Takcheongjeong Jongga

About this place

The Takcheongjeong Jongga (head house), built in 1541 (the 36th year of King Jungjong) by Takcheongjeong Kim Su and rebuilt after a fire in the late Joseon period, is a pavilion attached to the residence and is regarded as the most beautiful of private pavilions. It is a hip-and-gable-roofed structure seven bays across the front and two bays deep, and it bears a signboard by the master calligrapher Han Seok-bong. Kim Su was the second son of Nongsu Kim Hyo-ro, the founding settler of the Gwangsan Kim clan in Yean; accomplished in both letters and martial arts, he authored the cookbook Suun Japbang. Originally it stood close to the Nakdong River, but owing to submersion by the Andong Dam it was relocated in 1974 to its present location, the Ocheon-ri Historic Site in Gunja Village. Gunja Village is a village that took shape 500 to 600 years ago when Nongsu Kim Hyo-ro of the Gwangsan Kim clan settled there; its name derives from the words of Hangang Jeong Gu, magistrate of Andong, who said that in this one village of Ocheon there was no one who was not a man of virtue (gunja), and it produced a steady stream of scholars from the early Joseon period on. In the village, more than twenty old houses are well preserved in their original form, including Takcheongjeong, Hujodang (the head house of the Gwangsan Kim lineage), and the old house of Kim Yu, author of Suun Japbang. There are also the old documents held by the head house of the Yean branch of the Gwangsan Kim clan (Treasure), the classical texts held by that head house (Treasure), and the relics of Hujodang (Gyeongsangbuk-do Tangible Cultural Property), while the relic exhibition hall Sungwongak displays several hundred items of ancestral relics, old documents, and books. Hujodang also operates a hanok-stay old-house experience.