Jangseung village guardian posts and spirit posts
Traditional forms, modern carvings
A cluster of tall wooden posts stands among the trees, each carved at the top into a grimacing face with bulging eyes, a bulbous nose and a mouth full of teeth. Painted characters run down the shaft: Great General Under Heaven on one, Female General Under Ground on its partner. These are jangseung, the guardian figures that stood in pairs at the entrance to almost every Korean village until the twentieth century. Beside them rise thinner poles topped with carved birds, the sotdae or spirit posts, which asked for good harvests and kept away misfortune. Together they marked the boundary between the safe world of the village and the dangerous world outside.
The carving is deliberately rough and fierce. Jangseung were meant to frighten off disease and evil spirits, so the faces are exaggerated, and they were usually cut from a single trunk with an axe rather than finely finished. Some regions made them in stone, and the museum grounds also include stone guardian figures, the pot-bellied dol hareubang of Jeju Island and other regional types, so you can compare local styles. The birds on the sotdae are usually ducks or geese, water birds that were believed to carry prayers to the sky and to protect against fire.
The figures here are modern carvings made in the traditional way, since wooden jangseung rot after a few decades and were always replaced. In the countryside they were renewed at a village festival, often in the first lunar month, when the community also held rites to the guardian spirit of the village. They were dismissed as superstition during the modernisation campaigns of the 1970s and many were destroyed; today they have come back as symbols of Korean folk identity, and you will find new ones at temple gates, parks and even restaurants. Look for the distance markers that some jangseung also served as, giving the miles to the next town.
Did You Know? Jangseung often served as milestones as well as guardians, with the distance to the next village written on the post.
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