UCLA

This dissertation explores the contacts, conflicts, and contestations surrounding Seoul's city walls, and how they shaped Seoul's transformation and Korea's transition from the opening of the ports to the early colonial period (1876-1919). One of the main goals in this dissertation is to assert the inseparable connection between the capital and its city walls in the premodern period, and thereby the importance of examining various contestations and negotiations over its city walls in understanding Seoul's transformation into a modern city. More specifically, not only was the construction of Seoul's city walls instrumental in establishing Seoul as a capital and Chosŏn as a dynasty, but also its very existence came to symbolize royal authority and national sovereignty within the changing sociopolitical conditions of the Chosŏn dynasty as well as the diplomatic relationships in the larger East Asian contexts. In the same way, I argue that, the reverse, the destruction of the walls--both as symbolic and physical boundaries--played a significant role in Seoul's transformation and Korea's transition from the premodern to modern period in the global context. By largely focusing on forces from above and their intentions, the existing scholarship presents Seoul's transformation during this period as a progression from the royal capital Hansŏng (1394-1897) to the imperial capital Hwangsŏng (1897-1910), before being disrupted by Japanese rule as the colonial city Kyŏngsŏng (1910-1945). Stepping outside this teleological explanation, my dissertation challenges and adds complexities to the existing narratives by revealing how the Taehan Empire's efforts to make Seoul as a spatial manifestation of its imperial power were contested by other historical groups' attempts to respatialize the capital with different agendas: to an extraterritorial space, a democratic space, and a colonial space. Within a larger theoretical framework of the mutually constitutive relationship between space and society, this study argues that the transformation of Seoul from a walled to an open space was a process in which various historical actors competed against and cooperated with one another to make Seoul a new space of possibilities, at the crossroads of modernity in Korea.