Yonggang Seowon (Cheongdo)

About this place

Yonggang Seowon is a Confucian academy built in 1780 to hold memorial rites for Park Ik (posthumous title Chungsuk), the illustrious ancestor of the Miryang Park clan that settled in Cheongdo, and for the Fourteen Righteous Men of the Imjin War. During the Goryeo period, Master Park Ik held offices such as Vice Minister of Rites and Junggnyeong and rendered distinguished service by repeatedly repelling Japanese pirates and the Jurchen; when the Joseon dynasty was founded, he declined office and withdrew into seclusion at Dumun-dong, where he spent the rest of his life. The Fourteen Righteous Men were fourteen members of the Miryang Park family who raised a righteous army during the Imjin War and were greatly active in Miryang, Cheongdo, Gyeongsan and elsewhere—all of them relatives such as fathers and sons, brothers, and cousins. Among them, eleven were each enfeoffed as meritorious subjects of the first, second, and third ranks of the Seonmu Wonjong order, and one became a first-rank meritorious subject during the Manchu invasion of 1636 (Byeongja War)—an extremely rare case unmatched in any other family. In the overall layout of the academy, the outer three-gate, the lecture hall, the inner three-gate, and the Yeochungsa shrine are arranged on the same axis. To the right of the lecture hall, the Chungnyeolsa, enshrining the Fourteen Righteous Men of the Imjin War, forms a separate space. To the left of the lecture hall are placed the Yonggangjae and the kitchen quarters, and to the right the Boindang. The lecture hall is a hip-and-gable tiled building of five bays across the front and 1.5 bays deep. Its plan is of the central-hall-with-side-rooms type, centered on a three-bay open wooden-floored hall (daecheong) with one heated ondol room on each side; a half-bay veranda floor (twetgan) is installed across the front. Just outside the wall, at the entrance on the right, within a separate space enclosed by a square earth-and-stone wall, stands the stele pavilion for the graveside monument of the Fourteen Righteous Men. This graveside monument of the Fourteen Righteous Men was erected in the 13th year of King Gojong (1876) and records in detail the circumstances of the Imjin War. The loyal devotion to country shown by the Miryang Park clan in the nation's hour of crisis serves as a model for later generations.