When most people think of Bosingak, they picture the New Year’s Eve bell-ringing at midnight on December 31. In the Joseon period, however, the bell was closer to an urban operating signal than a festival device. At around 4 a.m., paru was sounded 33 times to lift the curfew and open the walled capital’s eight gates; at around 10 p.m., injeong was sounded 28 times to announce the curfew and close the gates. In a city where clocks were rare, the bell was a public notification shared by everyone.
33 and 28 do not belong to the same numerical system
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the 33 dawn strikes derive from the Buddhist Thirty-Three Heavens, while the 28 night strikes derive from the 28 lunar mansions of the skies in the four cardinal directions. Numbers from two different cosmologies divided the beginning and end of the day. It is also intriguing that Buddhist and astronomical concepts jointly structured urban time at the very center of a Confucian state’s capital.
The bell hanging here now is not the old bell
The old bell, cast in 1468, the 14th year of King Sejo’s reign, was originally at Wongaksa Temple and was moved to its present site in 1619. After prolonged ringing and fires caused cracks that made it impossible to strike any longer, it was transferred to the National Museum of Korea. The current Bosingak bell was newly made with donations from citizens and first rung on Liberation Day in 1985. The sound we hear is not a sound preserved unchanged from tradition, but one newly created to carry on its function.
From the pavilion, measurements extend down to the subway
In front of Bosingak is a subway benchmark installed in 1970. It served as the reference point for measuring the depth and elevation of construction on the Seoul metropolitan subway. The pavilion above ground governed movement through Joseon by time, while the small marker in the pavement set the elevation of the modern underground city. Only by seeing both together does Bosingak appear as more than a mere historic building.