Pungnammun was built in 1389 as the south gate of Jeonju's fortress wall, one of four gates — alongside east, west, and north — that once guarded the walled city of Jeonju. It burned down in a major fire in 1767 and was rebuilt; the structure standing today has itself weathered more than 250 years.
What makes Pungnammun genuinely notable is what happened during Korea's early modern reshaping. In the years after Korea's forced Eulsa Treaty with Japan (1905), a modern urban-planning drive saw the city walls and gates of towns across the country demolished, and Jeonju's east, west, and north gates were all torn down in short order — centuries-old structures erased almost overnight in the name of urban progress. Pungnammun alone survived. Of the four original gates of Jeonju's walled city, this is the only one still standing. The gate you pass through today at the entrance to the Hanok Village isn't just an old piece of architecture — it's the last surviving witness from a period when a city, in the name of modernization, erased its own past almost entirely, for reasons that remain partly a matter of historical chance.