South Korea’s Presidentelect, the conservative Yoon Sukyeol, has announced that he will move his official presidential residence to another part of Seoul and turn the former home of his predecessors into a tourist attraction. Yoon won the early March elections by a very narrow margin compared to his main challenger, the Democratic Party, and will be sworn in on May 10 next year: his election has mostly to do with practical and symbolic reasons, but according to some of his Critics it would be a wasteful and pointless decision.
The “Blue House” (Cheongwadae in Korean) has been the official residence of South Korea’s head of state for more than 70 years and is named for the color of the roof tiles on its main building.
It was built in the area where the Royal Gardens stood during the Joseon Dynasty, which ruled for about five centuries from 1392, and its complex is about 250,000 square meters. Between 1910 and 1945, in the colonial era, it was used by the Japanese as a government office, and with the proclamation of independence from Japan in 1948, it was used as the residence of the Korean presidents, who chose it for its remoteness and protected position. .
The Blue House, Seoul (AP Photo / Ahn Youngjoon)
In a March 20 press conference, Yoon said he wanted to turn the Blue House into a park to “give it back” to the public, arguing it was “a symbol of imperial power” while also showing the distance between the South Korean ruling class and the Population. He added that he plans to relocate to the Defense Department complex, about 5 kilometers south, to be closer to downtown and government offices.
However, his decision drew criticism from both outgoing President Moon Jaein’s party and many South Koreans, who said a sudden change of residence would pose unnecessary costs and a national security concern.
Also read: Who is Yoon Sukyeol, the new South Korean President?
According to a recent poll cited by The Wall Street Journal, more than half of South Koreans said they opposed the move and only a third supported it. About 480,000 people have also signed a petition to demand that the plan not go ahead, as they see it as a waste of public money and a whim: Yoon’s staff said the cost of moving residence would be about 37 million euros ; Some of its critics believe it would actually be 20 times larger.
Even before Yoon, some South Korean presidents including Moon himself from the centreleft had tried to move the Blue House elsewhere, but their projects were never successful: it was too complex or too expensive to build the infrastructure and systems . necessary security. Already, hundreds of officers would need to be relocated to other facilities, and there was a risk of exposing the future presidential residence to possible attacks on the Department of Defense.
Yoon’s decision drew criticism from some Democratic Party officials, who said the president left the Blue House because of its poor “feng shui,” alluding to the ancient Chinese theory that the rooms, furniture, and various elements of houses should be arranged in a specific way way that would make the various activities that take place there cheaper (Yoon’s staff have denied the allegations).
According to this theory, the properties of the Blue House would have brought much misfortune to those who had lived there in the past; More specifically, feng shui has been used as an excuse over the years to somehow justify the long list of corruption incidents many South Korean presidents have been implicated in.
In 1968, general and authoritarian leader Park Chunghee escaped an assassination attempt at the Blue House during an attack organized by a squad of North Korean soldiers to kill him. Roh Taewoo, President of South Korea from 1988 to 1993, was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for corruption and involvement in the coup d’état that led to General Chun Doohwan’s presidency ruled as a dictator from 1980 to 1988. Two other presidents who had lived in the Blue House, Lee Myungbak and Park Geunhye, were convicted of corruption while becoming former president in 2009. Roh Moohyun committed suicide following a corruption scandal in which he was implicated.
The Democratic Party called Yoon’s election “premature and absurd.” Meanwhile, he has announced that he wants to start his mandate from his new residence, saying that if he is not ready, he will work from a temporary location, but not from the Blue House.
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