire in 1897, King Gojong—now Emperor Gojong—made this palace, then called Gyeongungung, his imperial residence. The dragons in Junghwajeon Hall and the Western stone façade of Seokjojeon reveal an era trying to build a modern state without abandoning the legitimacy of the traditional palace.
25–55 minutes: Link the schools and church along the wall
Enter Jeongdong-gil, pass the Seoul Museum of Art, and continue to the Appenzeller Noble Memorial Museum and Chungdong First Methodist Church. Pai Chai Hakdang was a modern school founded in 1885 by the American missionary Henry Appenzeller; the red-brick church was completed in 1897. At the former site of Ewha Hakdang nearby, you encounter the legacy of the women's school that Mary F. Scranton opened in 1886.
55–100 minutes: Climb from Jungmyeongjeon to the Russian Legation
Jungmyeongjeon, tucked inside a side alley, was the site where the 1905 Eulsa Treaty was imposed, stripping Korea of its diplomatic sovereignty. Continue uphill through Jeongdong Park to the surviving tower of the former Russian Legation. After Queen Min was assassinated, Gojong fled here in 1896 and remained for about a year. Looking back at the end of the walk, Jeongdong no longer feels like a romantic stone-wall lane. It appears as a narrow stage on which a country searched for a diplomatic route to survival.