I've passed by Deoksugung more times than I can count over the years — mostly from a bus window, never actually through the gate. This week I finally went in, on a stifling July afternoon with my kids in tow.
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| Seokjojeon and its fountain in Deoksugung Palace |
We're a month into a "one month living in Seoul" stretch with my kids, and if you've ever done an extended stay anywhere, you know the trap: you start treating the place you're visiting like your actual home, which mostly means you stop going outside. After a few days of feeling restless in the apartment, I decided we needed to actually act like tourists for an afternoon. Deoksugung was the obvious pick. It's small, it's central, and somehow, despite having grown up in this country, I had genuinely never once walked through the gate.
We arrived in Korea right in the middle of monsoon season, and it had been raining on and off for what felt like weeks straight. Grey skies, damp everything, the kind of weather that makes you not want to leave the apartment even if you're not doing anything in it. Today was forecast cloudy again, but no rain, which at this point felt like a green light. So we went.
What I wasn't prepared for was the heat. This wasn't rainy-season mugginess, it was something closer to standing inside a sauna with your shoes on. We were only walking around for maybe an hour and a half, and I swear I could feel my skin actually tanning in real time. The humidity made it worse. Every few minutes of walking left all three of us sweating, and my youngest was completely done with the whole outing within about twenty minutes, dripping and miserable. I've spent time in Thailand, and more than once today I caught myself thinking that Seoul in July might genuinely be worse.
Deoksugung-gil: More Cafes Than Restaurants
Today happened to be Constitution Day (제헌절), July 17, marking the 1948 signing of Korea's constitution. What made it a slightly unusual one is that this was actually the first time in eighteen years it's come with an actual day off. It was dropped from the public holiday calendar back in 2008, and it only returned as an official holiday this year. So offices, banks, and most schools were closed today. I half expected Deoksugung-gil to be quiet because of that, but it really wasn't. There were families out, a fair number of foreign visitors, and a steady stream of people heading toward the Seoul Museum of Art, which sits right next to the palace.
It had been a while since I'd actually walked the stone wall road myself, and if anything, it felt about the same as I remembered — quiet, mostly cafes. What threw me off was that I'd heard, more recently, that this stretch had turned into a real food destination as more foreign visitors started coming through. I half expected to see more restaurants than before. Instead, walking it, I kept noticing the opposite — a few doors that should have had restaurants behind them were just closed, whether because it was a holiday or because that's simply how it is here, I honestly couldn't tell. We tried to get into one place near the wall and were told there was a wait. Right next to it was a brunch cafe called Lepul (르풀), which looked lovely, but I skipped it since my youngest is a picky eater who leans hard toward Korean food, and a sandwich-and-salad menu felt like a risk I didn't want to take that day. In the end, we ended up at a place called Jangsu Hoegwan. It wasn't particularly memorable food-wise, and the crowd there skewed noticeably older, but listening in on the conversations at nearby tables, it sounded like the place has a following for its gooksu-jeongol (noodle hotpot, 국수전골). We looped back past Jeongdong Theater and came out again near the palace's main gate.
One thing that genuinely surprised me on the walk was how many foreign embassies are tucked into this neighborhood. I'd always mentally filed "embassy district" under Hannam-dong, but there's a real cluster here in Jeongdong too. I knew the British Embassy backed onto the palace grounds, but I hadn't clocked that the Canadian Embassy was practically next door until we walked right past it. Ewha Girls' High School is here as well, its old trees just visible over the school wall — the school has actually been on that same plot since the late 1800s, which is longer than most of the buildings around it have existed.
Getting In: What It Actually Costs and When It's Closed
Hours: 9:00 AM–9:00 PM daily, last entry 8:00 PM. Closed Mondays.
Admission: 1,000 KRW for adults age 25–64. Free for age 24 and under, age 65 and over, and anyone wearing hanbok.
Address: 99 Sejong-daero, Jung-gu, Seoul (enter through Daehanmun gate).
Royal Guard-Changing Ceremony at Daehanmun: 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM daily, except Mondays.
I'd heard it described loosely as "1,000 won, and young people get in free," which is close but worth being precise about, since it's not really tied to being a teenager. It's specifically age 24 and under (along with seniors and hanbok-wearers) who get in free, and only the 25-to-64 bracket pays the fee.
A Palace That Doesn't Feel Like a Palace
Walking in through Daehanmun, my first reaction was: this is small. I grew up going to Gyeongbokgung regularly, and the size difference is jarring. Gyeongbokgung sprawls; Deoksugung feels almost intimate by comparison, more like a large private estate than an imperial palace.
That impression isn't entirely wrong, but it's not quite the full story either. Deoksugung didn't start out as a palace built from scratch the way Gyeongbokgung was. It began life as a private residence that got pressed into service as a temporary royal refuge after Seoul's palaces burned during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, and it kept growing from there in a fairly improvised way rather than following the kind of formal, planned layout you see at somewhere like Gyeongbokgung. That history is part of why walking through it feels a bit different from the other palaces around Seoul — including, interestingly, Gyeonghuigung, which was actually once one of the largest palace complexes in the city, more than two-thirds the size of Gyeongbokgung, before most of it was demolished during the colonial period. What's open to visitors there today is only a small fraction of the original grounds, so depending on how you measure it, Deoksugung isn't necessarily the smallest palace in Seoul so much as the one that was never meant to be this large in the first place.
The throne hall here is Junghwajeon (중화전), and I'll admit I had the name wrong in my head before doing some reading. Junghwajeon is where the king, and later the emperor, formally received officials and conducted state business, functionally the same role Geunjeongjeon plays at Gyeongbokgung. It wasn't even the original throne hall on this site. The first one was a much smaller building called Jeukjodang, and Junghwajeon was built afterward specifically because Jeukjodang turned out to be too cramped for the job.
How a Royal Refuge Became an Empire's Palace
The history here turned out to be more dramatic than I remembered, and looking into it properly filled in some gaps I didn't realize I had.
In October 1895, Empress Myeongseong was assassinated inside Gyeongbokgung by Japanese agents, an event usually referred to as the Eulmi Incident. Fearing for his own safety after that, King Gojong didn't move to Deoksugung right away. He first took refuge at the Russian legation in February 1896, in an episode known as the Agwan Pacheon, or Royal Refuge at the Russian Legation. He stayed there for roughly a year before finally returning to a palace in February 1897 — and that palace was this one, then still called Gyeongungung. I knew the broad strokes of this growing up, that Gojong fled somewhere after the queen was killed, but I honestly hadn't absorbed the actual order of events, or that Russia was involved before he ever set foot back here.
Shortly after returning, Gojong proclaimed the founding of the Korean Empire, or Daehan Jeguk, in 1897, elevating himself from king to emperor and turning this modest palace into the seat of that new empire. That's when construction here really ramped up, adding Junghwajeon, Seokjojeon, and a handful of Western-style buildings. The palace only took on the name "Deoksugung" later, in 1907, when Gojong was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Sunjong. The new name was essentially a title given to the retired emperor's residence, not the palace's original name at all.
Seokjojeon: The Palace That Doesn't Look Korean at All
If Junghwajeon is what you'd expect from a Korean palace, Seokjojeon (석조전) is the building that throws people off completely. It's a three-story neoclassical stone building that looks like it was airlifted in from London, and in a sense, it basically was.
Gojong commissioned it on the advice of John McLeavy Brown, a British advisor working in the imperial customs service, and the design itself was handled by British architect John Reginald Harding. Construction began in 1900 and dragged on for a full decade, finally finishing in 1910 — the same year Japan formally annexed Korea. Gojong, who had pushed for the building for years as a symbol of the empire's modernity, essentially never got to use it as intended. By the time it was finished, the empire it was built to represent had already collapsed. Standing in front of it in person, it genuinely doesn't feel like it belongs next to the rest of the palace — walking from the traditional wooden halls straight into this stone building with columns and a pediment is a strange transition, almost like crossing into a different country mid-visit.
I'd noticed a flower pattern carved into the triangular pediment above the entrance and assumed it was mugunghwa — hibiscus, Korea's national flower. It seemed like the obvious guess. It's actually not. That emblem is the ihwamun (이화문), a stylized plum blossom that served as the official imperial crest of the Korean Empire, tied to the Yi royal family name. You'll spot the same plum-blossom emblem all over Deoksugung and on Korean Empire-era objects generally. It's less "national flower" and more "royal family crest" — a distinction I hadn't actually known before this.
The fountain right in front of Seokjojeon is worth lingering at. It's considered the first Western-style garden fountain built in Korea, part of a European-style garden completed in the early 1910s, and it's easily the most photogenic single spot in the whole complex.
I went in expecting a quick, slightly obligatory palace visit to get the kids out of the apartment, and left having learned more about the last years of the Korean Empire than I ever picked up in school. Deoksugung is small enough to see properly in an hour or two, which actually makes it a good pick if you're already worn down by the heat and don't have it in you for the full Gyeongbokgung-scale trek. Just bring water — and maybe don't go at 1pm in July like we did.