Gwanghwamun Square: From Royal Avenue to Colonial Road to Public Plaza

The Haechi

The stone creatures are 해치 (haechi), also called 해태 (haetae), a mythical animal from Korean folklore said to sense right from wrong and to control fire. In 1870, during the reign of King Gojong, regent Heungseon Daewongun (흥선대원군) had stonemasons carve a pair of haechi and place them at the foot of the 월대 (woldae), the raised ceremonial platform in front of Gwanghwamun. The location was not arbitrary. In Korean geomancy, Gwanaksan, the mountain to the south, was considered a “fire mountain,” and its energy was believed to threaten the palace with fire. The haechi were positioned to intercept it. They doubled as a checkpoint: officials were expected to dismount and compose themselves under the creatures’ gaze before entering the palace grounds, since haechi were also said to judge the righteousness of anyone who passed.

The statues did not stay put. Japanese colonial authorities removed them in 1923, left them in storage, then relocated them in front of the new Government-General building in 1929. They were moved again in 1968, and only returned to the ends of the restored woldae in the square’s most recent renovation. Their travel through the twentieth century is a smaller map of the square’s own history: displaced, repositioned, and finally restored close to where they started.

In May 2008, Seoul officially adopted the haechi as the city’s mascot, replacing an earlier tiger-based character. Mayor Oh Se-hoon said at the time that he wanted a symbol as recognizable as Singapore’s Merlion or Berlin’s bear. The city picked a guardian that had been standing at this exact spot for over 130 years.

The Erased Axis

Gwanghwamun itself, the gate the square is named for, has not stood in one place either. During the Joseon dynasty, the road in front of it was the kingdom’s ceremonial and administrative spine: government offices lined the avenue, state processions passed through it, and it was one of the few spaces where ordinary people and the monarchy shared the same ground.

Japan’s colonial government dismantled that arrangement deliberately. In 1926, the colonial administration completed the Government-General building directly in front of Gyeongbokgung’s main halls and moved Gwanghwamun itself out of the way, off its original axis, to clear the view of the new colonial headquarters from the city. The palace gate that had faced the king’s throne for five centuries was relocated to make room for the building that replaced him. The message was not subtle: the old axis of power was over, and a new one, aligned with the colonial government, had taken its place.

The Government-General building was demolished in 1995, and Gwanghwamun was reconstructed on its historically correct axis in 2010, aligned once more with the palace behind it. What tourists photograph today as a simple restoration is, underneath, a corrected erasure: Seoul putting the axis of its own capital back where it was before someone else moved it.

From Road to Square

For most of the postwar twentieth century, the space in front of Gwanghwamun was not a square at all. It was Sejong-daero, a boulevard that at its widest carried sixteen lanes of traffic, with a narrow, largely symbolic pedestrian island running down the center. A statue of Yi Sun-sin stood on that island, visible mostly to drivers.

That changed in stages. An earlier renovation in 2009 created a modest central plaza, still hemmed in by heavy traffic on both sides. The larger transformation came between late 2020 and August 2022, when Seoul closed the area for reconstruction, cut Sejong-daero down to six lanes, and expanded the pedestrian plaza from roughly 18,840 square meters to about 40,300 square meters, more than doubling it. Over 300 trees were planted and the traffic-facing statue island became a place people could actually walk to, sit near, and photograph up close instead of glimpsing from a passing car.

The square did not simply get prettier. It changed who it was designed for. A road organizes space around vehicles moving through. A plaza organizes space around people staying still. Sixty years after the war, Seoul finally rebuilt the ground in front of its most symbolic gate for the second kind of use.