Sorok Island's lonely monuments quietly tell former leper colony's tale of suffering

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Sorok Island's lonely monuments quietly tell former leper colony's tale of suffering

Published: 09 Dec. 2025, 07:00 Updated: 09 Dec. 2025, 08:13

CHO JUNG-WOO
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

The autopsy lab at the former Sorokdo Rehabilitation Center in Goheung County, South Jeolla [PARK SANG-MOON]

GOHEUNG, South Jeolla — A 10-minute drive from Nokdong Port in Goheung County, South Jeolla, across the narrow span of the Sorok Bridge, leads to a remote island, where the beauty of its sea and pine trees conceals a long history of suffering.

Despite its status as a medical zone under the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Sorok Island — a former leprosy colony — today welcomes tour groups and families to the publicly accessible areas, from the Sorokdo National Museum to a central park filled with statues and traces of the island’s past.

Tourists paused for photographs, read plaques and retraced the lives of those once forced to live here in isolation on a visit to the island on Nov. 6.

Just before a stop sign that warns tourists not to go beyond into the residential area, a brown sign marked with trees and small houses points the way to the island’s historical sites. The name Sorokdo itself comes from the Korean word for a young deer, a reference to the island’s shape when seen from afar.

One arrow points to a redbrick building that appears ordinary at first glance. Inside, however, the walls hold the memory of mandatory autopsies.

An autopsy table remains in the autopsy laboratory at the former Sorokdo Rehabilitation Center. [PARK SANG-MOON]

The building, with its wide white-framed windows, was used as an examination room, called the autopsy lab, during the 1910-45 Japanese colonial period, where the bodies of deceased leprosy patients were dissected. The large windows, according to Cho Myung-rae, a curator at the Sorokdo National Museum, were designed to allow sunlight to pour in during the procedures. The autopsies continued until the mid-1960s.

“This is one of the most prominent features of the building,” Cho said.

Consent was not required. Autopsies were mandatory, regardless of a family’s wishes, before bodies were cremated, at a time when cremation itself was rare in Korea.

Patients on Sorok Island came to say that they died three times: first when they were diagnosed with the disease, again on the autopsy table and a third time through cremation.

Mannyeongdang, a charnel house for Sorokdo residents, sits on a hill in the island’s residential area in Goheung County, South Jeolla. [PARK SANG-MOON]

The ashes were eventually placed in Mannyeongdang, a charnel house on a hill in Sinsaeng-ri village, where the remains of 11,284 people are kept. Every Oct. 15, residents, staff members and religious leaders gather there for a joint memorial service, a ritual that has continued since the building’s completion.

Next to the autopsy room stands another redbrick structure, heavier and more severe, resembling a small fortress. Built in 1935, it once served as a detention facility for patients who violated hospital rules.

The building follows an H-shaped plan: two parallel wings, one to the north and one to the south, joined by a narrow central corridor. From the outside, its high brick walls betray the true purpose of the complex. Inside, the rooms are dark and bare, with a small toilet and a narrow window.

“The hospital director at the time had judicial authority to detain patients for up to a month,” Cho said.

Bars inside the detention center at the former Sorokdo Rehabilitation Center in Goheung County, South Jeolla [PARK SANG-MOON]

A cell inside the detention center at the former Sorokdo Rehabilitation Center in Goheung County, South Jeolla [PARK SANG-MOON]

After Korea’s liberation in 1945, the detention facility remained in use. In 1973, it was remodeled into living quarters as the island struggled with a chronic housing shortage.

Today, the former prison and the autopsy lab are designated cultural heritage sites, preserved reminders of the coercive system that once governed the island.

Beyond the brick buildings lies Jungang Park, or Sorokdo Central Park, a landscaped space created in 1940 as a recreation garden for patients. The paths wind through carefully planted trees and sculpted rocks, opening onto a small pond and a site that once housed a brick kiln where patients were forced to work.

As hospital finances worsened after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, bricks produced here were sold not only for Sorok Island’s expansion but also for construction projects outside the island, and the labor grew increasingly harsh. By the 1960s, the kiln was dismantled, and a small park was built in its place, transforming a site once shaped by forced labor into one of rest.

The Guratap, an iconic monument on Sorokdo in Goheung County, South Jeolla, depicts the Archangel Michael stepping on the virus and piercing it with a spear. [PARK SANG-MOON]

“Everything on this island was built by the residents themselves,” Cho said. The park, too, was completed by their labor.

At its center rises the park’s most iconic monument, the Guratap, which means the “tower that cures leprosy.”

The monument depicts the Archangel Michael stepping on the virus and piercing it with a spear, a motif drawn from Christian iconography.

At its base, an inscription in Korean reads simply: “Leprosy is cured.”

BY CHO JUNG-WOO [[email protected]]