A tale of two cities: Why Seoul demolished what Taipei preserved

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A tale of two cities: Why Seoul demolished what Taipei preserved

Published: 20 Mar. 2026, 07:00 Updated: 21 Mar. 2026, 17:00

MICHAEL LEE
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Left: The view from the middle of Sejong-daero looking north to Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul on Aug. 2, 2025, almost 30 years after the former Government-General Building was demolished. Right: The Presidential Office Building in Taipei as seen from Ketagalan Boulevard on Oct. 26, 2025. [MICHAEL LEE]

When K-pop megaband BTS announced that its comeback album would be titled “Arirang,” after the Korean folk song popularized by the country’s independence movement, it became clear there was no more fitting stage for the first performance of its upcoming world tour than Gwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul.

Long the focal point of Korea’s struggles against imperialism and dictatorship, the backdrop to the band’s return currently resembles what visitors would have seen at the end of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) when looking at Gwanghwamun — the main gate of Gyeongbok Palace — framed by mountains to the north.

It is a vista BTS fans will likely associate with their time in the capital long after the concert is over. But this background was not always the same.

For much of the 20th century, the central avenue of Sejong-daero that leads to Gwanghwamun ended at the former Japanese Government-General Building — a domed Neoclassical edifice that loomed as a reminder of Tokyo’s occupation (1910–45) of the Korean Peninsula. After liberation, the building became so closely associated with the South Korean government and the city that English-language guides and media often referred to it as the “Seoul Capitol,” despite mounting controversy over the painful history it represented.

The former Government-General Building towers over Gwanghwamun in central Seoul in 1994, a year before its demolition. [JOONGANG ILBO]

But across the East China Sea, an edifice built for a similar purpose escaped such perceptions.

In Taipei, Ketagalan Boulevard — renamed in 1996 after the indigenous people who once inhabited the area — leads to a Baroque-style redbrick building constructed by the Japanese as the center of the island’s colonial administration in 1919.

While Seoul demolished the former Government-General Building in 1995, its counterpart in Taipei serves as Taiwan’s Presidential Office today. This divergence reflects how two societies, both shaped by occupation, war, dictatorship and late democratization, came to interpret the architecture of Japan’s empire in fundamentally different ways: as something to be erased in one capital and absorbed into the national landscape in the other.

Gwanghwamun as photographed from Yukjo Street sometime between 1906 and 1907 [NATIONAL FOLK MUSEUM OF KOREA]

Remaking capitals

The divergence began not only with the imperial intent the buildings embodied, but with the cities that Japanese builders entered.

“Seoul was already a fully formed capital with a deeply established symbolic order,” said Lee Yeon-kyung, an architecture professor at Yonsei University, referring to its layout along pungsu jiri, or geomantic principles.

Before the Japanese occupation began, that order included a meridian running through Gyeongbok Palace and along Yukjo Street — now Sejong-daero — which linked the royal residence to six government ministries just south of Gwanghwamun. This axis from the mountains to the north and Cheonggye Stream to the south was seen as an auspicious conduit for geomantic energy. It intersected at its southern end with the city’s main east-west road, Jongno, where commerce and everyday activity unfolded.

Taipei, by contrast, offered Japanese colonizers a far emptier canvas.

“Historically, the center of power on the island had been Tainan,” Lee said, noting that Taipei “was only designated as the provincial capital late in the Qing period.” Its walls, built just a decade before Japan took control in 1895, enclosed what was still a small settlement surrounded by vast tracts of undeveloped land.

The Japanese Government-General Building in central Seoul in 1929, three years after its completion [JOONGANG ILBO]

That contrast shaped how colonial rule was experienced. According to Lee, building projects in Taipei “were experienced as urban expansion,” while such developments in Seoul “felt much more like a foreign intrusion into an established historical core.”

Nowhere was this more evident than at Gyeongbok Palace, where Japanese authorities demolished all but 36 of some 300 structures to make way for the Government-General Building, which was completed in 1926 in what was once the forecourt of the royal residence.

Han Jung-sun, a professor of international studies at Korea University, said the Japanese chose this location to “mutilate and imperfectly erase the icon of the conquered group so that their new icon would contrast more clearly and favorably with it.”

The former Government-General Building as seen from the main courtyard of Gyeongbok Palace in this undated photograph from the 1990s. The modern central government complex can be seen on the right. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Although the main throne hall survived, she noted it was “dwarfed by the five-story stone Government-General Building in front and later enclosed by the governor’s residence built behind it” — a placement that appeared intent on “starving the city and palace of its vital geomantic energy.”

Changes elsewhere, Han said, led to “further distortion of the geomantic balance between the city and nature.” The Chosen Jingu — a Shinto shrine where Koreans were forced to worship the gods and the emperor of their Japanese overlords — was built on Mount Namsan to the south, while a new diagonal axis linked Yukjo Street with Namdaemun and the growing Japanese rail and military hub in Yongsan District to the southwest.

The result was that colonial development was received very differently in the two cities. In Taipei, broad boulevards projected the image of a modern capital. In Seoul, the expanded avenue leading to the colonial headquarters alienated Koreans such as the novelist Park Taewon, who described it as an “awkward, wide and solitary road.”

A photograph of the former Government-General Building as seen from the south in 1952 during the Korean War. Gwanghwamun, which was relocated in 1927 during the Japanese occupation, is conspicuously absent from the streetscape. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Adapting ‘sturdy houses’

After liberation in 1945, both South Korea and Taiwan experienced war, poverty, authoritarian rule and rapid economic growth before eventually democratizing. These circumstances initially led both to treat colonial architecture similarly.

In Seoul, which changed hands four times during the 1950–53 Korean War, few of the Western-style stone edifices built by the Japanese survived intact.

But even in their damaged state, these buildings were too useful for the impoverished country to discard. According to Lee, the joke among older Korean architects is that the Japanese “were quite good at building sturdy houses,” which were essential while much of the capital lay in ruins.

The old Seoul City Hall, left, and the former Bank of Korea, right, as photographed in 2025. Both were built by Japanese colonial authorities, but continue to be used for different functions today. [MICHAEL LEE]

Some larger colonial buildings that survived to the present day through continued use include the former Seoul City Hall, now a public library; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art at Deoksu Palace; the old Bank of Korea, now a currency museum; and the Shinsegae Department Store in Myeongdong.

However, rapid development led to the wholesale demolition of many smaller colonial buildings in Seoul. Only recently have some jeoksan gaok — “enemy-owned houses” abandoned upon liberation by Japanese colonists — been rediscovered and repurposed as cultural or commercial spaces. Lee attributed their accidental survival to “how embedded they were within the daily life of the city, which made it difficult to draw a clean line after liberation.”

While noting that Korean perceptions of now-rare Japanese-style residences have softened, she said the official term for these homes “reveals a certain kind of nationalistic hostility.”

But in Taiwan, postwar attitudes toward the built environment were guided less by anti-colonial sentiment than by the ideological priorities of the Kuomintang, the political party that retreated to the island and ruled it through martial law upon losing mainland China in a civil war with communists in 1949.

The roof of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, whose design echoes the Forbidden City in Beijing where most of its treasures originate. For decades, the Kuomintang - which ruled Taiwan through martial law until 1987 - used Chinese heritage on the island to bolster the legitimacy of its claim to the mainland. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

“The Kuomintang government emphasized local Chinese heritage — particularly Qing-era structures — to legitimize their claim to represent China, even if such buildings on the island were not especially noteworthy by mainland standards,” Lee said.

Colonial buildings, meanwhile, were neither celebrated nor actively targeted in Taiwan. While Lee acknowledged that a significant number fell victim to “lack of care amid economic development,” many structures were recycled to accommodate the needs of both the ruling party and the huge influx of mainlanders who accompanied its retreat.

“The Kuomintang simply used Japanese buildings out of convenience because they initially saw the island as a launchpad to retake mainland China, not as a permanent home,” Lee said, adding that buildings like the Presidential Office “became normalized as ready-made infrastructure rather than being seen solely as symbols of colonialism.”

With democratization in 1987, official memory shifted away from the Kuomintang’s mainland-oriented historical narrative, and former colonial buildings came to be increasingly valued as part of Taiwan’s heritage.

A preserved Shinto shrine in Taoyuan, Taiwan [SCREEN CAPTURE]

“There was a growing movement to redefine the island’s identity as distinctly Taiwanese rather than Chinese,” Lee said, adding this shift made it easier for Japanese-era buildings “to be reframed as part of a layered history encompassing the indigenous peoples and other pre-1945 inhabitants of the island,” whose culture was suppressed by the Sinocentric Kuomintang government.

Consequently, many structures from the colonial era — including teahouses, residences, hot spring facilities and even Shinto shrines — were registered as heritage sites by the Taiwanese government as part of a belated preservation effort beginning in the 1990s.

By comparison, only one Shinto shrine in Korea — on the isolated leper colony of Sorok Island — survives out of the 995 built during the Japanese occupation. Even there, it faces periodic calls for removal.

“Over time, Taipei came to be seen as a capital that belonged to different groups over time — Ketagalan, Qing, Japanese, Kuomintang and the people of Taiwan,” Lee said. “Seoul, on the other hand, has always been perceived as having a single legitimate owner: Koreans.”

Left: Nobuyuki Abe, the last Japanese governor of Korea, signs the instrument of surrender at his official residence in Seoul on Sept. 9, 1945, thus handing control over southern Korea to the U.S. military. Right: A ceremony to mark the establishment of the first South Korean government is held at the former Government-General Building in central Seoul on Aug. 15, 1948. [NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF KOREA]

The curtain comes down

Like the Presidential Office in Taipei, the former Government-General Building in Seoul initially survived the fall of Japan’s empire and witnessed key events in South Korean history.

For three years after liberation, it housed the United States Army Military Government in Korea. It then went on to host the inauguration of the first South Korean administration in August 1948 as well as the ceremony marking Seoul’s recapture from North Korean forces in September 1950.

Left: A photograph of the northern end of Sejong-daero in 1968, shortly after the completion of the ferroconcrete incarnation of Gwanghwamun ordered by then-President Park Chung Hee. Right: A statue of Admiral Yi Sun-shin, which still stands today in downtown Seoul, is unveiled on April 27, 1968. [NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF KOREA]

Half-gutted by a fire set by North Korean troops — and too costly to renovate or demolish — the massive stone hulk sat neglected for nearly a decade after the 1953 armistice. It eventually reopened as the seat of the central government in 1962 and served as a venue for military parades and three of authoritarian President Park Chung Hee’s five inaugurations. It was later converted into the National Museum of Korea in 1986.

By 1995, it had stood for nearly seven decades and been used longer by Koreans than by the Japanese.

Yet neither longevity nor utility shielded the building from changing political tides that led to its demolition.

Japanese tourists catch a last glimpse of the former Government-General Building, then being used as the National Museum of Korea, as scaffolding goes up in preparation for the building's demolition in 1995. [JOONGANG ILBO]

According to Han, “the various ways in which the former colonial headquarters was used during these years embodied the tortuous and distorted official historical narrative” of Park’s government, which balanced anti-Japanese sentiment with Seoul’s need for economic and technical assistance from Tokyo.

She noted that Park sought to “water down his ‘pro-Japanese’ reputation” by elevating icons of Korean resistance, such as Admiral Yi Sun-sin — whose statue he erected in Gwanghwamun Square in 1968 — while still portraying Japan as a model of modernization. The government also suppressed discussion of Koreans collaborators — a sensitive topic for Park, who had served as an officer in the imperial Japanese army.

But after the 1987 protests against the military regime of Park’s successor Chun Doo Hwan ushered in democratization, the former Government-General Building became increasingly seen as an icon of Japanese imperialism and the authoritarians it had produced. It was also viewed as a physical impediment to restoring Gyeongbok Palace and to broader “national revitalization.” While some argued for preservation, more than 70 percent of respondents to a 1992 survey backed President Kim Young-sam’s campaign pledge to “leave not a single brick standing.”

Public resentment was further inflamed, Lee said, by throngs of Japanese visitors — some 300,000 a year — who treated the building as a “must-see monument” that their country had “bequeathed” to Korea. Its visible popularity persuaded even indifferent Koreans that the former colonial headquarters had to go. This sentiment was expressed by a JoongAng Ilbo columnist in 1993, who wrote that the building “must be dismantled” because it had become “a pernicious symbol that, instead of promoting remorse, reinforces pride among the Japanese in the supposed superiority of their forebears.”

Two years later, on Aug. 15, 1995 — the 50th anniversary of Korea’s liberation — a crane removed the cupola of the Government-General Building, then shrouded in scaffolding and a decorative screen. By year’s end, the former colonial headquarters was gone.

Left: A Korean flag floats above a crowd gathered in front of Gwanghwamun in central Seoul to witness the demolition of the former Government-General Building on Aug. 15, 1995, the 50th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese rule. Right: Sparklers alight to mark the removal of the cupola of the building's dome. [JOONGANG ILBO]

A continually contested core

While the demolition of the Government-General Building removed a symbol of Japanese imperialism, various debates continue over how best to restore the heart of Seoul.

In 1968, Gwanghwamun was rebuilt as a ferroconcrete structure bearing a nameboard in then-President Park’s handwriting in hangul. However, it was aligned to the former Government-General Building rather than Gyeongbok Palace behind it. A major restoration completed in August 2010 corrected this by rebuilding the gate in traditional pine and along the palace’s north-south axis. The gate’s woldae, or elevated stone walkway, was reconstructed in 2023.

Gyeongbok Palace come back into view from Sejong-daero as demolition of the former Government-General Building continues in late 1995. [JOONGANG ILBO]

However, this has not placated some critics, who argue that the nameplate — currently written in hanja, or Chinese characters, as is the case for most palace buildings — should instead bear Gwanghwamun's name in hangul, as it had for most of the latter half of the 20th century.

Another controversy centers on conservative Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon’s proposed Garden of Gratitude, which would feature 22 stone pillars representing each country that fought in the Korean War. The liberal central government suspended the project earlier this year over alleged procedural irregularities, which Oh has criticized as ideologically motivated and an abuse of power. The dispute is a reminder that Gwanghwamun Square remains a battleground for contemporary politics as much as historical memory.

While controversy over the removal of the former colonial headquarters has faded, it remains more than a historical footnote even for younger Koreans with no memory of the building.

A bird's eye view of Gwanghwamun and Gyeongbok Palace on Oct. 15, 2023 [YONHAP]

“The Government-General Building remains significant because it was the most prominent symbol of the Japanese occupation, and the occupation itself is central to Korea’s modern history,” Lee said. “At the same time, its absence means that younger generations encounter it mainly through textbooks and media rather than through direct experience.”

Yet despite never having seen it in person, her students “say they feel relief watching videos of its demolition” in her classes — suggesting its removal lifted a historical burden they hadn’t realized they carried as Koreans.

BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]