• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.313-340
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• 2004

Namhansan fortress of Kwangju in Kyonggi Province has remained a traumatic historical landscape of Manchu invasion in the year 1636. Skirted by the mountain fortress and on the ground of the uplifted flatland was the county seat which was relocated in 16Z7 from Kogol at the underneath ravine and later removed in 1917 to a crossroad place at the low-lying river plain. Once a secluded mountain village, Sungnaedong was at the outset planned as a county town of Kwangju, achieving thereafter a dramatic transformation from a small town of three hundred households into a nascent urban settlement of approximately six hundred households by the mid-18th century. The townscape of Sungnaedong features shrines, a second palace, a magistrate-commander's office, administrative buildings, and a periodic marketplace which were all decreed by the Neo-confucian template of the scheme of county seats. Townspeople managed to live on tilling tax-alleviated crop lands, trading merchandise, and selling their labor. Changing socio-economic situations led to the relocation of the administration center to the gateway village of Jumakri, which consequently heralded the decline of the mountain-fortress settlement of Sansungri at Namhansan.