A historical site Puyong Pavilion in Haeju City was built at the beginning of the sixteenth century during the feudal Joson dynasty.
It is a unique architecture built on the stone columns in a lotus pond.
The Puyong Pavilion forms an L-shape with a building called “Unghyang Pavilion”.
The pavilion is supported by tens of columns erected in the middle of a pond which is as large as one thousand several hundred square meters. The columns are standing on the border but no columns in the center, so the whole inside is uninterrupted for parties or something.
The Puyong Pavilion preserves the structural features of a typical pavilion and blends the surrounding environment and architecture, thus demonstrating the excellent building techniques of the Korean ancestors.
The charming scenery of the pavilion which felt like floating gently over the lotus pond gradually became widely known, which developed a saying “Missing the Puyong Pavilion denies that you have been to Haeju”.
The sound of raindrops falling onto the lotus flowers in full bloom in the pond at night was so pleasant to the ear that huge numbers of people gathered there when it was raining. It soon started to be called one of the Eight Scenes of Haeso (Haeso means ‘province with the sea in the west’).
As the scene of the pavilion became the pride of Haeju and one of the Eight Scenes of Haeso, many poems, songs and legends came into being, which are still being passed down.
Though it was severely destroyed during the past Fatherland Liberation War, the Puyong Pavilion was restored to its original state by the earnest instructions of President
The pavilion, which was used as a pleasure resort for feudal rulers in the past, turned into an excellent cultural recreation center for working people under the care of the Workers’ Party of Korea. It now serves as a place for education in patriotism that instills the national pride and self-confidence into the people.
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