Gyoryongsanseong Fortress, said to have been built during the Baekje era, encircles Mt. Gyoryongsan (elevation 518 meters) with walls stretching 3.1 kilometers. This fortress first enters modern Korean history in 1861, when Choe Je-u — the founder of Donghak, a new religious and philosophical movement — went into hiding at the Eunjeokam hermitage within the fortress to evade government surveillance. While staying there, Choe Je-u wrote the core scriptures that would establish Donghak's teachings. The intellectual foundation of an entire religion, in other words, was completed inside a hermitage hidden within a mountain fortress, out of the government's sight.
Thirty-three years later, in 1894, the same fortress reappeared in history playing an entirely different role. That June, as the Donghak Peasant Revolution swept the country, the peasant army leader Kim Gae-nam entered Namwon, established a local governing office (jipgangso), and took control of the western half of Jeolla Province. Kim Gae-nam's forces made their base at the very same Gyoryongsanseong Fortress where Choe Je-u had once hidden, and in mid-July he held a mass rally — the "Namwon Assembly" — attended by tens of thousands of Donghak followers, announcing the peasant army's strength to the entire country. Inside the fortress, the remains of an altar still stand, where Donghak soldiers once prayed for safety before battle, and where, after their defeat, memorial rites were held for the fallen. A fortress that once sheltered one man's ideas in secret became, a generation later, the staging ground for a mass uprising built on those very ideas.